Just before the close of 2023, AM deputy editor Aimée Turner caught up with three AM100 dealer group leaders – Jason Cranswick (JC), chief operating officer of Marubeni Auto UK, which owns Norton Way Motors, RRG Group and HPL Motors; Chris Clark (CC), managing director of John Clark Motor Group; and Robert Forrester (RF), chief executive of Vertu Motors – to discover what are the opportunities of 2024 and what were the challenges of 2023.

How was your group’s trading performance in 2023?

JC: FY23 has brought back into question whether businesses are “management-driven” or “market driven”. Looking back to the past two years, for sure, the market has helped the automotive retail sector have a good run. In this financial year we have focused on making really good management decisions and finding countermeasures to the pressures of inflation, changes in consumer confidence and movements in vehicle supply. We are confident the actions we are taking will mean that our business will once again produce good shareholder value and material profitability.

CC: We’ve had a really good year so far. Q1 and Q2 were broadly in line with last year despite there being ongoing new car supply issues and used stock constraints. We’ve been able to drive the quality of business we are writing and safeguard our sales margins and F&I performance.That said, Q3 has been more challenging and I don’t think that’s going to change as we progress through the final quarter.

RF: We’ve just done interims for the six months ending August which were well received by shareholders – our second strongest first half profit, at £31.5 million, on the back of better supply of new cars, strong margins in pretty well every sector and a consistently strong aftersales performance, particularly from much stronger margins in our accident and repair centres.At the start of the year, my biggest objective was to significantly increase the number of technicians we have in the service department. We increased them from March to the end of August by 54 – having started with 843 – so that’s quite a significant increase.We haven’t probably yet seen the full benefit as that will come through the second half.