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John Cleland is one of the UK’s best known racing drivers, winning the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) in 1989 and 1995. In all that time he has successfully run the family business started by his father, taking on the dealer principal role in 1974 aged just 22. He terminated his Vauxhall franchise 15 years later, despite being a works BTCC driver for the brand at the time, and took on Volvo in new premises in Galashiels.
Clelands of the Borders has just been named Volvo’s best UK dealer for the first six months of 2018, having held top or second in the brand’s table for the past two years. Speaking to Motor Trader in a centre that has recently undergone a £1.7m refurbishment, Cleland puts much of the dealership’s success down to applying the winning mentality he learnt in motor sport.
How important are CI scores to you?
There are KPIs, targets that we hit but we are also very critical. We constantly look at our business and want to know why we are so successful in some areas, and less so in other areas.
My whole team understand my mentality of winning, at being first, the best. I have directly 110,000 head of population in my territory, 43,000 houses. There are more in one district of Glasgow or Edinburgh. So I have to make sure I give everybody I touch the best experience, because in an area like this, if you upset someone or sell them something that’s not right, very quickly everybody gets to know about it. If someone in Glasgow buys a car that’s not right from a dealer in Glasgow, no-one cares.
How important is the customer experience?
We sell cars at £2,500 and that car is just as important to its buyer as an £85,000 hybrid to another. If someone has a genuine fault we will not argue, we will replace free of charge with a similar car or give them back their money, end of story.
My front-line staff all have the autonomy to decide that a customer has been messed about, not been given what they were promised, and to send them a bouquet of flowers or a box of chocolates as an apology.
Everybody has a choice. This morning we are delivering an S90 to an 80-year-old man who bought it off the internet having read reviews about Clelands and phoned some people he knew in the Borders, and they raved about our service. He’s bought a £35,000 car on the internet, because of our reputation.
How have you applied your motorsport experience to business?
I shake hands with everyone who buys a car in this business, if I’m here. And when I go down and introduce myself, around half the customers remember watching me on TV racing cars.
The background of what I did absolutely works in this business. I think it’s often missed that professional sportsmen and women make great ambassadors and have a role to play in business. They have reached
the pinnacle of their sport through hard work, effort and being the best and this can be utilised in business somewhere. Their mind is wired up differently to be successful.
How do you find staff recruitment?
Very difficult. We aim very high and I personally interview all potential new staff, because I want them to understand my mentality of winning.
I want my staff to be happy, to know they are paid more than their equivalents in dealers around them. But I also need them to buy into
the thinking here. For example, they must never say “that’s not my job.” I will make someone a cup of coffee, take someone outside to a car. Staff need to understand that is how this business is built.
Recently I needed a Saturday receptionist and trainee salesman, and I emailed our database asking if customers might have a family member who could suit the bill before we advertised on the open market.
Our customers understand what we expect from our staff because they experience it. I got a whole lot of emails back praising the idea, and I employed a lad whose mum is a customer. He was previously stacking shelves in a supermarket and he has proven to be a star – he understood from his mum how we work and what we expect, that we are hard but fair.
How big a deal was the refurbishment?
It was the first complete refurbishment the place had undergone. I sold my Jaguar franchise 18 months ago and we moved into that showroom while this one was rebuilt, moving back in on 14 February in conjunction with the launch of XC40.
On the Friday evening before the Monday we reopened the staff all saw the inside for the first time. I had replaced everything other than my desk and a couple of chairs – even the franking machine was new, no maintenance required, no-one saying that something didn’t work because it was old.
I walked them all round it and showed them how great it was, such as the nice new canteen, but I added that I had spent £1.7m on the place and I expected it to look just the same in 12 months’ time.
We are selling 50% more used cars because we have created the very model of a used car sales area, that Volvo now uses as a graphic for dealer development globally, right down to a separate kiosk for used sales that no-one else in the Volvo network has ever done before.
How important is digital marketing to you?
The internet is our biggest friend and our biggest enemy. Since it has become such a tool to purchase through, whether a new barbecue or new car, you have to be competitive, but you also need that edge. We need to ensure our reviews on our website, on Auto Trader and Google are true, genuine.
We spend a huge amount of time getting our website to the top of the pecking order, and as a result I sell from Shetland to Skye to Southampton and all points in between. On our website we offer to deliver nationally free of charge. If you fly up to Scotland to see us and the car is not what you expected, we will pay for your airline ticket. That’s been on my site for 10 years and I’ve bought one airline ticket.
We send customers lots of pictures, videos, and when we deliver a car to say London we send a uniformed salesman down with it to talk the customer through all the complicated dash features. But if they are not happy we will bring the car home again. I’ve never brought one home.
I hate Facebook with a passion, and we don’t do it as a business as well as we possibly should. I have a real issue with mobile phones at gatherings, I will slate someone for getting out their mobile at dinner,
so I’m possibly not the biggest advocate of social media. I use Twitter but only to keep in touch with motorsport goings-on.
I do use social media, through a family member, to check up on potential new staff before I interview them – if we don’t like what we see we don’t do the interview.
What is the major challenge in used cars?
Getting enough stock of the right mix, that everybody wants. We are very specific. We haven’t for 15 years sold anything other than Volvo. People don’t come here to buy a used car that’s not a Volvo. It is wrong for one of my customers to brush past a Peugeot, Jaguar or Audi on the forecourt.
There might be around £2,000 in a non-Volvo used car but we would need to put it through the workshop, add a warranty. We don’t know the correct service procedures because we don’t deal in that franchise. So let’s not bother, let’s trade it and use the money to buy Volvo stock.
We profile the stock really carefully. We won’t buy certain models, colours, engine and transmission variants. If stock is hard to get because everyone wants a particular car it’s not about book value, it’s what we can get for selling that car.
What’s the most challenging aspect of being a dealer today?
Being able to supply the right car at a time the customer wants, at the right price, while retaining a reasonable margin to cover our costs. If a customer tells me they can get something so much cheaper elsewhere and they don’t want our courtesy cars and attention that’s fine. I’m in business to make money and I want to pay my staff much more than the average wage and the only way we can do that is to make a reasonable return. If we all work towards the same aim, and most of the deals we do are profitable, we have sustainability.
