How we built a business out of recession - chapter 39 - Nick of time.
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 39th 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.
Like most companies, we made some good and not-so-good hires. Consultants came and went, easy to offload when results didn’t materialise. It was a similar picture with sales staff and product genii**, especially the newer starters. One product genius didn’t last a week because he couldn’t get up in the morning. But there were also long periods when no one left, and we were hiring. For the most part, I hope people enjoyed working for CitNOW and that the low churn reflected satisfaction in Wokingham and Stirling.
Colin, our Chief Technical Officer (CTO), probably had one of the most challenging jobs trying to hold on to software engineers, as well as hiring new ones to keep up with increasing demands. As we grew, there was a general shift to hire younger and train in good habits as experience priced itself out.
I never understood why Colin didn’t offshore projects in an attempt to keep costs down and productivity up, but my questions fell on deaf ears. Michael especially (the other tech shareholder in Stirling) insisted that we weren’t big enough. It was the objection I always remember, and it never went anywhere with the board because no one had any experience to challenge the claim. A good reason why we should have pivoted away earlier from board members with only automotive experience to others familiar with software as a service.
I expect offshoring would have involved a fair bit of travel to Eastern Europe or probably even further to India, which might have been a factor. We were also all old enough to remember when BT and at least one bank off-shored much of their first line telephone support to India with mixed results. Who even bothers phoning a bank now?
One of our best board hires was Nick. I distinctly remember when he joined because we were in the early stages of responding to the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) request for information. This was our pitch for the rest of Europe. The UK had already been essentially won, one dealer or group at a time, over several years. We suspected Europe wanted to be different, not that they ever said so. They certainly weren’t going to roll over and hand it to us on a plate. Plus, by now, Autos on Show (AoS) had finally woken up and had been trying to win back some JLR dealers in the UK with little success.
My experience with requests for information is that they’re a massive waste of time. The client is already biased, knows who they want to appoint, but must be seen to go through a process. I’d written a first draft but was bumped off the job when Nick arrived. Alistair wanted to deploy his new shiny shiny, who had previous experience with such thankless tasks.
You might be wondering why I didn’t object.
I liked Nick, and the way he’d started, and given his knowledge of JLR, it made sense. I didn’t think I had anything to prove either. We’d hired him to make a difference, and maybe this was a chance to tip the balance against the odds. It didn’t, but that had nothing to do with his written response. I expect it never even got read beyond the one-page summary.
The next real fight with Alistair was yet to happen. The monthly results were beginning to turn sour. A correction might be needed if our newfound UK profitability continued to be challenged.
JLR chose AoS to manage their European rollout, except it got watered down to mean next to nothing. The UK was nearly entirely CitNOW, and we had already hired grown-ups to manage the rest of Europe. Aside from Cesare in Italy, there was Manuel in Spain, Yves in France, Hans-Jörg in the German-speaking countries and Erik in the Netherlands. Except for Erik, they were all because of Chris’s*** handiwork and his network of European contacts within General Motors.
Individual countries could choose their solution, provided they conformed to the JLR standard, ironically a standard I originally wrote. AoS had no one on the ground in Europe, so we continued to pick up business, but it was a slow grind. No one was in a hurry to embrace video, which was partly a reflection of mainland Europe being slower adopters and the JLR decision not being mandated.
We threw Nick into the deep end when he arrived. Firstly, he sorted out training, removed the incumbent manager, and appointed Amir. He’s still there today, heading up a bigger and better training division nearly 10 years on. Nick’s initial responsibility also included HR, but after a few months, we made him MD for Europe, creating a formidable task force which continued through to the sale of the company and beyond.
Nick’s star shone brightly until one day it didn’t, well at least not with Alistair. He’d become increasingly frustrated by his forthright views and where our focus needed to be; the two were no longer on the same page quite as often as they might have been. It was clear that Nick didn’t tolerate despots any more than I did.
The Europeans were finally in a position to deliver, although it was still early doors. We’d been able to hire some expensive suits, but we now needed to see some results. If the UK remained profitable, we could support Europe until it took off. We were now looking for that first big win.
Having cash in the bank was a novel experience. It meant we had choices that were unavailable to us before. We could hire for those positions which we thought we always needed, and we could also erode our profitability by not delivering the sales uplift required to maintain them.
Having cash in the bank allowed us to make some silly decisions. And we did.
*CitNOW was our company’s trade name before we sold it in 2018.
**A Product Genius was a new role, a working apprenticeship. We deliberately hired young, energetic people with no automotive experience to provide demos, offer some training support, hopefully spot sales, and, as they matured, start closing them out.
***Chris was our long-standing ex-General Motors consultant, and this was his finest work.
Nick was honest and pragmatic, more so than Alistair and Gordon. He was prepared to listen