Six years. But who’s counting.

By Jonathan, founder of anycolourcar.com.

In April 2020, I started cleaning cars on the drive of my house near Penistone. Six years on, we’re a team of fourteen across two sites in Barnsley. Here’s how that happened — and the one thing I’ve never compromised on along the way.

If you’d walked past my house near Penistone at some point in 2020, you’d have seen a man in his late forties cleaning a Volvo C30 on the drive. Foam on the bonnet, bucket on the floor, sponge in hand. There was no anycolourcar.com sign. No team. No website. Just one car, on one drive, during the strangest spring this country had seen in a generation.

Six years later, we’re a team of fourteen. We sell used cars across the country, we buy them directly from the public, we sell new electric vehicles as a Skywell franchise, and we run our own service centre. Two sites in Barnsley — a showroom where customers come, and Unit 1, where the rest of the operation happens.

I’m genuinely pleased with what we’ve achieved and incredibly proud of the team. But we’re not finished — we’re still on the journey, and the destination isn’t in sight yet. That’s exactly why I wanted to write this down.

I still don’t know if it’s working. I think this is just an endless journey.

Thirty-odd years in the trade.

I started cleaning cars when I was seventeen. Brand-new Citroens, in the 1990s. I spent the next twenty years working in car supermarkets, and ten years in main dealer networks — mostly Toyota. By 2020 I was in my twenty-eighth year in the retail motor trade.

And I was tired of it. Not tired of the work — I’ve never been afraid of work. Tired of the empty rhetoric. Every dealer in the country talks about putting the customer first. Almost none of them actually build a business that way. Commission structures push staff to sell what earns the most, not what suits the customer. Pricing games make every transaction feel adversarial. Service standards drop the moment a car leaves the forecourt.

I’d spent most of my career watching dealerships claim to put the customer first whilst structurally being incapable of doing it. And I’d always wanted to make my dad proud. He came from absolutely nothing and built a life through honest work. I’d always looked up to him. The trade I’d ended up in didn’t always reward the things he’d taught me to value.

Early 2020.

In early 2020 I’d been brought into another project — a car supermarket. The people I’d trusted with it were stringing me along. Promises made, decisions deferred, the rug pulled. I had two young daughters at home. Their futures depended on me getting this right.

Then in March the world stopped. For the first time in years, I had time to think. And I decided: I’m going to build the dealership I’d been waiting years for someone else to build. The one that does the things my dad would recognise as right.

Later that year, I sold my first retail car. A Volvo C30, to the neighbour’s son who was just learning to drive. I broke even on it — zero margin — because I wanted to make sure it was absolutely right for a teenager. Looking back, that was the entire business in one transaction. I just didn’t know it yet.

The first proper unit.

The drive worked, until it didn’t. Word got around. Friends were asking for cars, and people started asking if they could come and work with me. The cars stacked up. My neighbours were brilliant about it, but it was getting silly.

A supplier pointed out a showroom in Barnsley. We took it. The first showroom opened in February 2022, after a lot of delays and a mammoth refurbishment.

Worth saying — I didn’t plan to be a retailer. The original plan was trade-to-trade: buying cars from the public, selling them to other dealers, doing both with more honesty than the rest of the trade managed. Retail came from customers asking. They’d see a car go through, ring up and say “can I just buy that from you directly?” Eventually we said yes often enough that it became the main business.

That set the pattern for everything that followed. Every part of what we do today — the four pillars, the service centre, the no-commission rule — came from customers asking. Not from a strategy document.

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"The business didn’t become what I planned. It became what people asked for."

The mistake we made.

We quickly ran out of space. So we took on a second unit — a beaten-up industrial unit in Worsbrough, along with a compound on the same estate.

We were still having problems at the showroom. We wanted to valet our own cars to be sure we were happy with the quality, and the dealership was becoming too tight. So we decided to take a smaller, nicer unit on the same industrial estate, just for valeting. That was a mistake. We spent money making sure it was lit, heated and comfortable to work in. Then another tenant moved in opposite and made the unit difficult to work in. We had to adapt.

We moved out, having spent a small fortune. Then we refurbished the larger unit instead — plastered the walls, installed a false ceiling, a proper floor, good lighting, and created a decent kitchen and toilet area. That gave us room to valet, and room to manage the photography properly.

Why the photo unit mattered.

Most used cars are photographed badly. Outside, in available light, with the angles that flatter the car most. The trade gets away with this because most customers don’t look closely until they’re already at the dealer. I wanted the opposite — photography that shows every mark, every chip, every scratch, before anyone commits to anything. Same lighting in February as in July. Same standards on a Monday as on a Friday.

Once you photograph cars that honestly, the price has to match. There’s no room for haggling because every blemish is already factored in. “The price you see is the price you pay” stopped being a marketing line and started being a consequence of how we work.

Which is exactly how I’d been pricing cars since 1994.

Penistone.

We later took on another unit in Penistone — beautiful, well insulated and warm. The problem was simply the distance. Half an hour doesn’t sound like a long time, but in reality it was.

