James Hopkins: Motivated by a need to catch up, James achieved career success. He shares the impact that had on his family and relationships.

James has spent his last 23 years in the automotive industry in a variety of increasingly senior roles with OEMs, and a global Leasing company, both in the UK and European roles, moving overseas with his family twice. For the last 6 years he has been with Constellation Automotive Group, in a variety of MD roles, running the Fleet Solutions and Retail Operations businesses. His last 3 years have been focused on online used car retailing, supporting both cinch & Cazoo in the physical operational delivery of the online consumer experience. 

In our conversation, as well as covering his professional journey, we talk about how his career choices have impacted on his family and relationships. It's clear that taking opportunities outside of his comfort zone has helped him develop a wide experience base and skillset across the entire automotive supply chain. 

Without spoiling it for you, I will say that James's story features some dramatic plot twists and I'm grateful to him for sharing his experiences so openly. I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. 

You can contact James via LinkedIn or email: kendalloneltd@outlook.com 

If you enjoy listening to my guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app.  

Instagram @careerviewmirror  

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Episode recorded on 11 and 17 November, 2022

Transcript

James Hopkins: 0:00

I can remember being lectured to by the area manager for Preston that this would never work. Why would people look online for houses? That's absolutely ridiculous.

Aquilae: 0:11

Welcome to Career-view Mirror the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers to share insights to help you with your own journey. Here's your host, Andy Follows

Andy: 0:43

Hello, listeners, Andy here. Thank you for tuning in. In this episode, we're celebrating the career to date of James Hopkins. James has spent his last 23 years in the automotive industry in a variety of increasingly senior roles with OEMs and a global leasing company both in the UK and European roles, moving overseas with his family twice. For the last six years he's been with Constellation Automotive Group in a variety of MD roles, running the fleet solutions and retail operations businesses. His last three years have been focused on the online used car retailing space supporting both Cinch and Kazoo in the physical operational delivery of the online consumer experience. In our conversation as well as covering his professional journey, we talk about how his career choices have impacted on his family and relationships. It's clear that taking opportunities outside of his comfort zone has helped him develop a wide experience base and skill set across the entire automotive supply chain. Without spoiling it for you, I will say that James's story features some dramatic plot twists, and I'm grateful to him for sharing his experiences so openly. I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. If you enjoy listening to my guest stories, please could you do me a favour and click the Follow button in the app that you use to listen to podcasts. This helps our podcast grow so that we can continue to share the wealth of experience that our guests have amassed during their careers so far. Hello, James, and welcome. And where are you coming to us from today?

James Hopkins: 2:17

Good morning, Andy. I'm coming to you from a little town in Kent called West Malling. And I live on a modern housing estate that used to be the last grass airfield in England, West Malling airfield.

Andy: 2:34

And so southeast England, the garden of England is that what Kent's known as, have I got that right?

James Hopkins: 2:40

Allegedly so yes, within a mile of my house, we have apple orchards and hop fields and all sorts of things. So it's absolutely wonderful when the weather's nice.

Andy: 2:49

A beautiful part of the country to live in. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. Where did your journey start? Where were you born?

James Hopkins: 2:57

I was born in the Medway Towns, which is north Kent and really developed around one of the oldest Royal Naval bases. So Chatham Dockyard and my sort of family have got links into Chatham Dockyard in the 1800s and 1900s. And I was born in 1969 in Gillingham.

Andy: 3:22

Right, that there's something in my head about Charles Dickens and Chatham, but I'm not sure what exactly what what it is.

James Hopkins: 3:30

So Charles Dickens used to live in Rochester. There's a house in Rochester that is where Dickens wrote a number of very famous novels.

Andy: 3:39

Very good. So let's talk about I'm always curious to find out a little bit about my guests childhoods and how that's influenced them over the years and throughout their career. So let's, if we may talk a little bit about your growing up. What was your family situation, James, do you have brothers and sisters?

James Hopkins: 3:55

I have a brother and my parents had the two of us, both born I was late 60s, my brother early 70s. My parents actually divorced though, in the mid 70s. And so we had a very unusual situation at the time where my brother and I stayed with my dad as a single parent and to not my mum.

Andy: 4:19

Very progressive

James Hopkins: 4:21

Very, very progressive at the time. So we had a couple of years, sort of growing up in our six, seven eights nines where it was just my dad, which probably made me grow up a bit because I ended up having to look after my little brother quite a lot and work shifts and various other bits and pieces. But after a couple of years of that my dad met my mum, and again, equally progressive, I suspect. I've reflected back on this in the past. My dad remarried my step mum in 1979 when she was 32. And my dad was her fourth husband. So she was an unusual lady, very larger than life character and from sort of the age of 10 11, until when I left home at 18, we had an interesting time growing up through my sort of teenage years and my secondary school as it were.

