12:20 pm, January 18, 2025
As January sales have picked up at our small little car dealership we’ve concentrated on keeping stock levels up – which means buying.
I’ve found one of the hardest parts of running the Clever Car Collection is working out when to buy new stock.
One minute you can be fully stocked, the next you’ll have a rush of sales and be down on numbers – and I keep getting told ‘you can’t sell empty spaces’.
So this year we’ve decided to just keep buying even when we’ve got what we feel is enough cars on the pitch.
We’ve set ourselves some rules – if we find a car in the daily auctions within 10 miles that hits our metrics in terms of Auto Trader Retail Rating and days to sell then we try and buy it.
Equally, if we get offered a part exchange or a car from a local seller which means we don’t pick up any buyer’s fees then we buy it, even if it is slightly outside of our usual parameters.
We’ve also decided to push our own buy-a-car channels. I asked AI for some ideas on how to promote our SellYourCarToJames.com website – built by the brilliant DealerKit team for me – and it suggested some social media and adding some spend behind it.
ChatGPT has already given us some marketing ideas for the website and the nice thing is Facebook uses some AI to ensure your advert is getting in front of the right people.
We recorded the Instagram Reel on Friday and put £100 behind it. It’s already paid off, as I write this I am chatting to a customer who wants to sell us their Corsa.
I also bought a couple of other cars last week and one was in the weirdest way I’ve ever experienced.
I always shout about our car buying needs in my weekly video diaries and often people get in touch to value their car. This week two people did just that and I agreed to buy the first, a Volvo XC60, from a chap in Wales. Nothing strange about that.
The second was a bit more unusual. I called back a customer who had valued their car on the website but they’d entered their mobile number incorrectly, so I was essentially calling a wrong number.
In a weird twist, this wrong number was not only someone who lived locally but also had a car that fit our profile. I agreed a time for them to bring their Peugeot Partner Teepee in and I bought it this week.
What are the chances of calling a wrong number and them not only having a car to sell but also being in the same area you’re based? A right result.
At the same time I’ve been buying from Carwow and Motorway still. One car I spotted was a broken Kia Sportage that was just down the road from me. I agreed a deal and sent my mechanic to check it out.
Sadly, it was beyond economical repair, but you have to try these things. What we have found is that as we’re growing and getting more stock up for sale you can have the odd one that sits around a little longer because it needs a little more recon work.
We got a bit of a deal on a Hyundai i20 that needed some paint and some repairs to broken bits, but we could take it on because we got a good deal and had the time to deal with it.
It certainly helps having a good mobile mechanic who can do these things at our dealership too. In fact, one of the best things we’ve done is find Darren Tonks, our spanner man, as it’s taken so much stress away from us.
We send him to customer’s houses if they have a warranty claim and they think that’s incredible service.
I’m excited to see how our social media push for car buying will go and the fact AI is helping with the process is certainly good to see. It’s about time AI took some of the pressure off Joe and I.
You can watch our latest video diary at the top of this post. Weekly updates are published on Fridays at 8pm on our YouTube channel.
