How we built a business out of recession - chapter 14 - mystery man appears in Llandudno
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 14th 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.
Jason** was one of the few customers I got to know well. Well enough for a beer and a curry, anyway. He was happy to spend time discussing performance and what could be done to make CitNOW a better product for his business. This was often as much about the process, encouraging salespeople to adopt new habits, as about the technology. The lessons learnt eventually became part of the training programme, supporting dealers better from day one.
I recently contacted Jason. I thought he might like to know that he was famous or at least being written about. His response brought a few details to life that I’d long forgotten.
He reminded me that the public was sensitive to the word TV, perhaps thinking that they’d be embarrassed somehow or it would cost money to have a presentation. Jason changed the Rybrook web address to request a presentation and the number immediately went up.
Loving the CitNow story.
I can’t believe it was 16 years since we started. I vividly remember the 1st car I sold with it. A Seafrost green Jaguar XJ6 3.0 to a captain in Yorkshire. I coaxed him into opening the link, walked him around the car with a full presentation, briefly haggled over the asking price, camera in one hand, phone in the other, and proceeded to film, keying his card number into our machine for his deposit.
I remember we initially named our CitNow link RybrookjaguarTV but people were reticent to open it. We promptly changed it to Rybrookstock. The script changed to log on to here to see more details.
I miss live. I loved the theatre you could create, “effective sweat” I called it. The whole sales team moving cars, sliding showroom doors, wiping rain off, all in view of a prospective customer, a passenger in our car selling theatre.
It was great to be involved.
My visits to Jason in Warrington and then North Wales were fairly frequent. I could also tie it in with a visit to Phil at Volvo Chester, another good practitioner, never afraid to get his hands dirty. There was also Budgens just down the road in Telford and Shrewsbury.
One advantage of having a client base was reducing the number of miles between active dealers. Local prospects also began to appear because they’d heard about this new system and were curious enough to get in touch.
It wasn’t that Jason pushed his mystery man at every opportunity. He knew I could do with some help and thought he might be interested in getting involved. It came up in conversation occasionally, usually by me after a year when nothing had happened.
Our situation hadn’t changed. Without an investor, we needed more sales leads, and we weren’t getting enough from the web companies that we’d befriended. They’d helped a lot, but after the initial influx of prospects who loved anything new, the trickle of leads dried up.
We’d also established that we had a competitor called Autos On Show. It’s gratifying to know that someone else had spotted the same opportunity, helping us to warm up the market, but what if their service was superior or significantly cheaper?
Our cash crisis continued to slow our product development, and we were a long way away from having a marketing budget or being able to afford a salesperson with a Rolodex. The focus was to make the pre-recorded video a more polished reality. Live was great, at least Jason and I thought so, but I was gaining more traction with new dealers when the focus switched to a pre-record.
It meant there was less pressure on salespeople to perform. If you cocked up, just do it again. It also provided the dealer’s customers with their own personal video, which they could watch whenever they wanted. I remember customer videos being watched 20-30 times, shared around family and friends. Every time a video was viewed, our service counted it, just like on YouTube. It was an excellent way for the salesperson to know whether the customer was less or more likely to purchase.
Jason booked us into The Belmont Hotel in Llandudno for bed and breakfast the day I met Alastair. He couldn’t stay, which was a shame, an early meeting the next day, a long way from the North Wales coast.
After the usual pleasantries, I started talking about CitNOW and my experiences over the last three years, from the early days with Honda to the latest product developments and dealers who were now signed up. It was great to share notes with someone who knew some of my customers and the pitfalls of dealer engagement.
Alastair was a tin man; he’d worked in the industry all his life, brought up in and around a dealership.
When I knew him much later, he recounted wistfully about a time when his Dad’s business closed at lunchtime for an hour. He’d be down there in shorts with his Mum and sister, enjoying a family lunch. He joined the business as soon as he could at 16. Apart from the spanners, as he put it, he’d done every job there was. The family sold Dane County, two Vauxhall dealerships, to Arnold Clark in 2004.
I enjoyed the rest of the evening with Jason. It had definitely been worth waiting for. I don’t know if it was because I couldn’t quite catch Jason’s eye when he was talking about his past with Alastair after he’d gone, but it was enough to make me wonder whether I’d quite got the whole story.
He told me a bit about his time working for Alastair as a salesperson at Dane County, the fact that there had just been a messy divorce. Nothing could have been that bad or why bother going to the trouble of a meeting?
It was certainly true; we were very different people, down to the unfortunate fact that Alastair was a Man United fan. In his defence, he was also a season ticket holder and didn’t live in Oxford***. The big positive was he immediately grasped how powerful video might be in the future and he was excited about the business.
It wasn’t long after Llandudno before we were talking regularly. He was far better networked than I was, which meant I started to meet new people, often influencers, who might help generate new leads. The irony was we couldn’t afford to employ him and he needed an income, which explained why he was working for BTC and Guy.
The automotive industry is a small world.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**Jason was the Sales Manager for Rybrook Jaguar, Warrington, when we first met. He was then promoted to Dealer Principal at Rybrook Land Rover, Llandudno and is now Head of Business at Ryland Land Rover, Stoke.
***One of the jokes about United supporters is they don’t live anywhere near Manchester. Half of them are in Oxford. It’s not true of course, just a quarter of them.