Andy: 5:16

Okay, well, we'll go to school in a moment. If you don't mind I'll just summarise a little bit and ask you about what that was like. So unusual to be in a family where you've just got your single parent and it's your dad. You're the older brother. So that put more responsibility on you. Then your dad finds another lady. Is there er at an interesting time. She's 32 years old, had four, four husbands. This was a fourth husband,

James Hopkins: 5:44

two children, so I inherited a stepsister and a step brother. So and we lived in a little community, little community. And I didn't know this, but my stepmom was the mum of a girl that was in my class at primary school. And we didn't necessarily get on in our final year of primary school and our parents got together, which was an interesting dynamic when we became siblings. It was phenomenal

Andy: 6:12

Sorry to laugh but you're smiling. Listeners, James is smiling. So I am not just being completely callous here.

James Hopkins: 6:23

Yes, no, Andy, I get it. We're both in our 50s now, we do look back and laugh. The first few years of that scenario was was was awkward because we were 10 11 12 13. So we were that age where you were just getting into puberty and all that sort of stuff and sort of getting forced to go to stuff together.

Andy: 6:45

It's it's romcom gold, isn't it romantic comedy gold, I can just,

James Hopkins: 6:50

Absolutely

Andy: 6:50

Hollywood would love this storyline of the two kids who don't really get on in class. And suddenly you find out your step siblings. Take it from there.

James Hopkins: 6:59

Indeed. So it was an interesting time. And it meant that I guess there was that growing up piece as well, all the way through right. And my my younger brother was also in the same class as my stepbrother. So the kids are exactly the same age. We're like literally months apart in terms of our birthdays. So it was a really interesting, interesting time growing up. And just to complicate matters further, my stepsister stayed with her dad, but the younger son came and lived with us. So we had a proper blended family in the late 70s and early 80s.

Andy: 7:39

Goodness me. I'm just thinking often in school, don't they say, Okay, let's pair up with somebody pair up with someone for this. Now go and live with them.

James Hopkins: 7:51

You've hit the nail on the head and it was Oh my god. So it was yeah, it was it was there was some awkwardness. Let's put it that way. As you can imagine quite a bit of teasing from classmates when it got out as well. Okay, yeah. So you listen, you need to grow up and get a bit of a thick skin quite early in that scenario.

Andy: 8:09

Yes. Any of that, do you look back, you said you reflect on it. Any any of that made a significant long term difference to you?

James Hopkins: 8:17

I think, as we go through the chat later, I've always probably put myself in slightly difficult positions, to try and prove that I can do stuff. So I think there's an element there without being too sort of self psychiatrising myself if that's a word around losing contact with my real mum, because we did lose contact for 25 years. 10 until 35, I had no contact with my real mum, just my step mum mum who I didn't quite get on with as well as I should have done. So I've always probably been looking for some degree of validation. So go and do a difficult job or put yourself in a difficult position. I mean, I went from no exercise and not running through some time with Mazda getting into triathlon to do an Ironman. So it was always pushing myself that bit further to do something. And I've sort of spoken to people over the years and there's that whole piece around looking for that validation and proving I can do stuff. Because I've had to do it from a very young age.

Andy: 9:26

I totally understand and can relate to that, how things that we may be didn't have in our earlier years, we're constantly compensating for or are trying to replace later on. So thank you for sharing that with us James. There's so much to think about there. I'm going to ask you about school. We were chatting before we started the recording and you were talking about one of my guests admitting they'd been a lazy student and that resonating so I always ask how I always ask my guests how they were as a student.

James Hopkins: 10:00

Yeah, no, I, I probably was lazy. I was fortunate to be reasonably academically bright. I passed the 11 Plus went to a grammar school, I managed to get myself by the skin of my teeth into the top set in the grammar school. And every one of my school reports said he does the bare minimum to get by.

Andy: 10:20

Right. Okay

James Hopkins: 10:21

So wouldn't go above and beyond, wouldn't be a superstar. I was interested in football and cricket and did quite a lot of sporting stuff at that age. But yeah, sort of kept slightly under the radar and just did what I needed to to just about keep in the bottom 10% of the top class, if that makes sense.

Andy: 10:43

Yeah, it does. What with your personal home life situation and that spilled over into the classroom as well? Was that possibly a little bit distracting at this time?

