4:52 pm, April 23, 2020
Peter Vardy, CEO of eponymous dealer group Peter Vardy appeared on Car Dealer Live and revealed he has sold 1,000 cars during the lockdown.
Vardy was very honest about the difficulties of having to shut his business and how strange coming back to sites that were left empty for weeks has been.
He said he’s been very open and honest with all staff, furloughed and not, and that he’s trying to ‘keep momentum in the business’.
With an online sales focus, through sister company SilverBullet, Vardy has kept a ‘sales squad’ and ‘aftersales squad’ in the business.
He said: ‘Our sales team are getting us ready to sell online and we’ll have done 1,000 sales when we get back to work. The aftersales team have been keeping NHS staff on the road with small jobs too.’
He added that SilverBullet was created as a ‘self-defence for the motor group but also for the rest of the industry’.
Vardy is now focusing on how he can run his dealerships when they are allowed to go back to work, with current trials going on in-store.
For now he is implementing a delivery service for a lot of the cars that have been sold, in response to the news that dealers can sell online and deliver, and his team will begin deliveries on Monday.
Across 20 sites in Scotland the Peter Vardy group represents six manufacturers – including Vauxhall, BMW and Porsche – and has its own used car offerings in the forms of the Peter Vardy CarStore car supermarkets, and classic car-focussed Peter Vardy Heritage.
Vardy himself has been with the dealer group since its creation in 2006, following a five year stint at the family’s previous business, Reg Vardy, until its acquisition by Pendragon the same year.
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