Dealer Profile: Swansway Jaguar Crewe

The purpose-built Swansway Jaguar Crewe showroom opened its doors on 1 April following a £5.5m investment. The opening marked the premium brand’s return to Crewe after a long absence; a major coup for family-owned Swansway which happens to be based in the town.

The 10-car showroom boasts Jaguar’s latest corporate identity, has space to display 40 used cars and its ultra-modern workshop has six ramps. The site is located on the Crewe Green Roundabout which enables the business to promote itself to the thousands of motorists who drive past each day.

Heading up the business is Matthew Hill. He joined the group in October 2016 after 11 years with the Volkswagen Group working at a regional network level for both VW and Audi where he established a close working relationship with Swansway who represents both brands.

This is a brand new outlet in what was an open point – how do you build a customer base?The biggest challenge we had from a sales and service perspective was that we didn’t have a customer database. So the main task to the staff from the management team and the group marketing department has been to drive enquiries into the business. We’ve undertaken a number of initiatives in the local area aimed at driving awareness and ranging from digital marketing and product placements to sponsorships and charity events.

We have already seen an uplift in retail service bookings month-on-month, which is a positive, and our used car performance is growing nicely too. The initial months of a new dealership are always challenging, there is that big excitement of the opening and everyone comes in during the first few weeks, then
it settles down. But the overall linear graph shows that we are picking up month-on- month.

Swansway being such a well-known name in the area is a definite advantage when driving awareness, although we are not particularly seeing existing customers of the group in the centre – it’s mostly new business. There is an element of crossover but mostly we are picking up existing Jaguar customers that have been elsewhere and also brand-new business to the brand.

A new business requires a new team, how difficult has it been to recruit staff?The process of recruitment wasn’t as painful as perhaps we would have imagined. We have employed a good mix of people – some are existing and previous JLR staff, a couple of our Swansway staff transferred over and I’ve been able to employ some staff I knew from my Volkswagen Group days.

The team started work in mid-March and the first week was taken up with JLR brand inductions, followed by Swansway group inductions. This included the Swansway sales process and a history of the group provided by our director Peter Smyth, embedding the culture of what is Swansway, the ‘caring honest and proud’ strapline that we all live by.

With the rollout of desirable new products you must feel this is an ideal time to become a Jaguar dealer?
We are on the cusp. The new XF started it, then the XE and now the F-Pace which has produced fabulous results for us. The E-Pace is around the corner and then the electric I-Pace. While we will be selling a lot more SUVs than has been traditional for Jaguar, it makes no difference to the sales process, it’s simply about ensuring everyone is fully aware of the product. We are big believers in ongoing learning and development anyway.

We are seeing migration of XF owners into F-Pace, which we expected and the E-Pace will bring conquest opportunities alongside possible migration down from F-Pace and across from XE.

We expect the I-Pace, with its 300-mile electric range, to be game-changing territory. It will be a whole new ballgame, requiring training of both the sales team and the technicians, and new tooling.

Aftersales is the bedrock of any dealership. Do your efforts to build an aftersales parc extend to targeting owners of older Jaguars?
Yes. We are exponents of Jaguar’s J3Plus programme, which is a brand initiative aimed at older cars and we are getting the customers – we’ve already had a 15-year-old S-Type in for substantial work.

While we do compete with the independents we have quickly built a good relationship with those locally by supplying them with trade parts. I think there is room for both; an independent cannot offer the full package we do, but that package comes at more of a premium price.

How difficult is it to establish your used sales business?
We are in the process of finding our niche, though we are getting there. We have a good idea now of what kind of used product our customer base wants and we are tailoring our offering to meet those expectations. It’s an ongoing challenge to find good product to fill that demand; at any given time we would ideally have another six to 10 cars in stock around us, but getting the right cars can be challenging. Luckily we have access to Jaguar UK stock and former management cars. This is very helpful as not having an existing database we are
not yet generating our own quality part-exchanges.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a premium car dealer in today’s market?
The biggest challenge we are finding is that the market as a whole is becoming premium – the middle ground is becoming eroded. So every manufacturer has to demonstrate affordability with regard to the capital cost of the car. We are seeing a lot of Fords, Vauxhalls and French brands as part-exchanges. We need to demonstrate affordability in what is a very competitive market and maintaining residual values is key to that. The industry is target driven, it always has been and I don’t see anything that is going to alter that business model in the next few years.

How would you sum up progress so far and how do you see trading for the rest of the year?It has been positive so far. We have delivered results ahead of where we were looking to be, we’ve sold more cars than we thought we would and it continues to grow. It is a challenging environment but various KPIs are all going in the right direction .

I expect the rest of the year to produce a similar trading environment to now, I don’t foresee any drastic changes. We are getting a lot of customers coming into the business that previously would never have considered buying a Jaguar; this is due to the brand having a growing reputation and us having an impressive facility in such a prominent location.