James Hopkins: 10:54

Yeah, no, I think it probably was. And I guess just the whole growing up as a teenager, and we moved house a couple of times, and there was a sort of messy divorce going on in the background between my dad and my real mom, which it impacts a little bit. But I think I probably just got distracted with other stuff if I'm honest, I didn't find school all that interesting. Certain subjects I loved. I ultimately ended up doing okay, in my O levels because it was O levels at the time. I'm old enough. And through my A levels, I loved geography. And I actually managed to pass the Oxbridge entrance exam to go, and I got a place at St. Catherine's college to read geography and screwed up my A levels, because I didn't work hard enough. So there's a whole piece around being probably overconfident too early about your ability. And there is a big difference. A lot of people have said this to me, the difference between doing O levels and A levels is O levels you get spoon fed the stuff and you've just got to learn what the teacher tells you, A levels you've got to go a bit beyond what happened in the class. And I never went the beyond what happened in the class piece. Because I got into my car and my mates and the pub and all that sort of stuff.

Andy: 12:13

Wow. So you goodness me, you had the chance to go to Oxford to study geography, which you loved and thanks for being open, you said you screwed it up, because you didn't work hard. Have you got any regrets now, or

James Hopkins: 12:29

yes or no. It meant I had to get a job at 18. And I had the chance to redo my A levels but decided I didn't want to do that. Because I knew better. So I got a job. If I look back, that was 35 years ago. And the journey I've taken and the way my career has panned out. I don't think I've suffered from it. I've had to do a lot of chin up academically on the side.

Andy: 12:58

Yeah. I don't want to get into career yet, if you don't mind, you've given us so much already. But I would like to, there's a few things I'd like to ask you. So one is this idea of you know, that experience of and whether you think it's the right thing or not, it's this idea that okay, it's accepted that going to Oxford, or Cambridge must be a pretty good thing for your career. So you know, that that was something that was within your grasp, and you you missed it. And I wonder, and we don't need to go there now. But just wondering how, how much that has fueled you since, how much that's you know, been the motivation to make up, I think you said catching up or

James Hopkins: 13:38

So I think knowing that there's a couple of something earlier. times where I've had a decision to make to either go like the left fork or the right fork. And there's a number of times I've taken the wrong fork. In this particular case, I've sort of reflected on it over the years. And through luck, circumstance, it sort of worked out okay for me, but it did definitely fuel a desire to sort of make up for that lost opportunity. So I guess getting into the world of work. And even if I think through what I did in part time jobs as a 15 year old to an 18 year old, I've always wanted to really do well. And all that energy and enthusiasm that I didn't put into my schoolwork, into doing well in whatever I'm trying to do work wise.

Andy: 14:34

Yeah. Staying in childhood then. So you had that loss at 18 If you like of not going to go to Oxford, but then you lost your real mom, if you like, disappeared for 25 years. You didn't know where she was.

James Hopkins: 14:49

Didn't know where she was. So through a whole set of circumstances, she met someone else, the reason my parents divorced was she met someone else. They were both journalists, he got a job, I now subsequently know this. So bearing mind, this is the late 70s to start with, he got a job. He was a local journalist in Kent on the local paper got a job in Derby, and moved to Derby. So beyond letter and a landline, there wasn't really any way to keep in touch back then. So through one reason and another and some stuff I won't go into with my step mum, communications that were sent never got to us. So there was a bit of a spin on the story, which I've subsequently found out, but only when I got to my late 30s. Around attempts to contact that didn't happen, etc, etc.

Andy: 15:43

So she was writing to you, but you're not getting the letters or something like that.

James Hopkins: 15:48

Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot of that. And then we moved house. Because there was now four of us variously in the house as children and the parents, we needed a bigger house. So that new address was never passed on. The new phone number was never passed on and so things got lost. But fast forward to me sitting in Ford Reddit, in about 2003 in Brentwood, and I get a ping on my screen at work on my laptop, from friends reunited with a message from my mum.

Andy: 16:23

Oh my goodness

James Hopkins: 16:24

and we can get into that later.

Andy: 16:26

There's a there's a teaser folks, just hang on for that part of the story. I I always ask my guests as well what jobs their parents did so what had they had sight of the sort of work that people were doing? So your mum was a journalist?

James Hopkins: 16:42

Yeah, my original mom was a journalist. My stepmom did a bunch of stuff, ended up being a freelance photographer. My dad was a chemical engineer, and worked in chemical manufacturing plants and ended up being the head of health and safety for Europe for his company, which was Akzo Nobel, which are large producer of stuff into the paint industry and a bunch of other chemicals. So my dad was very technical, very disappointed that I didn't want to go and read chemistry at university. But I can still recite, I think the first 35 elements of the periodic table because my dad as I was growing up absolutely drummed it into me. And I had to learn it

Andy: 17:28

I'm not going to ask you to do that.

