JB: What are the negatives of having a single brand partner?

BG: Ford can’t hit the bullseye with every product. We had a great time launching the new Fiesta – a perfect car, with perfect timing at a perfect price. But the new Focus last year was a challenge.

JB: Why?

BG: Too many of them to sell and pricing was a factor. In the interim Ford had put the prices up six or seven times. And it isn’t radical enough.

So you don’t have a constant state of perfection. It’s like a sports team: always changing, thinking about how they can get to the next level and Ford is good at that, most of the product it has and is coming is really good.

JB: What factors have characterised Q1 2012?

BG: If you’d asked me this at the beginning of January, I was worried about what was going to happen. We had a lot of overage stock, there was a change in senior management at Ford, the ‘feel good’ factor didn’t exist.

There was a whole pile of different things which were interconnected, giving me cause for concern. But the first quarter has been very good.

I really don’t know why and that worries me, because I’d like to think I’m pretty close to the market. We do fleet, but my business is focused on retail and that’s dependent on the ‘feel good’ factor and consumer activity.

Now I might say consumers felt comfortable about their jobs; banks were suggesting they could sense consumers wanted to spend their savings.

So March in particular was a joy. If I analyse it further, I’ll need therapy.

JB: What were your numbers in terms of Q1 2012 compared to 2011?

BG: March last year was the biggest individual March we’ve had – we’re not going to end up doing the same as that.

Our expectation is that we will be down and the reason why we won’t do as well as last year is because the incentive money on the table for us was a super cash booster.

The super category bonuses weren’t available to us this year, so we will be down in the P&L stakes by about 10%.

March will still be a profitable month and put us ahead of our expectations for the full year.

Our profit before tax last year was £1.6 million. This year’s budget is less.

JB: Our data and insight business AMi shows you hit a financial black hole in 2006 when profit per site slumped to £176,125 and gearing got as high as 72% in 2007. Now you’re at £460,286 and 38.5%. What happened?

BG: We had a significant write-off then. We had to tear the carpets up, look inside everything we did, reconfigure the business, and survive long enough to get the good times back again. So, we re-engineered ourselves.

We revisited the market places we were in. We had one site that was not contributing and we had other things we had to do in terms of our businesses that we wanted to get better

Ford said: “what are your plans, anything you need from us?” I said no, just stick with me.