Growth without the founder doing it all

A founder-led car retailer that has grown quickly on the strength of its owner’s eye for stock. When we started, it was selling around 60 cars a month and advertising about 125. Its business plan is ambitious: roughly double sales and stock each year for the next few years.

Every car passes through the same stages. It is bought, collected, checked, sent for mechanical work, bodywork, an MOT or a valet as needed, photographed, listed, enquired about, viewed, reserved, sold and handed over. Some of that work is done by staff and a good deal by outside providers: transporters, mechanics, MOT stations, body shops and valeters.

Almost all of that activity ran through the founder. They bought the cars, which is where their expertise lies, but they also chased suppliers, knew where each car was, decided what needed doing next, picked the photos, wrote the listings, took the calls and settled every exception. Staff asked the founder because the founder was the one who knew.

That works at 60 cars a month. It does not work at 120, and certainly not at 240. The question the business put to us was simple to state and hard to answer: how do we grow substantially without the founder’s workload, and the day-to-day complexity of running the place, growing at the same rate?

The aim was never to take the founder out of the business. It was to take them out of routine coordination, so that their time goes on buying, on the big commercial calls, on serious customer issues and on strategy.

We started with discovery rather than software. We spent time understanding what staff actually do, what happens when a car fails its MOT or a supplier is late, who decides what, what gets written down and what lives only in people’s heads. A lot of how the business worked was informal knowledge, and the first job was to make it explicit.

From that we designed a new operating model. In that model, each stage of a car’s journey has an owner, the information it needs, an expected time, a record of completion and a route for escalation. Ordinary decisions, such as routine repair spend or a standard aftersales complaint, sit with managers within agreed limits. Larger, unusual or high-risk decisions still go to the founder. The principle throughout: push ordinary decisions down to the right level, and make sure the important ones still reach the right person.

Then we began building the technology to carry that model. An off-the-shelf system would have digitised the paperwork, but it would not have captured the real preparation process, the supplier handoffs, the decision limits, or the way a car’s location and its status need tracking separately across several sites. So the business is getting a bespoke ERP designed around its own workflow: one view of every car, job queues for staff and simple job lists for outside providers, enquiry capture, viewings and bookings, deposits and sales, costs and contribution by car, and reports a manager can act on. Background automation will handle overdue checks and retries, and every important action will be attributable to the person who took it. Judgement stays human: buying, pricing, serious customer issues and the final choice of photographs are deliberately not automated.

The same engagement covers the business’s brand and online presence, which are being brought up to the standard of the operation behind them.

The engagement is in progress. Discovery and the design of the operating model are complete, and the foundations of the system are built: the application platform, secure sign-in, roles and permissions, configuration, and the finance structure that costs and contribution will run through. The rest of the vehicle journey is being built on top of it, with an internal pilot planned for 2027.

The business now has a defined plan for how work and decisions should move as it grows, and the system to carry it is on its way. The sales and stock figures are the business’s own targets; the operational results will be measured once the system is in use.