James Hopkins: 17:30

No I wouldn't, it would be very dull.

Andy: 17:33

So we've covered quite a bit of ground there. So school, obviously a lot going on in your life in those years, living with your kids from your class who you didn't necessarily get on with and so on and all that, when you did get to the end of school, you had this disappointment with A levels and is it time do you think should we talk about transitioning into those first jobs?

James Hopkins: 17:58

Yeah, no, that makes makes perfect sense. So I needed to find a job. And I literally looked in the local paper as you did back then to try and find something to do. And ended up as a trainee estate agent in 1987. And I started in mid September, and about three weeks after I started, we had the great storm, if you remember all the way across the South of England. And I had to go out the next day taking photographs of houses and trying to avoid trees that had fallen down and all sorts of stuff.

Andy: 18:33

How did you choose the estate agent role?

James Hopkins: 18:37

Honestly, first job I got offered, literally that, no planning no thoughts. Just I need to earn some money. I didn't really know what an estate agent did if I'm honest. And then I used to work part time in a local pub as well. And I remember talking to a couple of the locals saying I'm gonna go be an estate agent. They said you really do realise people hate estate agents. Why the hell are you doing that? And first I'd heard of it. And yeah, lasted me for a good number of years. I did okay at the end. But it was a an interesting start to life.

Andy: 19:16

Did you you said you had, you know, on jobs from 15 to 18 part time jobs really applied yourself. Did you once you got into the workplace into the the estate agency role did you really apply yourself there?

James Hopkins: 19:31

Yeah, threw myself into it. I had a couple of roles with local companies. So by the time I was 20, I'd started working for Halifax Property Services, big national company. And by the time I was well within within six months of being there, I was running my own branch. Wow. So I'd gone through the sort of negotiator, listing houses, selling houses and was quite good at it. Managed to sell a lot of houses, be able to explain to people why they should sell their house through us. And at the age of 20, I was running the local branch, had five or six staff that I didn't really know how to manage, because nobody had ever told me that, you just sort of pick it up as you go along. Fast forward a year and a half 21 and a half, I was area manager of eight or nine branches, all in the Medway and Maidstone area in Kent.

Andy: 20:30

That's incredible. And so you clearly had the natural talent, if you like, you had some natural intelligence and ability, and it was really only switched on when you got interested in work. I shouldn't really jump around so much but I'm just wondering, given your dad was obviously a professional, and first of all disappointed that you didn't become a chemical engineer. How did he react to you not getting to Oxford? Was he was he really proud when you got the offer from Oxford, and then

James Hopkins: 21:01

very proud, but very pragmatic as well. So he came from both of my parents came from very working class backgrounds and sort of being the first people that had done well in their generation, if you like. Interesting other part of the story. We don't have a very big family, both of my parents were only children. So growing up, no aunties, uncles, cousins or anything. So they were both focused or my mum at this point, obviously, never knew I got an offer from Oxford University or anything of that nature, because she wasn't in the picture. So it was just my dad and my stepmom. And so in that respect, it was yeah, dad was very, very pragmatic about it. Right, if you're not going to do that, go get a job, you need to work. So it was very focused in that respect. And I guess that whole piece of slight regret about not taking the opportunity that was in front of me, drove me very hard through that piece of working really well in the estate agency. I was a young lad, I was probably working seven days a week. Because I had nothing else outside of work. I enjoyed it. I found I was reasonably good at talking to people, looking back I probably displayed a bit more EQ than somebody at my age should have done. But that was just something I found if you treat people well and supported them, it bounced back at you. Right. So that was just a way of surviving and developing and growing that career. And so if you go all the way back to 1990, I was 21. I'd done fairly well. I'd just bought my first house. And I was driving around in a company car that was a diamond white Escort RS turbo.

Andy: 22:54

Wow.

James Hopkins: 22:55

So your archetypal late 80s 1990's, I probably had a black suit and white socks, I would imagine at the time as well.

Andy: 23:04

I am picturing it now. Those RS turbos, they were objects of desire at that time

James Hopkins: 23:12

they were

Andy: 23:13

from certainly because we're similar age so completely. You we're living the dream James

James Hopkins: 23:20

I absolutely was living the dream, going on holiday with my mates to Spain in the summer and working hard. And I was 20 21 and looking back, didn't have a care in the world. Right.

Andy: 23:34

Yeah, but underlying, I think there's this needing to prove yourself, isn't there?

