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The family-run Ancaster Group has been a mainstay of the local south London community since it was established in 1949 by Harold Cole, father of current chairman Robert Cole. Launched as a garage to repair and restore trucks it opened its first franchised site in Croydon in 1956 when it started selling Standard Triumph.
In 1972 it was one of the first dealers to represent Datsun, making it one of Nissan’s longest serving partners. It now operates six Nissan sites across south London and also represents Hyundai and the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles brands.
Overseeing this significant progress across Ancaster has been Stephen Wood, group managing director for the past 14 years, and also currently president of Nissan’s European dealer council, having previously chaired the UK equivalent.
The group employs around 280 staff and is rated 113 in the Motor Trader Top 200. Last year its Penge Nissan site won the coveted Franchised Dealership of the Year Award.
As the group expands how do you ensure consistently high levels of customer service are delivered across the business?
We have been in south London over 65 years, we have very well-known brands that benefit from high levels of customer retention. This has been achieved through providing a friendly and professional service, which is consistently applied across the group. The directors have a meeting every Monday to discuss the performance of the business, we talk to our sales and aftersales brand managers, we regularly have review meetings and we constantly visit the sites.
Staff are the key to our success and it goes right back to the recruitment process – every new member of staff goes through a thorough induction with our HR team to receive all the training they need and to ensure they can become valued and successful members of the team. It is vital they understand our ethos which is about being friendly while offering a very professional service, in a prompt and efficient way.
We spend a lot of time talking to our staff and understanding their concerns. As a dealer in Greater London we have somewhat different issues to other businesses. Our sites are tight with very limited parking for example, so we work very hard to give our staff the best possible facilities and resources to do the job, which encourages them to provide customers with the service they want.
As part of this we’ve focused on taking non customer-facing staff out of our dealerships to free up space. In early 2016 we moved our head office team out of the Penge dealership to new offices and we are currently acquiring a centralised facility where cars can be stored, prepared and valeted, and then delivered to the sales sites for customer handover.
All this allows the dealerships to focus on their touch-points with the customers, which is key to ensuring they are dealt with in a friendly and professional way.
Is staff recruitment and retention more difficult in such a competitive area as Greater London?
I’m very proud of the loyal and dedicated team we have at Ancaster. We now employ around 280 staff and 70 of them have worked for us for more than
10 years. Our customers like to see a familiar face, as this gives them confidence as to the level of service they will receive. When we do recruit it is tough due to the many alternatives available in London. The motor trade offers fantastic career opportunities but as an industry I feel sometimes we are not that good at promoting ourselves.
It’s a twenty-first century business – you must be very good at IT whether you are in customer or non-customer facing, sales floor, technician or support functions. You have to be very positive in the way you interact with customers. It’s a very fast-moving industry and you must be ready and willing to react quickly to the changing marketplace.
Ancaster has been around a long time, we are well known and respected in south London and that makes a difference. A familiar name helps when people are deciding on their career, and we can bring them into our business and grow them with us. We spend a lot of time working with the local community to enable people to see that message and understand the type of business we are.
When someone joins Ancaster we provide them with the history of the company and also of our directors, to demonstrate the potential opportunities open to them. And we also offer our staff a bonus for recommending new recruits, which encourages word-of-mouth promotion of the industry and is good for all concerned. Retention of such recruits works very well because they better understand the business they are coming into.
How was Q1 for Ancaster and do you expect Q2 to be more challenging?
We had a very successful Q1 across all of our brands and all departments, but it definitely felt tougher than in previous years, not helped by our sites being more congested than in previous quarters. This was partly down to our success in renewing customers and having a lot of retail part-exchanges arrive on site, but also due to levels of new car stock we are being obliged to take at present by some of the manufacturers. Despite these headwinds the hard work and dedication of our teams resulted in us achieving our best-ever quarter-one result.
The market has definitely cooled in Q2. There is always some pull-forward from April into March every year, but this year it was more pronounced by such factors as manufacturers pushing Q1 sales to achieve numbers, and the VED changes. The Easter break in early April also exacerbated the contrast between Q1 and Q2.
I expect May and June to pick up as we move to a customer buying cycle not affected by March, and I’m still confident we will have a good 2017. The market is cooling slightly and there does need to be a level of realism from manufacturers with their targeting.
Having said that we do have excellent working relationships with all our manufacturers, which I think is key to success, we are all working towards a common goal.
Is there scope for further expansion at Ancaster?
Yes, we are always looking for opportunities. We are very well placed within the Greater London environment – eight of our nine dealerships are within the M25, giving us a huge presence. If we can add other opportunities within our area of influence, we are keen to do that.
We would look at brands outside those we already represent on a case-by-case basis. But any expansion would be in a structured way that enables us to keep the Ancaster DNA through the entire business.
