How we built a business out of recession - chapter 49 - gold in them there hills
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 49th 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.
It was Ken** who reintroduced me to James over an early supper in London’s West End. They knew each other well because of their Inchcape connection.
Inchcape was already a good client of ours, initially, due to their BMW dealer network. But over time, we had gradually expanded into their other premium-branded networks, including JLR*** and Mercedes-Benz, which they partly represented, along with other groups in the UK.
I’d briefly met James before when Alistair had pounced after he’d left Stratstone and had been in between roles. Nothing in particular happened as a result. He’d just bought a day’s consultancy to chew the fat.
Alistair spent the day driving James around, leveraging the opportunity with introductions to one or two of our clients who would have been interested in a high-level catch-up. Between the meetings, he would have been probing James about his next move and exploring any possible opportunities for a CitNOW introduction, where we were struggling. Pendragon, which owned Stratstone, also owned other groups, including Evans Halshaw, where we’d been shut out for years.
The early evening meeting was enjoyable and efficient. Ken had called in a favour, and I certainly wasn’t about to compromise his position with some overzealous sales patter. I’d never been a big fan of the dog with a bone approach. Given that it was rare to meet someone quite so senior, I was more interested in listening to what James had to say.
He knew exactly how such events ought to be conducted and observed the adage that there was no such thing as a free lunch. We arrived on the topic of automotive video a few minutes before he needed to leave to catch his train back to the Midlands. It was more than enough time to discuss any possible thoughts he might have, what I could add, and any next actions.
It turned out that he was quite a fan of the technology, recounting an early skirmish that he’d had with Autos On Show when he was running Stratstone, another premium-branded network of dealers including Aston Martin and Ferrari.
I was keen to explore web video for their used car stock lists, and he was surprisingly well informed about the benefits. Like most people in his position, he wasn’t looking to add me to his Rolodex, but he was keen enough to open a door or two so I might have an opportunity to continue the discussion with an appropriate senior manager at Inchcape.
This is what ultimately led to a meeting with Claire at Inchcape’s Volkswagen dealership in Telford at 09:00 on a bright, crisp Tuesday morning, one autumn. She was deeply embroiled in dealer marketing, making her perfect for a discussion about the addition of video to the 20 images that every used car displayed on their various websites.
Used vehicles were always displayed with images. They had to be. Otherwise, potential web browsing customers would ignore the vehicle in question, moving immediately on to the next in their search. It had been like this for a long time.
We already had a web video application with the ability to provide a half dozen stills. It was unloved and barely used, so I wasn’t even thinking about still images when I arrived. I thought Inchcape might like the web video part, picking up on the conversation I’d had with James months earlier.
At some point during the conversation, we’d got onto the process of how, and I’d suggested that the dealer’s sales team should be tasked with making the videos. The benefit was instant access to new content on any day of the week, whenever stock arrived. There was no reason why it couldn’t be on their website and therefore on sale almost immediately.
It was Claire’s throwaway comment, however, which caught my attention.
It would certainly be a lot better than the two weeks it takes for some of our BMW stock to appear online.
What?
Can you walk me through how that happens?
AutoTrader had dozens of freelance photographers all over the country whose job it was to take professional photos of the new (used car) stock when it arrived. But they only visited a dealer once a week. Everything on their digital drives was downloaded at night, sometimes the following morning.
If stock arrived on the day the photographer was there, it was either perfect timing or the dealership had to wait a week for their next visit. But with BMW, photos couldn’t be used until the background was also replaced with a more aspirational setting, which added even more time to the process.
I, like everyone else, assumed that AutoTrader had the market pretty much stitched up, along with their used car website for display advertising. It wasn’t in their interest to change anything, even though camera advances on phones could provide a pretty good alternative to professional photography, especially if the images were only going to be displayed on a website.
Every day, a vehicle wasn’t for sale was costing the dealer money. For an operation the size of Inchcape, this was significant. Then add to this the cost of image creation and manipulation. To meet the agreed standard, there was a weekly photographer and another third-party provider to change twenty backgrounds for every vehicle.
It was nothing new. Every manufacturer had an image standard to which the franchised dealers subscribed.
What was new was considering a new, improved version of our web app, which would be added alongside the existing CitNOW Sales app already used in every Inchcape retailer. It would immediately give every dealer more control over the process, and stock would no longer sit idle waiting for the photographer.
I was reminded of the words that Steve, our former Finance Director, had uttered when we were sitting in our shared office one morning, frustrated that Alistair was in Japan and not next door.
There has to be gold in some of the hills much closer to home.
Warrington, where Alistair lived, to Telford via the A49 is 61 miles, give or take a tenth of a mile.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**Ken was a senior industry marketer who had worked for Hyundai, the RAC and then Inchape. He’d helped me a lot when we’d been struggling with our cost base, unsupported by the significant sales growth required.
***JLR - Jaguar LandRover