James Hopkins: 23:41

Totally

Andy: 23:41

Which might have been installed by that A level experience when, you know, that one incident failing your A levels and I'm just dramatising here

James Hopkins: 23:53

No, you're right. It was no, it wasn't just that I only, my A level experience wasn't I just missed the grades. It was I screwed it up. So from from turning. So you take your A levels in June. So I turned 18 in the January, and from January to June because I'd done quite well in my mocks I just thought I've got this and it was a massive life lesson. Don't be complacent, don't not put in the work. Don't not put in the training all that sort of stuff. And I did and I crashed and burned.

Andy: 24:29

Yeah, the reason I'm going into this is because I did too. If my listeners are thinking why's Andy obsessed? leave the guy alone. Why is he obsessed with his A levels and it's I'm gonna have to confess, I realise this is me projecting my life story onto you. I also did exactly the same thing. And then had something to prove to myself because that was on, you know, as on one trajectory like you. You were on that trajectory and then all of a sudden, oops, there's a wobble, and it all changes. So So you had an unusual childhood, but it was it sounds like it was supportive and that your dad wasn't like putting loads of pressure on you. There wasn't a really high expectation it was. But then what happened was you ended up with this internal driver to I've got something to prove to myself, I should have done this. I screwed it up. I'm going to work damned hard now on the path that I'm on. And the you're there. Let's get back to you in your white RS turbo.

James Hopkins: 25:27

Indeed, with the bucket seats, if you recall,

Andy: 25:31

yeah. Running eight stores at 21 and a half? Yes.

James Hopkins: 25:35

Yeah, I had about 60, 70 staff on a seven days a week operation. Didn't really know what I was doing. Because there wasn't such thing as management development courses or anything like that. At the time. It was more around what are the results? And how are you going? I think there was the odd nod to things like staff turnover. So if you had a lot of people leaving, you can't have been a very good manager

Andy: 25:59

That was an alarm bell Yeah.

James Hopkins: 26:01

But other than that, it sort of developed its itself, really. And I guess for the next two or three years, I sort of kept doing all of that. And interestingly, as I get through a couple of years of running estate agents, something else, this is gonna sound like a mutual love in and it's not meant to, I listened to your sideview mirror thing about your Asia Pacific experience the other day, right. And that whole thing about starting to get restless, when it's all going okay, and you think you're on top of it, certainly for probably 20 25 years, I then got, right, what's next? Where else am I gonna go? How do I develop? How do I broaden? How do I go forward. And I was starting to get a little not frustrated, but probably it was a bit more running it and in the late to mid, no it was the late 90s Apologies. So 1993 1994 the Halifax who I worked for so I was in the estate agency arm of this thing, but I was also doing quite a lot of mortgage stuff as well that was going into the bank because the reason that the reason the building society apologies at the time bought the estate agents was to get more mortgages. The Halifax then decided that it was going to do two things, it merged with the Leeds building society, if you recall, and it also decided it was going to stop being a mutual building society and list itself as a bank. Okay, so there was a lady that had been the regional managing director for Halifax in the southeast, a lady called Margaret Walkinshaw who convinced the board of the Halifax that they needed to trial some stuff in Kent, where she happened to live. And so the Halifax set out on this whole plan to create this test zone in Kent, which was going to reengineer the house moving process from the estate agency side through the mortgage application side. So instead of you doing every branch process their mortgages, they started setting up admin centres and processing centres, like a service centre so that all the mortgage applications went into one, they started getting automated underwriting and that type of thing. So I got as the sort of youngest and I guess, reasonably forward thinking person within the estate agency division, I got offered the opportunity to go and join this project team that was going to relook at the whole house moving process. So bearing in my background, to that point had been very local, I'd sort of made it up as I've gone along, no real formal education. But I got the opportunity to take a secondment into this project team that were doing this whole house moving piece. And I can remember getting invited to a business park where one of these processing centres had been set up in a big boardroom. And there was probably 25 people around the table. And Margaret, who is still I'm still loosely in contact with, amazing woman, did phenominal things through the sort of mid to late 90s, she introduced some of these consultants that were coming in and we had McKinsey's and Boston Consulting Group. And this guy from McKinsey stood up and started talking about skunk work. And we're going to do some wireframe stuff, and we're going to build this new process and it's all completely an alien language to me. And he said, he said, I'm gonna tell you a story. This reminds me of when I first started with McKinsey's, we had this project with the bank and we did whatever, what came out of that was the world's first ATM. And they start talking about all these consultancy terms. You know, running stuff up the flagpole and all that cliched stuff you hear about, I didn't have a clue what they were talking about. Not a clue. But I was like, fascinated, I was like a rabbit in the headlights, because these people were very academic, very professional. And I'd worked in a local estate agency. So they were talking about banking terms and project terms. And altogether, this massive project team then kicked off and I got assigned to be the estate agency person that would bring in all the what do we need to do to house buying. So over a period of time, this is probably 94 to 96, I get involved in a bunch of projects, some software development, some just thinking about how we can take the normal way of doing estate agency, which is you send somebody out to a house, you type up the house particulars, you go and take a photo of the house, send the cans of film off to a company that develop them and bring you back 100 little tiny colour pictures with a sticky piece on the back, you then take off and stick on the front of the particulars. And when you've run out of all the colour ones, you then photocopy them. And they all sit in drawers and people walked around every estate agents and registered and you'd give them loads of sets of particulars to how do we put this online. So I did 18 months working on how you could start to get a website up and running that had all the sales particulars. So we had to get the processing capability of very first digital cameras that we could then send off and get all the photos back on floppy disks that we then had to load up, some mapping software. Long story short after two and a bit years of that we had a working system that we trialled in Medway and Maidstone.

