As we stroll through the vast parking area at Northside's Doncaster site, Tim Ward, the firm's managing director, tuts loudly and stoops to the floor to pick up a piece of litter. "My ambition is that one day everyone at the company will do this," he says. "Then I'll know they love this place as much as I do."
Ward has been involved with the Mercedes-Benz dealership – crowned Dealer of the Year in the 2007 Motor Transport Awards – for a little over two and a half years
now and still brims with enthusiasm for the business.
The firm, Northside Truck and Van, trades across four sites in Yorkshire: Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and the flagship premises in Doncaster. Ward has overseen major changes at the business including a £6m investment in the physical dealerships, which included refurbishment of the premises in Bradford and Sheffield (£750,000 worth of work at Leeds is just about to start) and an entirely new building in Doncaster and a large-scale investment in expanding the firm's parts holding.
The Doncaster showroom is kitted out in stainless steel and glass and looks, save for the vans and trucks that surround it, more like a car showroom than one selling CVs. It's also in sharp contrast to its surroundings, which are still very much the old heavy industries that Doncaster grew up on: it's towered over by the brick chimney of the steel plant next door, just up the road is a massive wire mill, and the site itself
used to be a steel works.
However, 30 seconds up the road and 'new' Doncaster is springing out of the rusting wreckage of the old. Funded by the EU, there are a number of new distribution centres (DCs) standing empty on the edge of town – and the likes of Ikea and MFI already have DCs in the area – and Ward sees the opportunity there: "I'd like to know who's taking them on," he says "and then I get to be first in. I'd love to see Mercedes trucks outside them."
Ward has transport in his blood – his father ran George Ward Haulage in Leeds before that went bust during the recession of the early 1980s. However, it had provided Ward with a grounding in the industry as he worked as a mechanic there.
Once it had gone under, he moved on to work for Mercedes-Benz at a dealership in Leeds, curiously on the same site that Northside now operates from. Although he started out as a mechanic, he moved through the ranks and ended up as dealer principal.
A stint running a car dealership followed, where he met his current business partner and Northside co-director Fergus Leitch, before heading off to run Scania dealership Union Trucks in the North East. Involvement with several more Scania dealerships followed, with Ward eventually ending up working directly for the truck maker as aftersales director, responsible for 40 of Scania's wholly owned dealerships.
"After a year or 18 months of doing that, I thought to myself that [Fergus and I] should be doing that ourselves," he says. After some time spent searching for the right dealership, another business partner was recruited, along with financing (its parent company is a Scottish haulier and property firm), and eventually they bought what was to become Northside.
However, given Ward's previous employment, it's perhaps a surprise that the product line-up is German rather than Swedish. He explains: "When I was working for Scania I felt that the manufacturer that had the product range and the right product was Mercedes. I wanted to represent a top marque and I had Mercedes history previously, which helped, so when I was looking round it was an obvious choice.
"We did look at some other opportunities with them, but this is my home area so it was fortuitous that this came up for sale - it was the product range we wanted in an area where I knew the customer base."
Ward says after the acquisition they sat back and watched the company for two to three months before making wholesale changes to the management team. "That was really the catalyst for taking things forward. It was about making people responsible and giving them ownership and making them feel like they were there to manage," he says.
"Sometimes that's the problem with large companies – you become more like a number and work by procedure. You have got to be flexible – of course we have procedures and all the normal structures, but we give managers the flexibility to work on their own initiative."
He says that he wants Northside's employees to feel as much a part of the business as possible. "I've been a mechanic and I know what it's like to be treated like a mushroom and I don't want to inflict that on other people," he says. Ward and his management team now make two presentations each year to staff: "I don't want anybody to be able to say 'No-one's told me that,'" he says.
When he started, he went round each depot and promised to keep coming back. "I could see people saying 'Oh yeah', but I kept my word. I think people realised pretty quickly that we were different to what they'd been used to." It's a view reflected by his senior staff.
Leigh Margel is group van sales manager and has been with the dealer for more than a decade. He says: "I've been here 13 years and through four different owners. My view, and that of those that have stayed with us, is that we can't believe how much the place has changed for the better. It's mostly down to improved communication.
"I remember a comment from the receptionist at Sheffield a couple of years ago when someone I'd previously worked with walked in with Tim. He said 'good morning' to the receptionist and she said to me 'that's the first time he's spoken to me in years'. That summed it up for me."
However, staff issues weren't the only problems at the firm – sales were also pretty flat. As Ward notes as he displays the firm's historic sales graph: "When I first ran that graph, I thought 'Shit – what have we bought?'" But it's a different story now: Northside is, Ward believes, one of the top three Mercedes truck dealerships in the UK. It delivered around 400 units last year and will do 630 this year.
It's also the number one Mercedes dealer for vans, selling 2,200 last year and was the first Mercedes dealer to break the 2,000 barrier. It also does a brisk trade on the used van side, shifting more than 300 in January and February this year.
The revamped premises will have made a significant difference, with customer satisfaction surveys reflecting the money spent. Margel adds: "Last year it was highest in Sheffield and Doncaster – it tended to reflect the facilities, we could have guessed which would come out on top." Understandably perhaps, Leeds was bottom: "Leeds was slightly behind the other three [sites], but money is to be spent there in the next few months," says Ward.
Although the investment is clearly paying off, Margel believes that internal changes to its aftersales service have also changed the way the company is perceived. He explains: "There was no focus on aftersales – no-one understood how important it is, so there was no leadership and it just bumbled along."
Northside helped to supply Macfarlane Transport Holdings with new vehicles when it underwent a major refleeting and Margel thinks that would never have happened under the old regime: "I can tell you that Macfarlane would not have bought from us three years ago because our aftersales were not up to it," he adds.
As well as recruiting new customers, Northside has also concentrated on retaining its existing ones: "Just as important is customer retention – we have focused on stopping them leaving in the first place," notes Ward. Once the refurbishment work is completed at Leeds, Northside will then turn its attention to opening a fifth site in the distribution hotspot of Normanton, West Yorkshire. Ward says he'd prefer it to be another Mercedes site, but wouldn't rule out looking at other marques.
The firm has also started a van rental company and while it only runs 38 vehicles at present, "it's an area for expansion", says Ward. On the financial side, it's also a healthy story: accounts for 2007 show profit of £1.65m, up from £1.59m, with a target of another 15% growth this year.
As you might expect, Ward has a cheerful outlook: "I'm very positive. The best comment I had was from a customer. He said the difference between the business now and how it used to be is that now everybody cares. It's probably as nice a comment as I could have had."
If continued success means carrying on picking up litter, then he's happy to, even if the concept required some elaboration higher up the food chain. Ward explains that he was sat next to the president of Daimler UK at a Daimler dinner when he outlined his litter-picking ambition: "He looked at me like I'd gone mad – but when I explained, he knew what I was driving at," he adds.
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