Why I'm so excited...

It’s been about a month since Motors.co.uk joined the Manheim family, and life has certainly been busy.  Now that I’m trapped on a long train journey, I wanted to take the opportunity to express how and why I’m so freaking excited about the future.

My appetite has been particularly satiated having watched physical auctions at the Leeds site over the last 2 days.  It really brought home the vision of integrating Motors.co.uk into the Manheim product set and the opportunity to create something unique for the UK automotive industry.

There are a number of work streams underway to identify and prioritise the development opportunities available to us – we are in a lucky position to have a large number of ways to build value together, but the trick to the success of the acquisition will be addressing the points in the right order.

We have a self-fulfilling path to success.  At a high level it’s not particularly complicated (or secret) and here’s how I see it:

• Integration with Manheim can help increase exposure of  Motors.co.uk in the dealer community
• A site with more advertising dealers creates a bigger pot for investment in building audience, which will build response for advertising dealers
• More response means more sales for our dealers
• Increased audience means better data that Motors and Manheim can use to help inform our customers about stock and pricing
• Enormous number of product development possibilities for reporting, transferring data, unifying systems that either significantly reduce dealer effort or improve ability to understand business performance
• Greater profits for our dealers .  QED

It is easy to ask “so what is the vision?” but the reality is that this hasn’t changed for either business - helping dealers to maximise profitability.  This was the driving force before the acquisition, but united we have many more tools to execute this.  As such, much of life is business as usual as we pick off the opportunities one-by-one.

From a Motors.co.uk perspective, the overriding theme of conversations is how we can make the site as efficient as possible in generating valuable response for advertising dealers.  This has two enormously exciting strands: 1) optimising the consumer journey on the site (making the site as enjoyable to use as possible) and 2) developing further products (or integrating existing products) to provide dealers with the tools to improve their business.

The vision also fits with AutoExposure and CAS whose products have a great fit, providing further depth to Manheim's product portfolio as well an opportunity to link systems and provide packages of enormous value to dealers.  Each of these businesses have products that are smarter than the average bear, and they're about to get smarter.

At this stage, I appreciate that this sounds like brown-nosing, non-descript, management guru waffle – but trust me it will become real.  Watching the cars line up in the lanes at Leeds, the above is clear, obvious and kid in a sweet shop exciting! 

ps - for insight into another team that are handling an exciting acquisition, have a look at Felix's blog on the EvenBase acquisition of Job Rapido.  Like the Motors/Manheim tie-up, I know that there is no way of ever conveying the amount of work (performed by many good friends of mine too) that will have been undertaken to complete the deal.  Good luck chaps!