My Motor Trade Journey

I have always been into cars, with visits to the national motor show at the NEC a yearly ritual from an early age. I come from a motor tradish background. My parents originally hail from Coventry and members of my family have worked within different areas of the trade for years. My father worked for Alvis and then later became a motor vehicle lecturer, my grandfather worked at Jaguar, my uncle worked at Peugeot/Talbot and my cousin works currently for JLR all on the manufacturing side.

I started as a trainee sales person at Swan Street Motors in King's Lynn in November 1994, where I was very fortunate that I met a great mentor. My mentor John hailed from Lancashire and was a very likeable person. I would watch him with his customers, how he would listen and then advise what their best options were, always with their best interests in mind and not what was best for his commission cheque! John never worried about his commission cheques because he had a never ending supply of repeat customers. In fact he very rarely went out onto the forecourt, he didn't need to as he had a constant flow of customers that would come into see him daily. At 3.30 pm every day he would religiously ring 10 customers, just to see how they were. Now obviously a lot of these calls would lead onto enquiring if the customer was thinking of a change, however that was never the primary motive when a call was made! John's consultative style of selling and understanding that people buy from people struck a chord with me.

With my new found enthusiasm for vehicle sales, I quickly rose up the sales ladder and became the 2nd best sales person in the dealership...John was always number 1!

In August of 1997 I moved across to Sorensons BMW in King's Lynn. At 22 years of age,having been a lover of BMW vehicles since i could remember, they had just launched the Z3, it was literally a dream come true! At 22 years old I was also the youngest BMW sales person in the network at the time, minimum age was set at 25.

Fast forward 25 years, I have had my own sites large and small, worked from home and from units on an appointment basis. I have had short stints out of the trade doing other things. But have always come back to the trade. I think once it's in you, it's really hard to get it out of you! There will be plenty of you that know what I am talking about!

In June 2019 I started working on AutoEngage. I had always had an interest in the marketing side of business. I had been shown early in my career how important the customer is and how important keeping in regular contact is. Not always trying to sell something, just treating customer as people.

I sat down with a friend and colleague and drew out my ideas on a sheet of A4 paper. You can see what I drew in the picture below.