How we built a business out of recession - chapter 5 - Adam says yes
The story of CitNOW*
This is the fifth 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 roughly a 5-minute read and is 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.
Unlike many software start-ups, we appeared to be at a significant disadvantage. Of all the US success stories I’ve ever read (no one seems to write about British ones), the founders always seem to be gifted software programmers who met in college. Aside from investing their time writing rich, functional software for a yet-to-be-discovered killer app, they maintain a healthy life balance with outdoor passions for mountain biking and snowboarding. Monthly expenses are kept firmly in check until version one is finally released, bringing investors flocking. I bet their teeth were all straight, too.
I was neither gifted nor a programmer, teeth not too bad for an Englishman, so every tiny development, every step towards a minimum viable product, a term later learnt, had to be written by someone outside the company. It was a cost we could ill afford.
It was a financial strain even for the one day every fortnight of Berrie’s (Codevio) time. It also meant progress was slow, painfully so. There was no alternative, no spare cash; we had to make do.
Codevio was a Scottish triumvirate from Stirling, although Berrie had since moved back to The Netherlands, a native Dutchman with his wife and two children. Although Codevio may have been small, it was a proper software development company with lots of commercial experience. They could make anything you wanted if you had the money.
Before becoming software guns for hire, they’d had more than a taste of success with their own start-up, which they’d eventually sold. Colin, who would eventually become our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), was also a member of a disparate group that created a movie database before the World Wide Web existed. Amazon eventually bought it. Colin drove a Porsche as a result and invested in his passion for films with a home cinema. I thought it was a great dot com story. Someone I knew a bit had indulged his passion with other like-minded individuals, with less thought about commercial gain, at least when they started, driven more by creating something they and others would find helpful.
I might not have been able to write code, but I knew everything about the current CitNOW product: what worked, what needed improvement, plus a list of new features I was aching to get started. There was nothing else I could do apart from focus on the dealer and customer experience at Holdcroft, make sure Ian (Honda) and Adam (Holdrcoft) were happy, and hope we got to sell our service before someone else rushed in and stole the market away.
Competition became a more constant concern in the years that followed. At first, I thought we’d discovered gold and wanted to keep that fact a secret until we could pan the rivers ourselves, picking up the nuggets just waiting to be discovered. It was silly and irrational. Having a product that vaguely worked barely put us on the starting line. As I was about to discover, being first to market comes with many other, as yet undiscovered problems.
Adam finally said yes. With improved picture quality and a bigger video window, essential if this was ever going to succeed, we now had something. It also meant his used car sales team could do some damage when they started to use the service.
By now, I was well-known in the dealership and hoped that I could persuade Lisa and Anthony, with the help of Chris (Used-car Sales Manager), their boss, to use this fantastic sales tool every day whenever a new enquiry rang in.
I was on a massive high that afternoon, driving back down the M6* after Adam had given his blessing. We finally had CitNOW version 1 approved, a massive step forward from the telemedical app we’d started with 18 months earlier. I was now seriously excited for the Holdcroft sales team. I was convinced they might find themselves in the embarrassing position of emptying their forecourt of used stock once video became an everyday part of their sales process.
My euphoria lasted precisely a weekend. I soon came back down to earth with a bump the following Monday morning when I returned to Holdcroft and caught up with Lisa and Anthony after their 8:30 am sales meeting. Wound up like tops, neither had time to listen to me about our new secret weapon. There were calls to be made and deals to be finalised. Training would have to wait. Instead, I went to the local cafe for breakfast with a vague promise that I could have some time once the morning fires had been extinguished.
One reason outsiders started CitNOW with no dealer experience was that we couldn’t see the myriad of reasons why a live sales presentation tool couldn’t possibly work. The common culture and dealer business practices in 2006 were mainly at odds with what we were trying to do. I never had the chance to ask Adam about his expectations, educated with the knowledge I didn’t yet possess. It wouldn’t have been a good fit.
I expect he saw it as a tool that could be used if the situation was appropriate. That’s a long way away from expecting a video presentation for every enquiry, and appropriate is a word wide open to interpretation. It often results in little change, the well-trodden path of old habits being preferred.
It would have been unfair to expect him to think differently, either. It was, after all, no more than a technology demonstrator at this point, and he was on board because the brand had asked him to help. True, he was more predisposed to change than most, but he quite rightly let Chris run his department without much interference, especially while sales were good, and they were good. Too good.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
*The M6 is a UK motorway from the Scottish borders to Birmingham in the Midlands, joining the M1.