10:59 am, May 5, 2008
Well, you’d never have guessed it, but we managed to sell our Fiesta. Now we need you to get involved!
TO be brutally honest – I was starting to panic. Six weeks after picking up our little Ford Fiesta from Autotrade-mail and it hadn’t moved off my drive. As you can imagine, launching a new magazine takes up quite a bit of time, so our Trading Places feature had slipped down the priorities list.
But with the first issue put to bed, a window of opportunity arose – it was time for Operation Make Money. Our M-reg, one lady owner, 51,000-mile Ford was in good nick for its age, but needed a few cosmetic repairs. We needed to make the decision to tart it up or spend some cash and have a small rust patch repaired.
Wanting to get the ball rolling as soon as possible, we decided to give it a decent valet and advertise it for slightly less money. So to work. Not wanting to spend any cash, we went on the blag and a whole range of car cleaning products soon flooded our offices. One sunny Sunday we got to work with the Autoglym products and a shed load of elbow grease and the Fiesta was soon looking superb.
Next up was a little bit of help from our friends at HPI. It’s always better to be safe than sorry and an HPI Check is a great way of protecting yourself from hidden history. We knew there was nothing wrong with the Ford, but being able to prove that to our potential buyers would be very helpful indeed. One simple call and the check was made – clean as we expected – and seconds later the certificate dropped into our inbox.
So preparation out the way it was time to sell. With grand plans to put the Fiesta in the Auto Trader, local paper and if that failed on eBay, we got to work penning an ad. That was the easy bit – with the only real thing missing being tax (we didn’t want to tax it and add another owner to the logbook), the ad wrote itself. But then we had a stoke of luck.
Chatting about the feature with my football team mates one mentioned that he was looking for a runabout for his better half. They’d just had a baby boy and needed a five-door. A few days later he was round and taking it for a test drive.
Being a car mechanic, he gave the Fiesta a thorough going over and found nothing wrong – testament to the corker our friends at Autotrade-mail found. A bit of bartering later and the deal was done – £695! Far more than we were expecting, but probably something to do with the fact said friend knew it was for a good cause!
We told Autotrade-mail the good news and boss Marcus Kelland was so impressed he offered to make it up to £1,000. Good man! Find out who’ll be taking up the cause next month.
HOW YOU CAN HELP RAISE MONEY FOR BEN…
THE plan is simple – raise as much money as possible for automotive industry charity BEN. How? With an elaborate relay race and your help. Autotrade-mail donated our first car and we aimed to sell it for as much money as possible.
The entire fund will then be handed to another trader who’ll put it into a car of their own, again trying to make as much money as possible. Each month the baton – in this case the cash fund – will be passed on to another trader who’ll carry on the challenge.
The aim is to make as much money as possible, and have some fun a long the way. We still need willing dealers to take up a leg of the relay. Call us on 023 9252 2434 or email [email protected] to find out more.
