Driven man who is happy to follow in father's tyre tracks
SMELLS of fresh coffee from the onsite café and the twang of pop band Busted waft through the Peter Vardy BMW dealership in Edinburgh. Gone are the days of oil stains on the carpet and a man in a dodgy tie trying to sell you a used maroon 3-series.
"I'm always trying to picture what the next generation of dealership will look like," says Vardy.
"I'm drawing up plans to get rid of the sales desks – people don't want to be bartering with a salesman. The days of transactional selling are over, it's all about the experience now."
The sales "experience" is a key theme for Vardy, 31, who was educated at Loretto, the private school in Musselburgh, and studied marketing at Strathclyde University before joining the family business. He now takes his inspiration not from his competitors but from shops such as the Apple store in Glasgow. He wants touch panel screens on the wall, where customers and staff can look over car specifications together.
He also takes inspiration from the giant supermarket chains, especially when it comes to buying stock, negotiating "aggressive" deals with manufacturers to bulk buy cars from their recession-fuelled stockpiles. "It's not necessarily our buying power but more being 'cute' with your buying," says Vardy.
His strategy seems to be paying off: sales at Vardy's three Vauxhall dealerships – in Motherwell, Perth and Kirkcaldy – are up 35 per cent year on year... To read the remainder of the article please click here to visit the official Scotsman website