INTERVIEW
James Batchelor chats to Peter Vardy about the future of car retailing with online transactions and teaching the next generation of leaders.
Peter Vardy CarStore in Dundee 14 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
With my really optimistic head on, we might perform the same as last year
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o one would deny coronavirus has had a devastating impact on the motor trade so far in 2020. Closed showrooms, mass redundancies and dealers having to adapt to new, often alien working practices have made for chunky column inches. But that’s not the case with Peter Vardy Ltd. Peter Vardy – the man with his name over the door of 20 new and used car showrooms across Scotland and the third generation of the Vardy dynasty that’s been so successful in motor retailing since the 1920s – has survived the worst of the coronavirus pandemic by concentrating on two things: looking after his workers and embracing the changing landscape of car retail. Part of the Vardy empire includes an end-to-end online retail platform called SilverBullet, but that aside, the business as a whole has really grabbed hold of the opportunities that online retailing presents and is making a big success of it. ‘If you’re into e-commerce at the minute and you can get your head around it, then it’s a really exciting place to be in,’ Vardy tells us in an exclusive video interview, available to watch in full on our website – see right. Exciting and also hugely profitable, too. Vardy says of all the used cars the business sold in August, 14 per cent were online and without any sales person intervening. ‘That’s a massive number,’ he says. ‘That doesn’t mean I need fewer sales people, it means we can sell more cars.’ Vardy says the business has employed more people during lockdown to capitalise on the opportunities brought about through online car sales, including 10 extra drivers to help with deliveries. That’s something that would be impressive in normal trading times, but even more so when other dealer groups are cutting jobs because of growing online car sales. ‘It’s not my intention to have software replace a sales adviser, especially not if I have good sales people,’ he explains. ‘Overall, our cost-of-sale reduction with software is selling us more cars. When you’re selling a car online, the finance penetration is higher, the add-on sales are higher and there’s no discounting. So, with those 14 per cent of deals being on a higher finance, with more add-ons and being made with no discounting, you can allocate your sales advisers to do other things. This saves you time. ‘If we digitalise our business properly, if we make our sales, service and part departments proper e-commerce departments, then our business is as safe as houses.’ With many big firms and dealers all grappling with the right way to run an online sales model, Peter Vardy is out there already doing it with a template that’s working, and he’s observed how the world of e-commerce is shaping up.