Andy: 32:00

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James Hopkins: 34:16

The whole lot, and eventually it really started to work. We were starting to get people having making inquiries online and it became part of the shop window that the Halifax then offered to the city when they wanted to float and become a bank. Okay, so it's the digitization of that the centralised processing of mortgages, some links into conveyancing firms. So the view was at the time if you put your house up for sale today, it would probably take you six months to move in 1994. The Halifax wanted to take six months to six weeks. Put it online, you can find a house quicker. You can see all the pictures online. So we were taking internal photographs for the first time trying to do floor plans, and that was trying to do that sift of saving people's time. Yeah, so putting it online and putting internal photographs on there allowed you to discount houses more quickly as a buyer. Yeah. And obviously as a seller,

Andy: 35:15

saves everybody's time doesn't it.

James Hopkins: 35:17

and as a seller, of course more people can see your property other than just those people that have gone to register with an estate agent or seen the board outside.

Andy: 35:25

So digitalization in the property market happened before it happened in motor trade then

James Hopkins: 35:31

significantly, driven by that Halifax piece, which I was part of. And I can remember then we expanded it out across the country because it worked in Kent so I can remember going and spending three weeks in Preston of all places.

Andy: 35:47

I have listeners in Preston

James Hopkins: 35:48

Preston was a lovely place had some great nights out in Preston, I spent probably a week and a half there going around all the sites and installing the software that they needed to be able to get this digitalization up in Preston. And I can remember being lectured to by the area manager for Preston, that this would never work. Why would people look online for houses? That's absolutely ridiculous. Don't be stupid. Not everyone's gonna have the internet and it takes so long to because people were on dial up right? There was no Wi Fi no broadband. So it would take

Andy: 36:21

that's a fair comment. Yeah.

James Hopkins: 36:23

Right, it takes forever to download the photos and all that stuff. But I convinced this guy and in the end, they took it in Preston. Now about this sort of time this project was coming to fruition. And the Halifax had merged with the Leeds and had successfully floated as a bank. So at the end of so probably 1996 going into early 1997 this test zone started getting wound up. So I'd had a two year secondment and had been absolutely you know, really, really enjoying myself

Andy: 36:57

yeah, very stimulating

James Hopkins: 37:00

Found my element right. I'd also because I was then working with the bank, they then started saying, Look, if you're gonna do anything with us in the future, you need to start doing your Chartered Institute of banker exams. So, on the side, I enrolled for my AC IB right and started doing a degree in financial services with you UMIST. So, I was sort of doing that on the side loving this job really getting involved getting intellectually stimulated getting challenged and stretch and again was reasonably okay at it. So, I had the opportunity when the test zone all wound down because it had done its purpose, I had a choice at the time, do I stay with the bank, so I was going to transfer from the property services arm into the bank to reasonably senior level because I got to be a senior project manager. So it was an almost an external hire, but from a different bit of the business into the bank. Or I could have stayed with the IT development. So I was 27 probably at that point. My dad saying keep the stable job. I got offered a job at Halifax's head office running customer relations for the bank. Or I could have gone with the startup which they were going to spin off. So this is one of these forks in the road left right. I took the right hand easy channel probably steered by my dad and money, had to move to Halifax as well to do it. So I was in head office or I could have gone the other way. That left fork is now Rightmove. The area manager from Preston that I had to

