5:16 pm, March 13, 2025
Waylands dealer group boss John O’Hanlon today provided a fascinating insight into the way he assembled his portfolio of car manufacturer partners.
O’Hanlon, who founded Waylands Automotive in 2017, started with a single Volvo site but over the past seven years has added Kia, Polestar and MG showrooms to his fast-expanding operation in southern England.
Introduced by host James Baggott as an ‘absolute legend of the motor trade’ at Car Dealer Live, O’Hanlon has enjoyed a hugely successful career. He was CEO of Ridgeway Group when it was snapped up by Marshall Motor Holdings for £106.9m in 2016.
During a keynote interview with Baggott at CDL, he explained that he still had the drive and ambition to carry on in the motor trade and ‘do it all again’ at that point – partly because the sale of Ridgeway had not been his decision.
He said his job at the moment was to put Waylands in the best possible position to take advantage of all available opportunities – and that meant choosing the right manufacturers to work with.
‘I grew up with mainly German premium brands,’ he recalled. ‘If you look at what Ridgeway benefited from, it was Volkswagen Group, Mercedes-Benz and BMW – and latterly, JLR. That was where the growth was at that time in the market.
‘It’s easier to work with winners. I always say that. Whether it’s your suppliers, whether it’s your brands, look for the winners.’
O’Hanlon said that the decision to work with Volvo when Waylands was launched was an easy one to make and enabled his new company to sell premium, comfortable cars with a great reputation for safety. The manufacturer was heading in the right direction – towards electrification and away from ‘dirty diesels’, he added.
‘Working with Volvo acted as a catalyst to look for other winners,’ explained O’Hanlon. ‘And I thought, I need a budget brand, I need a volume brand, I need a premium SUV brand – and suddenly, everything fell into place.’
Turning to Waylands’ current fortunes, he said: ‘2025 has started incredibly well. We’ve been on a quite a journey in terms of growing the business and that’s involved a lot of investment in and around our facilities – we’ve spent over £14 million on our facilities, in fact.
‘The business as it stands has been seven years in the making and we’re now ready to accelerate – taking the businesses we’ve got, and growing and exploiting the territories in which we operate.
‘We’ve been really clear on what our ambitions were. So when we started, with a two-car showroom, three ramps and 20 used car spaces looking after Reading Volvo, we aimed to have an annual turnover of £100m. We did that within three years and we did £250m last year.
‘We’re setting out our stall so that we’re not only successful and growing, but we’re able to invest, whether that’s in our people, our assets or the brands we represent.’
O’Hanlon said that future growth of Waylands would involve acquisitions. He said: ‘Right now, we’re at 11 sites, and I think to get to a turnover of £500m, we’ll have to be approaching 20 sites. It’s inevitable that there will be more acquisitions.’
Looking back to the pandemic, he said there was a feeling of reassurance after Covid that physical dealerships still had a role to play: ‘We found that customers did want to come back to showrooms and did want to talk to us.
‘Digital is key to what we’re doing and we’re working really hard to be a digital-first business but we’re also working hard to make sure that a Waylands showroom is an attractive place to be – a fun place to be.
‘It’s difficult because if you go into any of our showrooms, they are corporate spaces. They do look the same. They sell the same products from the same factories so the differentiator is our people. So that’s where we’re spending a lot of time and effort – making sure that our differentiator is our people all the way through.’
Asked if there was one thing he would change about the car sales industry, O’Hanlon said: ‘We should be able to trust each other more. That’s difficult because we’re not all working towards the same objectives.
‘The power of having a brand, a dealer and suppliers all pushing in the same direction, comes from the depth of the relationship they have. I would love to be in a position where we could just trust each other a little bit more.’
