How we built a business out of recession - chapter 11 - Rachel, our first employee and the birth of the pre-record
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 11th chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is a 5-minute read, it’s an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
John was unusual. Every other car salesperson I ever met had no experience running a business. Why would they?
John had. He’d owned a car dealer that successfully migrated into selling scooters, Italian Vespas, that sort of thing, before selling up. Not ready to retire, he joined L&L as a part-time salesperson. John was an amusing square peg in a round hole who provided great feedback because he was a genuine practitioner; I didn’t have many. He also discovered a way to turn our live-only system on its head.
Like all of my early dealer wins, I spent time on site, listening to feedback, solving the problems I could, and queuing others if it was a software change we wanted to fix. The product continued to evolve slowly; the video became more stable, and the interface a bit more intuitive.
Going to Hertford rather than Warrington, Telford, or Stoke meant less driving. It was a welcome change to get there by 09:00 am and leave mid-afternoon to return to Wokingham in time for tea.
Andrew, the DP** at Hertford, was a great guy who entrusted the use of CitNOW to his Sales Manager, who mostly found me an irritant. He couldn’t completely ignore me, but he mostly abstained from endorsing any new process. The sales guys were told to use it - the results were always going to be mixed.
The Mercedes-Benz brand was a bit like Jaguars’. A more personal approach to selling meant remote presentations were likely to be well received when offered. At L&L, the kit was neatly hidden away in a small meeting room. When the door was shut, most of the sales team forgot it was there.
The exception was John, who fully embraced the tool now at his disposal. It also didn’t take him long to decide that live video was fine, but a pre-recorded video was far more helpful for most customers who were too busy during the day.
Every live presentation generated a unique address, which could be posted to the customer in an email. It was a clever way to remind the customer about their possible purchase, even though there was no soundtrack (the phone call wasn’t recorded). John started sending videos to customers, even if they hadn’t had a live presentation. By creating a customer session on his laptop, he could connect and record the video as if he were doing the standard presentation. It was a simple solution that immediately became popular, especially when we found a way to capture sound as well.
I couldn’t believe I’d been so dumb as to not work it out for myself. But then I was an annoying evangelist who believed that live was still the best way to sell a vehicle if the customer wasn’t in the showroom. I must have been in denial about the fact that most salespeople didn’t like live because their managers were still telling them to get the customer into the showroom - bums on seats sell cars. John just wanted to get more presentations in front of more punters, and a pre-recorded video did precisely that.
He was so proficient that they decided to assign John the responsibility of videoing all new stock as it arrived on the forecourt.
With roughly 40 dealers using version 1 of our product, we had outgrown our kitchen in Winnersh. Our first big step, aside from leaving our linked detached behind in favour of a bigger rental, was to find a home for our business as well. Space Centre Wokingham, in Molly Millar’s Lane, kindly obliged with one of their easy-in-and-out starter units.
They were neatly designed and suited to any number of different start-ups on monthly leases. We’d planned desks for future office-based staff on our ground floor, using the mezzanine level upstairs for meetings. The two young lads next to us were running some sort of metal works. Downstairs, they had their workshop, and upstairs, a couple of desks. Ironically, the biggest noise problem wasn’t them bending metal; it was torrential rain beating the corrugated roof.
Start-up units are interesting places. You never know who will survive and thrive or might even come in handy at some point when you desperately have a last-minute request. That’s how we started working with Ambition Creative. Gerry and Gary had started a small design agency a few doors down. We continued to work with them for several years, and they are still going strong today, although no longer on this estate.
The poodle parlour around the corner always seemed busy. We used it for Pogo’s grooming until we didn’t anymore. Digging his back legs in at the door wasn’t a great sign, even if he was a big scaredy cat. A couple of Australians decided to start a company called Stiltz, which manufactures lifts for homes and has long outgrown its starter unit. The busiest unit when we were there might have been the paintballing company selling guns and ammo.
When we moved into Space Business Centre, we still had no employees. We continued to contract all software development to Codevio in Stirling, although Berrie, my primary contact, was now in The Netherlands.
We started to plan some summer internships for graduates fresh out of university who might be looking for work experience. We were in desperate need of some help and thought one or two might prove useful, some raw talent with a bit of initiative. We gave them three months to prove themselves, no guarantees and paid their travel expenses so they wouldn’t be out of pocket.
We ended up taking two of them on, both long since gone now. But the name missing from the chart was Rachel. A grumpy young lady, especially on Monday mornings, who we hired straight from school at the same time. She’s now People, Business Partner at CitNOW Group.
Well done Rach, the longest-serving employee in the company now running HR.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
** DP is short for Dealer Principal, sometimes called Head of Business, Managing Director. They run the dealership.
Keep writing. Having experienced a small part of the CitNow story I find the early days story fascinating