We took on more compound space at Worsbrough to try to help, but we had three issues building at once. I felt our arrangement with other garages to handle mechanical work was a real risk — if they closed or ran into difficulties, we were snookered. Profits were getting squeezed and the used car market more volatile. And the industrial estate itself was getting busier — at least once a week we’d lose access to the compounds for half a day, due to pallets, lorries and forklifts.

All of which pushed us, eventually, toward the answer that became Unit 1. But before we get there, the other thing that happened in those years was Skywell.

Why we sell Skywells.

In the 1980s, Barnsley had the biggest Lada dealership in the country. Most people don’t know that. I didn’t for years. But it tells you something specific about this part of the world: South Yorkshire likes good value. Not cheap — good value. A car that does the job, doesn’t pretend to be something it isn’t, and lasts. The Lada was that car in 1985. I think Skywell is that car now.

Getting a manufacturer franchise wasn’t straightforward. I chased Ora. I chased Jaecoo. I chased others. The mainstream Chinese brands were all being courted by bigger dealer groups, and an independent in Barnsley wasn’t at the top of anyone’s list. Skywell turned out to be the right partnership at the right time: electric, well-equipped, long warranty, accessible price. The same logic as the 1985 Lada, three decades on and battery-powered.

More importantly, Skywell let us say yes when customers asked about electric. I felt it was a whole new arm to the business. We could buy them used, sell them new, service them, and offer Care Packages on them. Same platform thinking, one more pillar. I’m also invested in our customers and the local area — I felt the franchise gave us a proper chance at life-cycle customers. Sales, service, sales.

Unit 1.

Our most recent move, and our most ambitious. For years, we’d been outsourcing servicing and repair work to other garages. It was fine when they had capacity. It wasn’t fine when they didn’t. Every time they got busy, our cars went to the back of the queue. We were running a business whose customer experience depended on people who had their own customers to prioritise, of course.

So we took on Unit 1 — a proper service centre with five ramps, three offices, a tool room and a customer waiting area we put serious money into. It also let us bring everything else under one roof: valeting, photography, storage, the Skywell service and warranty operation. The refurbished unit could go. The compounds could go. Penistone could go. One operational home, one team, one place.

We service any car, not just the ones we sold. MOTs, servicing, repairs, diagnostics. Open to the public.

There’s a longer reason for it too. In 1994, when I was selling Toyotas, I used to pick up customers’ cars when their service was due, take them in, run them back. I’d ring them when a new model came out. The whole life cycle, properly looked after. Most of the trade has lost that. Unit 1 is me, thirty years later, getting to do it the way it should always have been done — only this time the customers are ours.

"The sale isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting gun."

Where we are now.

Today, we’re fourteen people. That’s twelve, plus me and Louise — my partner in this business and outside it. I genuinely couldn’t do any of this without her. She takes care of the detail and she keeps me in check, both of which I need in roughly equal measure. We’ve made it through six years of pandemic, fuel crisis, cost of living, and what most people in the trade are calling the worst used car market this country’s seen in a generation.

We sell quality used vehicles online and from our Barnsley showroom. We buy cars directly from the public, with instant payment on collection. We sell new electric vehicles through our Skywell franchise. And we look after vehicles through our service centre at Unit 1, with Care Packages that give customers a fixed-price ownership experience for up to three years.

Nobody on our team earns commission. That’s not a marketing line — it’s how we’re structured. The whole business shares in success through a team-wide bonus tied to overall performance. Which means when a customer asks for advice, the advice is the advice. There’s no incentive to push the higher-margin car. The financial pressure that creates that behaviour at most dealers just doesn’t exist here.

And I should say something.

These last few years haven’t been simple, away from the business. I had a bad year with my own health in 2023. I lost my dad, John, in January 2026 after a long fight with cancer — he came from absolutely nothing and built a life through honest work, and I’ve always wanted to make him proud. He was quite honestly the best man I ever met. My mum is living with dementia, and we’re helping care for her at home. My eldest girl is in her first year of high school and absolutely smashing it. My youngest girl could probably run the business for us if she didn’t have to go to school. And Louise has been alongside me through every one of those years — the business and everything outside it. None of this would be standing without her.

Through all of it, this team has held the line on what we deliver to a customer. That isn’t down to me, we are also so lucky to have you, the reader of this supporting us and cheering us on - Thank you!

"We have never — ever — compromised on what we deliver to a customer."

What we want to be.

The brand line, if you can call it that, is “to be the one you call.” Whatever you need from a vehicle — buying it, selling it, switching it, fixing it, or just asking a question — we want to be the call you make. Not a dealer you used once. Not a service centre you Google when something goes wrong. The default.

It’s a bigger ambition than “buy your next car from us.” It’s the relationship most people already have with a good plumber or a trusted mechanic — scaled across the whole vehicle, for everyone who lives within reach of Barnsley. We’re six years into building that, and we’ve got a long way left.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. The next call doesn’t have to be about buying anything. It can be a question. It can be “what would you do if you were me?” It can be “is this worth fixing?” Whatever it is, I’d be glad to be the one you call.

-Jonathan