Why our job has never been harder — and why we're not going anywhere

I started in this trade back in 1992. Thirty-odd years — group operations, used car director, and now running my own business day to day, living with every decision I make. I've been through recessions. A credit crunch. A pandemic that shut the doors overnight. Thirty-odd years in, and I'm still waiting for somebody to show me the easy bit they all promised was coming.

And I'll be honest with you. Right now is as hard as I can remember it.

Here's the thing people outside the trade don't get. It isn't one big problem you can point at and fix. It's a dozen smaller ones, all landing at once. Any one of them on its own, you manage. All of them together, week after week, is what wears you down.

Start with money, because it all starts with money. The base rate is still sat at 3.75%. A long way down from the peak, but a world away from the near-free money people got used to. When finance costs more, monthly payments go up, and the car a family could afford last year is suddenly out of reach this year. The customer hasn't changed. The maths has.

Then confidence. A car is a big buy, and for most people it's one they can put off. When the news is grim and money's tight, that's exactly what they do. They sit on their hands and wait. You can feel it on the forecourt.

And the news is grim. There are wars on. Whatever your politics, conflict abroad hits us right here — on fuel at the pump, on shipping costs, on the price and supply of parts, on the general sense that now isn't the time to be spending. People watch the headlines and keep their hand in their pocket. That's the mood we're selling into.

Then the competition. The Chinese brands aren't coming — they're here. BYD, Jaecoo, Omoda and the rest now make up better than one in ten new cars sold in this country, and they've overtaken the Japanese brands to do it. Sharp on price, loaded with kit, and backed by serious money. That's real pressure on every established name and every dealer trying to hold a margin.

Then the EV question, which has frozen half the market solid. People genuinely don't know what to buy. Petrol, hybrid, electric — nobody wants to make the wrong call. I get asked which way to jump ten times a day, and if I had a crystal ball that good I'd not be stood on a forecourt in Barnsley. And they've watched used electric values fall off a cliff, with the leasing firms saying they'll fall further still this year. So the buyer waits for the floor, and the dealer carries the stock and the risk while they do.

Then the finance scandal sat over all of it. The FCA's motor finance redress scheme is now confirmed — around £9.1 billion in total, across roughly 12 million agreements, at an average near £829 a customer. Rights and wrongs aside, the effect on the ground is the same. Lenders are twitchy, customers are wary of finance full stop, and a cloud hangs over a part of the business that used to be simple.

And I've not even got to the cost of actually running the place.

This is where it really bites, because it's the stuff nobody sees. Parts prices are, frankly, ridiculous. Electricity, fuel, business rates, insurance — all up, and none of it showing any sign of coming back down.

And then the wage bill, which the last couple of Budgets have gone after directly. Employer National Insurance is now 15%, and the point where we start paying it has dropped from £9,100 a head to £5,000. In plain money, that's the best part of £700 to £900 a year more for every single person on the payroll. We've got 14 of them. Do that sum. On top of it, the National Living Wage climbs again every April. And before anyone jumps on me — I'm all for people being paid properly, that's not the point. The point is every one of those rises lands on us, not the customer, because there's only so much you can pass on before you price yourself clean out of the job.

And here's the number that stops me in my tracks. I sat down and worked out what it actually costs to keep our doors open today against 2020 — the year we set this business up, six years ago, before any of this landed. The National Living Wage has gone from £8.72 an hour to £12.71 — nearly half as much again. Business energy has roughly doubled. Fuel's up about a third. Corporation tax has gone from 19% to 25%. Parts, up and up. And the interest on the £175,000 mortgage on our showroom has as good as doubled, because back in 2020 the base rate was 0.1% — today it's 3.75%. Add the lot together and the cost of simply existing as a business — before we've sold a single car or paid ourselves a penny — is up the best part of 40% in six years. Forty per cent. Let that sink in.

One small example sums the whole thing up. Asda Tyres. A customer buys their tyres cheap off a supermarket or online, then brings them to us to fit. We do it properly, safely, to standard. And when you actually do the sums — the ramp time, the labour, the disposal, the kit — fitting a tyre the customer bought somewhere else can genuinely cost us money. We still do it, because it's service and it's the right thing by the customer. We fit them with a smile, then go and have a quiet word with ourselves out the back. But you can't run a business for long on jobs that lose you money.

Then there's what's just happened with Skywell, and it tells you everything about this market.

We're a Skywell franchise partner. Good cars, and I've said before what a class act David Clark has been to work with. But their UK importer, Innovation Automotive, has just ceased trading — gone, effectively overnight, after eight years — reportedly citing a lack of the investment needed to compete in a market this brutal. The remaining stock got sold off. And now dealers and, more importantly, owners are left in limbo. People who bought a car in good faith are worried about their seven-year warranty, about parts, about servicing, about what their car's even worth now. Skywell are hunting for a new UK distributor and I hope they land one quickly. But sit with what that means for a second. The market out there is so hard it isn't just pressuring the dealers — it's taking down the importers above us. And when one falls, it's the dealer and the customer left holding it.

So yes. It's hard. Harder than I've known it.

But here's where I land, and I mean this. None of it is a reason to shrink back and wait it out. The opposite. When the market's this tough, the operators who keep doing more — who sweat the small stuff, who are straight with people, who do the job properly even when the maths is tight — are the ones still standing when it turns. And it always turns.

And there's something that matters to me more than any of it. I'm a South Yorkshire man, proud of it, and this business serves the community I come from. So when times get hard, that's exactly when we dig in on looking after our customers — not pull back from them. The people who buy from us are our neighbours. They see us in the town, down the shops, at the school gates. We're not here to shift a car and disappear. We're here to stand behind what we sell and be the people they can trust when everything else feels uncertain. That's not a marketing line. It's the whole reason we do it.

I didn't come into this trade in 1992 because it was easy. Neither did most of you. We came into it because we're built for exactly this kind of graft. Stubborn, most of us. It helps.

So I'll put it to the room. What's hitting you hardest right now — and more to the point, what are you doing about it? Drop it in the comments. I'd genuinely like to know.