In Spring 2010, Adrian Crew of Drive Assist Direct, asked me to review one of the businesses that he has responsibility for – Nottingham AutoPark.

Adrian and I have a long history – we worked together at Carnell Motor Group, and my company had supported another business unit under his control within Drive Assist – the wholesale division - where we have carried out one to one telephone coaching over a sustained period of time.

Nottingham AutoPark had seen a decline in performance, and the motivation of the team was suffering.

I started my review by ensuring that we fully understood the customer experience. I find the best way to understand how any business actually runs is to see this through the customers' eyes.

It's fine for people inside the company to say 'we do this and that' – but the real proof of the pudding is knowing what the customer experiences.

So, we carried out a series of physical, telephone and internet mystery shops – these were not only useful in helping us to make recommendations about business improvement, but they were also critically important when we were giving the team one to one feedback.

Adrian comments "Elaine has a thoroughly professional and intuitive approach to analysing your business as your customers see it"

I then designed a training needs analysis process based on the mystery shop results and one of my team spent half a day with each member of the sales team and with the two managers to assess their needs.

By June 2010, we had conducted all of the analysis and research and I was in a position to meet up with Adrian to present my recommendations, which centred on 3 key aspects of the business:

1. Display and Branding
2. Processes
3. Training

Despite difficult overall trading conditions in the sector – and when most business leaders looked at reducing every cost possible - Adrian committed to implementing all of the initiatives we discussed and invested wisely in the future of both the business and the team.

Initially I worked intensively with the team – one day per week. Then, as the initiatives were embedded, I withdrew to a once per month support level.

Look what we achieved > >

In September 2011, Motor Trader Magazine reviewed the top 75 UK Independent Dealers. It reported that as a whole the sector faced a 'unit drop in combined sales volume'.

In the same survey, Nottingham AutoPark came top in the category 'Top 10 improvers by sales volumes'.

Click here to read Motor Trader's "Top 75 Independent Dealers" article, or here to read Motor Trader's "Top 10 Improvers" article.

"By seeing what needed to be done to improve our performance and attitude we are now ranking number one in the most improved car sales in this highly competitive retail market" Derek Webb, General Sales Manager.

As Motor Trader magazine commented "In terms of Top 10 improvers by sales volumes Nottingham AutoPark did outstandingly well considering its' size to increase units sold by 20.7%"