How we built a business out of recession - chapter 25 - we want a Gordon.
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 25th 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 wasn’t that our limited success was burning a hole in our pocket; there were lots of demands on the cash we’d started to generate. But it did mean that some of the impossible had now become possible.
One of the best examples of this was hiring consultants to help fast-track our growth. The logic was simple. We believed that our best chance of success was to be first up the beach, as Alistair was fond of saying. We were paranoid about new competitors arriving, and we always had one eye on Autos on Show (AoS), the biggest threat to spoiling our fun in the UK. Why not hire senior automotive executives with plenty of experience and a Rolodex** of connections?
The immediate benefits were compelling. We couldn’t afford to employ these senior suits because they were far too expensive. They also weren’t looking for full-time work anyway, already enjoying the benefits of spreading themselves through their part-time contracts. Hiring on an ad-hoc basis gave us access without any long-term baggage. If it didn’t work out - well, we’d tried another avenue of opportunity, and we weren’t now stuck with a useless, overpaid, over-promoted waste of space.
They weren’t queuing down the street to work with us either, but now and then, another Andy or Andrew would pop up, unerringly often with that name, mainly delivering not a lot of anything in the end. They bristled with manufacturer relations, usually where they’d worked for a significant period, and could now guarantee meaningful decision-maker discussions in their shiny new consultative roles. One or two fizzled out quickly. Another with Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) dragged on for over a year, probably longer, as goalposts moved, the result of political infighting as far as I could tell.
When JLR finally announced that AoS was their preferred supplier for mainland Europe, we were already working with many of their UK dealers, having sold our service on a group-by-group basis, starting years before their final decision. The dealer feedback had been good enough for the UK management to reaffirm our UK position despite the international team’s decision to go elsewhere for Europe.
Despite our initial disappointment, we were never locked out anyway. AoS made the most of broadcasting the decision wherever they could, but it led to virtually no new business for them and a great deal of distraction. The contract wasn’t mandated, so European countries could, and did, continue to have a choice provided another supplier met the terms of the brief. We did, having written much of what was in there in the first place.
Our most successful consultant, responsible for plenty of our UK dealer group sign-ups, was very much a Gordon, not an Andy. I first met him at the Denham Grove Hotel, just north of London, with Alistair, where they both happened to be staying. Alistair had hired him during the Accident Exchange days, where Gordon had run sales for several years after Alistair left. It had definitely been a challenging time for Gordon, but their friendship was still intact, so it couldn’t have been too bad a hospital pass.
Alistair wanted us to meet because he was keen to explore the possibility of Gordon leaving his life of freelance consulting to join CitNOW instead.
I found out that Gordon’s typical working week often started early on a Monday, driving or flying from Glasgow and returning home again the following Friday. He was living out of a suitcase, but in return, he was making a good living working for several suppliers that relied on his automotive knowledge and long list of contacts. Gordon was a good salesman who I came to like a lot. He even attended our wedding with Sandra in 2021.
There was never an issue with the product. Gordon liked the business and was already starting to sell on our behalf. The BMW rollout was underway, and we were picking up new dealers from the same groups and their non-BMW franchises. We were also having some success with other brands, including Renault and the Renault Retail Group which owned a number of their own dealerships.
The problem was simple. Gordon could earn more money remaining an independent consultant. The task in hand, which Alistair took on, was to persuade Gordon on the merits of working for less. In return, we were dangling a small share of the company. Cream tomorrow? Perhaps. It was certainly a deal which could have easily curdled and nearly did, when Donna and I left in 2018.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
** Rolodex is a US company which produces a small desktop file containing cards for business contacts. It’s largely been superseded by digital contact management systems.