Andy: 38:37

Just say for international listeners just say what Rightmove is

James Hopkins: 38:40

Rightmove is pretty much the de facto property listing site in the UK. There are other property listing sites but it has hundreds of 1000s of properties and pretty much everybody that's looking for a house to buy or rent or a flat in the UK will at some point look on Rightmove and it lists all the sold prices of houses, etc, etc. It's almost become the auto trader of house moving. Yeah. So the area manager that I got told it would never work by is a chap called Miles Shipside who's now the multimillionaire Chief Operating Officer of Rightmove

Andy: 39:23

After you convinced him you had to convince him that it could work. Oh, my James,

James Hopkins: 39:31

so I didn't know at the time that was working. But I then end up through circumstance and opportunity being offered this job to go and run Customer Relations Department of Halifax Bank as it was then

Andy: 39:45

So sensible option, the sensible northern option, which was lovely and I went and we bought a house in Brighouse, which was just a little drive over the hills into Halifax and I worked in a place called Bingsheath, which was a former wool mill in Halifax that had big old 18th 19th century mills with four foot thick walls that had been done out into offices, and you had the shiny Halifax head office and the customer relations department was about a 10 minute walk across town in this former mill, bearing in mind, I've not had a corporate background, I'd gone through the estate agency, I got into this sort of skunk works quite fluid project team for two years with all these management consultants and funky people and quite techie. Yeah, so I rocked up in Halifax, in 1996, that I went there to run this department of about 60 people. I was, barring one of the typist and the typists pool, the youngest person there and had to run this department of people that were defending the bank against customer claims that have been escalated to head office and the chief executive. What I didn't know was I was also then the key person to front off to the building societies ombudsman and the banking ombudsman and go and represent the bank in hearings that decided whether we were liable or not. So massively out of my comfort zone. How much thought can you remember putting into these decisions? And how much was it you thinking well, if the bank thinks it's a good thing to do, then I'll or my boss says it's a good thing to do I'll do it. Because it does seem quite a significant difference from the skunk works to this

James Hopkins: 41:32

so because we were in that project team, we'd been into head office quite a bit. So I've made some connections with a few people, and through that then I saw that there was a job at head office, I applied for the job. They thought I could do it. So it was leaving everything behind with my partner at the time. And moving to Yorkshire. Right. She also worked for the Halifax so she got a job in a project team that was picking up the whole mortgage piece. And I got this job in customer relations.

Andy: 42:03

So you trusted people who said you could they thought you could do the job that was an element of this, trusting? If they thought you could they knew you. They thought you could do it. Yeah, I'll have a go

James Hopkins: 42:15

Absolutely right. So I was completely out of my depth, but was flagging it for all I was worth. I did an awful lot of reading and background research on it all. And it happened at exactly the same time as the computerization of that department happened. So because I'd done something Tech, I must have also been a good person to bring in. So a fairly resistant team of people in their 40s 50s and 60s that were plate handlers in Halifax's head office. The fact that no longer were they going to record into a Dictaphone their replies to customer letters and send that little tape to the typing pool, they were actually going to type it themselves

Andy: 43:03

I bet they loved that.

James Hopkins: 43:05

know, Windows 97, or whatever it was, that came in, and they had to learn how to do their own, log a complaint on a database, rudimentary database and start replying to the letters back out. And we were getting four or 500 complaints a month coming in. The other thing that had happened at the time, this was probably a sort of really defining moment, was a lot of people were complaining because some if you can remember back to the time when some of these building societies and banks were converting from a building society to a bank, if you were a member of the society, you got some shares. And at the time, the standard number of shares that you've got issued from the Halifax converting if you'd had a certain size mortgage or a certain size qualifying savings account was about 1500 pounds, which in the late 90s was a chunk of money. But what happened was through so the Halifax then did very careful communications campaign through many probably 18 months of the transition to say on this day, your account needs to be open and it needs to have this much balance in to qualify for the shares and mailings went out to millions of people to qualify. A number of people claim they never got the mailings never got whatever and so weren't advised of what they needed to do to keep the minimum balance in their account. This ultimately ended up in a bit of a class action at the building societies ombudsman, where people were claiming that they hadn't been told or didn't get a mailing. We had a fairly standard response, which was no this was the communication shedule we can confirm that all these mailings went. And we had almost a template response, because there were so many complaints coming in saying, This is what happened, we reject your claim for shares unless it was really obvious, and probably a year and a bit after having gone up to Halifax and sort of got the lay of the land on the big corporate head office and all the politics and everything else. And got a little bit of a working relationship with the chief executive of the bank at the time, because I was answering his people that wrote to him, if an MP got approached by a constituent because the Halifax had done something that would cost them money that will go on House of Commons paper to the chief executive. And I'd have to draft the reply letter for him. And all he would do is just sign in his nice flash pen. But we got to the point where as I was looking through some of this stuff, started to realise that one of the mailings that we said had gone out to people missed the date. And so I ended up at 28 years of age, without a banking background, but frantically trying to do my banking exams, having to go to the board of the Halifax and do a presentation that said, here's why I'm recommending we pay out 5 million pounds in compensation to these customers. Because if it goes to the building society ombudsman, we're going to lose. And you don't want bad publicity,

