INTERVIEW
‘New car supply problems? The best thing for the motor retail sector in 50 years!’ Vertu Motors CEO Robert Forrester wasn’t exactly backward in coming forward during an in-depth chat with James Batchelor.
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t goes without saying that to be the chief executive of a successful and hugely respected dealer group, you have to be tenacious. Being outspoken and forthright aren’t a prerequisite, but that’s exactly how you could describe Robert Forrester. The 50-year-old chief executive of Vertu Motors plc – a company that includes the illustrious Bristol Street Motors business – has character with a capital ‘C’. ‘I’m fairly outspoken on this subject, but you have to give customers what they want,’ says Forrester. He’s speaking to me on the day when Vertu has issued a stunning interim trading update with record profits for the first half of 2021 (see panel), and the talk has turned to Cazoo, the purely online used car retailer. ‘I was listening to the radio this morning and I heard a Cazoo advert. They are clearly spending millions and millions and millions of pounds. I mean, you could almost name the football club they aren’t sponsoring and it would be a lot easier. ‘However, when you look at the economic reality, we have a conversion ratio in car sales of about 30 per cent – so we convert about 30 per cent of inquiries. Online e-commerce – these are their numbers and actually mirror our numbers – has a conversion ratio of point eight of one per cent. ‘So, if you go and spend millions on marketing and you get 100 customers at the top of the funnel, you will sell not one car – because you can’t sell point eight of a car, actually, so broadly let’s call it one. Now, you’ve got to spend a lot of money to sell one car. And that doesn’t look like a good business model to me.’ He adds: ‘I think we’re pretty good at pure online retailing. We’ve sold 681 out of 50,000 used cars. There is no point [Cazoo] having dealerships dotted around the country if they don’t like people to visit them and do test drives – that’s what the customers want. You can go down this online route all your life, but the bottom line is you’ve got to give what the customer wants. Customers want a test drive, particularly with a change of powertrain like electric cars. ‘I think the world’s going to be quite interesting, because I think we’ll see a complete conversion of the online experience and the offline experience – and we will make that completely transparent. ‘But I think you’ll see the online operators becoming exactly the same as bricks and clicks, test drives, you know – online/offline. I think it’s going to be very interesting – sit on 06 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
VERTU MOTORS Position: 2019 turnover: 2019 EBITDA: ROS:
6th £3bn £40.7m 0.6%
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