8:59 am, August 5, 2024
When’s the time right to expand your used car business and take the plunge with a dealership?
That’s the question I’ve been asking myself – and others – in this week’s video diary.
I had a chance phone call from a local businessman last week offering me the opportunity to take on a unit that had just become available.
It was not far from where the workshop that does my prep work is located and a short walk from my house.
But I can’t decide if the time, or the property, is right. If you’ve been following my journey with the AI Car Dealership Project, you’ll have seen I’ve been steadily growing my used car sales business from home.
I’ve gone from a couple of cars to nine in stock and it’s causing a few headaches. It’s been a juggle between storing them in my garage, my drive, my dad’s place and the workshop.
Cars are never in the right place, especially when a customer wants to see one. What’s more, I can’t offer finance at the moment as I’m based at home. You see, you can’t be FCA regulated at home.
The property I was shown – which you can see in this week’s video diary (above) – was a former car workshop. It used to have a few ramps in it and has a decent sized yard for storage.
But it needs a lot of work to get it up to the sort of standard I want to portray for my business. I’m aiming for the personal touch at the moment and customers seem to like buying from me at home.
I am not sure they’d get the same warm, fuzzy feeling turning up at a site with barbed wire fencing next to a breaker’s yard.
It would certainly need considerable cash thrown at it to get it up to the sort of standard I’d want for my business. It would need a new floor in the workshop, painting, better lighting, an office refit and the toilets re-done.
Then outside would need gravel laying or a concrete base put down. All of which would cost a lot of money and I’m really not sure it’s in the right part of town.
What I really want is an up-and-over-door style unit on a smart industrial estate where I can have offices on a mezzanine floor. The problem is, round here, they don’t really exist – and those that do are all taken.
I’ve had lots of interesting comments on this dilemma on the video on YouTube and would love to hear yours. Post them on the video and I’ll take a look.
Also in this week’s update you can see I had some success with an Audi A1 sale – the first phone call arrived just three hours after advertising it and the buyer snapped it up when they came to test drive it.
That followed some similar sales success with a Skoda Octavia and, later in the week – after a serious car cleaning effort – a result on a Fiat 500.
But it wasn’t all good news. There’s an on-going battle to prepare a VW Polo for sale with an air-con system that really refuses to play ball. And then there’s the Toyota Aygo that bought about a serious case of the ‘Thinkabouters’.
Needless to all who saw it last week thought about it, and never called back.
It’s all fun and games in the motor trade isn’t it. ‘Fun’. ‘Games’.
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