How we built a business out of recession - chapter 46 - go get 'em Jack
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 46th 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.
Claudia rounded off our horribilis annus by collecting all of our financial woes and writing them off in one go. Nearly £1 million went down the paper toilet. The good news was being able to start the following year in much better shape, much closer to a cashflow positive situation.
Costs had been cleared out that we couldn’t afford. I was sad to lose people, but delighted that we got rid of the ego-oriented trappings, such as the Manchester office and the chauffeur, even if he was a lovely Liverpool supporter.
It also meant we could focus our attention and limited resources on some of our biggest opportunities, supporting growth in the largely untapped European markets.
There is still one company dead end left to untangle, which I’ve been ignoring. I don’t really know why? It’s just been sitting there, untouched, when it definitely deserves a little something. It happened at a similar time to our Asian adventures, this time on the opposite side of the globe. The main protagonist, a true cock amongst cocks.
When I first met Jack, I noticed his teeth, they were impossible to miss. Big, brash, very white, and almost too big for his mouth that articulated an East Coast drawl. In European dental tourism parlance, you’d be correct and forgiven for calling them Turkey teeth.
The gravelly, rasping sound which filled his sentences must have been encouraged by chainsmoking Capstan Full Strength or some Yankee equivalent.
It wasn’t true, of course, Jack liked the finer things in life. His lips had never been sullied with something so cheap as a cigarette. Jack preferred cigars. Big, fat, ostentatious ones from Cuba, with a glass of bourbon, plenty of ice and an audience.
His shirts were crisp, well-pressed, and white, interrupted by fine stripes that neatly fitted his trim 6-foot frame. The collars momentarily reminded me of Harry Hill, the British comedian, although the similarity ended there. Jack wasn’t funny. He liked talking business, and talking about himself, constantly. Self-reflection would be an entirely new, uncomfortable idea he would have no time for.
Around the same time as the wild goose chase to Japan and China - ahh, but think of the airmiles, we were approached by the Hyundai distributor in Ireland, who wanted to discuss becoming CitNOW’s distributor in the US. They were cash-rich and looking for new opportunities to make even more.
Their qualification for being taken seriously, aside from deep pockets and a desire to engage, was the man himself - Jack, their guaranteed, nailed-on, winning formula. A US citizen with Irish roots who had worked in the car industry for years. He knew exactly how to make CitNOW a huge US success, starting on the East coast, where he happened to live near Boston.
So far, so good.
If we did do anything with these guys, the biggest risk was going to be their money. Our main concern was how much time would need to be devoted to getting them started and how would we protect the brand, if the venture was a failure?
The question of leaving the States well alone, for software litigation reasons, was now conveniently forgotten, because someone else was footing the bill. We could treat this as paid for research, exploring the American market. What not to do, if there was ever a next time.
Our Irish friends were an interesting bunch. In meetings, their accountant, responsible for delivering the project, seemed to write down everything ever said in his A4 notebook. Page after page of notes, talking about best practice and how to get started, was, in the end, largely ignored. Jack knew best.
We’d had so much easy success with the aftersales service, compared to sales, that we strongly recommended that they focus on the US workshops first. They didn’t because Jack was a salesman who believed he could sell anything to anyone. His idea was to start with sales, and because US dealers were bigger, with perhaps twenty-plus salespeople, the monthly licence fee would be four times as much.
He regaled us with stories of how unscrupulous US car dealers could be, all adding to his rite of passage. Even his old sales team would sometimes close out sales by putting particularly awkward customers in a room which they couldn’t escape from until they signed the paperwork.
I’m not sure how you imprison a potential customer, something about a faulty door handle. It was all part of the larger than life, bullshit, which followed Jack around.
Given the significant store the Irish team had put in him, I assumed he had ended up with his own string of US dealerships, a self-made man living the American dream. I established, with a bit of digging, that his career had plateaued at Sales Manager, but the site was the size of at least half a dozen UK dealers combined.
The one thing everyone could agree on was when Steve was hired.
He’d joined as a graduate intern, one of our first three hires, during the summer of 2011. Not only did he survive, he became a real asset to the business. He learnt fast and took on more and more responsibility, often without prompting, just what a startup is looking for.
He was also growing faster than we were, so when he resigned, we weren’t entirely surprised. Fortunately, Jack, who’d got to know him because of the stubbornly slow set-up in the US, persuaded him to go and work for the new company in Boston. He said yes, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Selfishly, we hadn’t lost Steve completely and we knew we could trust him to shout if and when he needed to.
The new enterprise started slowly, before grinding to a halt 24 months later. The number of signed up dealers was less than twenty and these had mostly happened when they’d decided to make the Workshop application available.
Contractually, they’d failed to deliver, even though we’d been more than generous in shifting the agreed sales expectations further away. I don’t believe they were very surprised when we decided to finally cancel their contract. The only surprise was Jack, who still seemed to have plenty of capital with the Irish contingent. How he explained the lack of sales and several complaints from female members of staff, who knows?
Several years later, they re-launched again with their own product.
After CitNOW was first sold, the new owners must have been looking for a foothold back into the US because they purchased the Irish start-up, minus Jack of course.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.