How we built a business out of recession - chapter 18 - the fallout
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 18th 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.
Why? Why the fuck would you go and do that?
It’s not as bad as you think, Donna. I know it’s a third of the company, but at least this way, we have a better chance of doing more than just surviving. There is no halfway house where we simply pootle along. We need to grow fast. I think, at least this way, we’re buying some insurance.
We’re not buying anything. You, on the other hand, have decided to buy your stupid so-called insurance with absolutely no guarantees that anything will change. Worst still, I’m not even consulted. Simply told after the event.
Because I didn’t think I needed your permission.
Why not? We never discussed this, you moron. What did he do, plead poverty? Did you feel sorry for him or something?
Look, I know we didn’t talk this through. I just didn’t think it was that big a deal. I didn’t want to waste shit loads of time debating the value of the business, which, let’s face it, is still only a good idea, maybe with 40 dealers out of a possible 5 plus thousand vaguely agreeing with us. And even that’s not true. We both know that half of them won’t renew after their 90-day trial.
Whatever.
At least let me…
Shut-up. No. I’m not interested.
The row was over, at least for now. It was also Pogo’s lucky day, who’d already been out for his afternoon constitution with one of the kids. I put on my running clobber, picked up his lead and went out into the gloaming, glad of the company.
Unbeknown to us at the time when we moved for the third time, we discovered that Wokingham is blessed with a forest. I thought it was great, and also really close to where we’d recently moved to. It was easy to turn off the main road, 50 metres from our front door and take a slow jog under the railway bridge, escaping immediately into the countryside.
After the bijou linked detached in Winnersh, Donna had found a fantastic semi in Earley, which had been extended into the attic and over the garage. All the bedrooms were great, with lots more space downstairs. It was the complete opposite of where we’d been, except the landlord decided he wanted to move back in just as we were settling into our new found tardis. He exercised the 6-month break clause, giving us 4 weeks to get out.
Fortunately, we landed on our feet again arriving in Finchampstead Road. We were now close to the office, a short walk back in the direction of Wokingham and great walks/runs for us and Pogo.
This run was uneventful. I took the tarmacked road down to the campervan workshop on the forest's edge, a weird house with outbuildings, before venturing into the trees. The path was well-marked, and there was more than enough moonlight to guide me around my forested three mile circuit.
I could hardly blame Donna for being angry with my off-the-cuff offer. The business had become an all consuming part of our lives, and right now, it was in a finely balanced positioned. Yes, we’d achieved something. You might even argue that we’d cracked it, at least partly, because we had a monthly revenue stream, roughly grossing £8,000, each signed-up dealer paying £200.
I’m sure plenty of business books might suggest that we’d done the hard part. It certainly didn’t feel that way. Our limited success wasn’t getting any easier, harder if anything, as we tried to patch over the technical frailties of the hardware, save more of the 90-day pilots from failure, invest more in our product and try and fend off our first serious competitor - Autos On Show.
One of my most depressing jobs that usually got relegated to the evenings, was looking through dealer dashboards. One of the selling points of the system was the option for Sales Manager and Dealer Principals (DPs) to review individual salespeople. Who was making plenty of videos, who was doing none?
As someone with admin rights, I could see every dealer, looking at total videos over days, weeks, months etc again down to individuals, producing reports typically of their next to useless performances. Armed with this evidence, I would turn-up to do additional training reminding Sales Managers politely of their team’s performance, trying to cajole them to focus more on the opportunity. I largely failed to impress.
The sad truth is, I often knew that a dealer was going to fail as soon as the 90-day trial had been agreed with the Dealer Principal. Before I’d even gone through the painful process of a dedicated broadband line, winning over the Sales Manager (or not) and delivering training to the sales team.
These basket cases were all the same. No one was ever happy. The DP, sometimes the owner of the business, largely unavailable and too busy to really fix the fundamental fractures and resultant poor performances. They preferred to throw the dog an occasional bone instead. A sticking plaster on a cut which was only ever going to work for a day or two.
How was a video service using netbooks attached to handy cams ever going to solve anything? We’d established that live didn’t work, and the focus had shifted to a pre-recorded video. It still needed the salesperson to access their CitNOW portal on a dealer PC. The address of the video link was then copied and pasted into an email, which was finally sent to the customer.
It sounds like a lot of effort, and I suppose it was if you were being told to use something that was just another complication to doing your job of selling cars, little confidence that your personal customer video was going to have the desired effect. But where that leap of faith was taken, it did. There had been enough wonderful stories of success with positive customer feedback that our rotating 40-plus dealers stuck with us despite the clunky nature of the solution.
My poor handling of the Alistair situation was finally put to bed. We moved on, both recognising the lack of momentum and the need to do something to change the current situation for the better. Time would tell whether this pivot was an economically sound one or not.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.