Terry Finds Top Gear on the Web
Sarah Walters
MAYBE it's a myth, but the archetypal car dealership is surely a forecourt of
shiny vehicles bustling with eager salesmen keen to give potential buyers the
`hard sell'.
Walking into the busy dealership of New Car Discount, it is striking that not a car
or sales person is in sight. Instead, the Ashton-under-Lyne based company trades
solely online, keeps its sales staff in a hub on the first floor and locks away its
cars in a storage unit at the back of the building.
NCD's story began four years ago when Openshaw-born Terry and his colleague David
Schofield decided to leave the car dealership they had worked at for eight years
to sell cut-price cars online. The idea was already popular in the States but remained
an alien concept in the UK.
Four years on, and the idea of splashing out £15,000 for a car at the click
of a virtual button still seems a little scary. Yet, Terry sells around 2,000 cars
a year. He admits, though, that most people aren't ready to buy a vehicle in the
same way they pick up the weekly groceries or the latest chart CD.
"People still aren't ready to press the button and buy the car there and then,
they want to talk to somebody and there is still an element of touchy-feely. Buyers
e-mail us, we send them a quotation and a few days later, we'll ring them up."
Terry, now 35-years old and sharply dressed, earned his thick business skin the hard
way. The son of a tradesman and a legal secretary, he left grammar school at 16 and
went on to study three A-Levels.
College
"I wasn't convinced what I wanted to do with my
life or that I wanted to go to university. I couldn't say I was one of those
lucky people who knew from the age of five that I wanted to be a professional
footballer or astronaut. I knew I could be successful in whatever I decided to
do, so I left college and went into the world of work.
"I started as a management trainee for H.Samuel jewellers and became a manager
at 19 - I was the youngest manager in the company. And then Gerald Ratner made
his famous comments about one of his products being `crap' and the business nose-dived,
along with my career."
After a few stop-gap jobs, Terry found his way into the car industry when he
was 25 - something he works out by remembering which registration plate letter
was in use in the year he joined! He worked for Smith Knight Fay and Dixon Motor
Holdings before deciding to have a go himself.
"I saw an opportunity basically. People like Jam Jar has been the pioneers,
they had spent millions of pounds on advertising and introduced the idea that
people could buy cars on the Internet.
"My boss told me the Internet was finished because it was just as the dot-com
bust was coming," says Terry, who remains defiant that the decision was
taken at the right time, even if it was a bit of a gamble.
"I thought, `you might think that's a bad time to start but actually it's
the ideal time to start because the competition will be scared and won't be looking
to invest'.
"The initial investment to start up was up £60,000-£80,000 and
we've put in a further £200,000 since. This year, we've turned over £20m
and we'll increase that a little next year, but we're concentrating on reviewing
the business services." NCD is certainly at the dawn of a new era. With bolt-on
services planned in insurance, car hire, travel and loans, NCD is becoming a motoring
portal. "We're launching five websites this month.
The core business is fine, but if people stop buying cars then we need other
strings to our bow."
Control
And the other key market for NCD is women. The best lesson Terry took from
his days in the dealerships was to sell to the woman "because they control
everything".
But, the website has failed to attract female customers in the volumes Terry
hoped and so the company is working on a strategy to reverse this trend, including
a NCD `sister' site.
Surprisingly though, Terry is as vocal about his desire to retire to Italy at
45 as he is about his firm.
And yet, even an hour in Terry's company leads me to wonder how he'll manage
to take a back seat. He freely admits to scribbling down midnight moments of
clarity and his pot is bubbling with career ideas, including becoming a free-kick
coach for soccer hopefuls.
But, he's decided to make his fortune first and is considering floating NCD in
the near future. "Probably my best and worst aspect is that I'm extremely
competitive, I always want to win. I stay ahead of my competitors because I really
want to beat them, but it also makes me a bit of a pain at work because I want
everything done perfectly."
Hardly the sentiments of a man considering slowing down. "I do like to
spend a lot of time with my family, my wife Joanne and two children, who are
five and one. My family are growing up and I don't want to be in the office.
"But we're still a growing company. There'll be over a million people using
our site next year - that's a large portion of the UK population, and I'm just a
guy in an office in Ashton-under-Lyne with 20 staff without the resources of a £1bn-turnover
dealership.
"It just goes to show what you can do."
