March 2021

Being the best Looking to the future, Ian was very specific about where he wants to go from here: “Nowhere,” he declared, with a little chuckle. “I want to stay exactly as I am, doing exactly what I am doing. I made the decision a number of years ago that I didn’t want to expand any further, I didn’t want that extra commitment, I didn’t want the stress, and I know that people say, and all the business development plans say that if you’ve got all the right processes in place and all the right people in place, things should run smoothly. Yes, it does, but there is still a level of stress there that I didn’t want. I made the decision, based on the fact that I am doing pretty well out of this. I am quite happy where I am, let’s just stay where we are. Of course, staying right where you are is more complex than you might think, as ‘here’ is a relative term when you are talking about cars: “Obviously we are investing in the future,” he clarified. “We do ADAS, we have done for a number of years, we are investing in all the latest equipment we need to have so we are keeping up in that respect.” So, it is a case of refining what you’ve got and getting it to the pinnacle of where it can be we asked: “We just want to focus on what we can deliver to our customers and be the best that we possibly can. That’s just where I want to be.” In conclusion, he added: “I’ve got no plans to expand, no plans to do anything else. I just want to be the best VAG expert I can be.” MARCH 2021 AFTERMARKET 41 www.aftermarketonline.net to touch them.” It comes back to the discipline of being a specialist, which when considering vehicles outside of your specialism, Ian summed it up. “If it’s not VAG group, we don’t know, and we don’t want to know.” Ian is VAG through-and-through: “I did my apprenticeship on VW and Audi, which goes back to the original Quattro back in the 1980s. That tells you how old I am! I left the trade for a couple of years, came back to it, ended up working with a guy that was doing Lotus. I spent quite a few years doing that, but in the end I had enough of Lotus. They were so much trouble. The Esprit is a good example; Having to bend over or lie over the top of an engine, with your hands down the front of it for the cambelt. I just felt this was not my idea of fun anymore. That’s when I started going back to what I knew, and what I had originally trained on. “In the beginning I was on my own. Now 30-odd years later there are five of us in total, and we have got a much nicer building than what I started with, which was a shed on a farm. We’ve got a purpose-built garage which was built about five years ago, and 95% of what we do is VAG.” He had summed up their aims quite succinctly. Is it important we asked, being that focused? “It all stems back to knowing your product incredibly well, so you can give exceptionally good service and value to your customer. From a business point of view, it all helps with the efficiency of the workshop. I don’t want guys spending three hours trying to figure something out that somebody down the road might take an hour to do.” Marketing Speaking of succinct, the team at CT Cars know their customers very well too: “A lot of the marketing is done for 25-60-year olds with money. We are not in the business of trying to compete fitting discount car parts. We diagnose correctly, and we fit the right parts, and the car does not come back. We’ve had it so many times; ‘So-and-so down the road can do it cheaper’, that’s fine, be my guest and go down the road. We are not in that competition market. We are in a very affluent area, and all of my marketing is aimed at people who want their cars fixed a certain way. They want it done correctly, they want them diagnosed correctly, and they don’t mind spending a little bit of money to get an exceptional service and exceptional quality of workmanship.” Top Garage With their focus, CT Cars made the Top Garage final in 2019, and the business is doing it again for 2021. We asked Ian about their Top Garage experience: “We definitely learned from it,” he said. “The main thing about doing it is trying to win it, and getting the publicity from it, and getting more customers to try and realise just how fantastic you are. “We put up the certificate from 2019 in our workshop, that says we were a finalist within it. We have used that for some good marketing as well.” I want to stay exactly as I am, doing exactly what I am doing ” Follow us on facebook.