Andy: 46:22

you probably wouldn't have that as a funny story. But

James Hopkins: 46:25

No but I don't I don't know if we're allowed to swear on these things. But I was absolutely kicking myself. I brought it to my boss's attention, who was the general manager ran the big sort of Central Services Department was into the board. And I said to him, this is what I found. We've got to do this. Are you sure? Yes, I'm sure I'm sure. So it ended up me having to go up onto the rarefied atmosphere of the seventh floor with a bright yellow carpet, very 1970s 80s decor. And go and stand in this big room, with all men, at the time, probably 18 Directors and non exec directors, that was a board meeting and explain why we had to pay out 5 million quid and I got lots of questions. But I stood up straight and answered as best as I could and as straight as I could. And in the end, they took my recommendation, said I was very brave to go in there and do it. Stupid, but brave. It needed to happen. So it was it was one of those moments of if it's the right thing to do, do it. But quite an interesting one in terms of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and doing whatever.

Andy: 47:43

Yeah, absolutely. Let's there's question that I'd ask about that. But I think in the interest of time, we should keep moving moving forward with your career journey. Did they let you stay?

James Hopkins: 47:55

They did let me stay and in fact,

Andy: 47:56

I know you were the messenger, you weren't the

James Hopkins: 47:58

I think I didn't get shot. No, no, okay. I didn't get shot. But I didn't get promoted either. Let's put it that way. So we then sort of started working on a whole piece around how we need to manage complaints better, that's the one thing that spilled out of it. And there was a project that I was working on that pulled all the various bits of the bank together, because it was very divisionally focused, so quite a lot of infighting across divisions. But often a customer would have a complaint that was about their bank account and their mortgage, and the way another the insurance company dealt with their complaint. And what we would do is then do three copies of the letter and send it to each department and get them to answer their bits and then stitch it all together. But actually what you needed to do was go, I can see how that bit of that complaint impacted that bit of your complaint. And all the divisions did was just answer their bit of it. Nobody was looking at the overarching piece which frustrated customers. Yeah, yeah. And so, anyway, long and the short of all of that was I then got fast forward to 2000. I got a call out of the blue from Margaret, who used to run the test zone. I know you're up in Halifax. Now she'd since retired, right semi retired in her early 50s. But the consultant that worked for McKinsey's was now working with a different consultancy firm, the guy that invented the ATM, was now engaged working with Ford on a project in Leeds to revolutionise the used car market and start to work on an online version of some use car ads and sell some associated financial services. Note that this was a Ford credit, a Ford financial, global project. They had nobody in Ford credit or Ford financial that knew about project work. I must know a bit about financial services because I now work for a bank and I was known to the consultant. So one thing led to another and I was invited to go and talk to them about this great project that Ford were doing. I was living in Halifax, still. We'd had my daughter at that point who was born in Halifax general Infirmary

Andy: 50:10

big cheer from the Yorkshire listeners,

James Hopkins: 50:13

big cheer from the Yorkshire listeners and she was about 18 months old and was starting to ask for a bath. Okay, and I kept saying no Isabel it's a bath. Right? So you can anyway that that's just now re alienated or your Yorkshire listeners.

Andy: 50:27

They just don't like you now.

James Hopkins: 50:29

Fair enough. Yeah, fair point. Listen, with my accent, if you were going out for a beer in Brighouse on a Thursday night, when all the farmers came in from the fields, it was always a little interesting anyway. So I got this opportunity to go and work on this thing for Ford, went through a multi stage interview process. Having moved to Halifax, sold the house in Kent, been there for a period of time, and one of the actions of the Ford thing was stay up there for a year. And then we'll this project will do what it needs to do and we'll move you back down to Brentwood for the Ford head office. So actually, it's a way for me to get moved with work back down south as my daughter got older and was only seeing the grandparents every once a month as we spent loads of time going up and down the A1 back to see the grandparents with our little daughter, right? We we ended up with this opportunity for me to go and work for Ford, which meant I left this sort of Halifax career behind me and in 2000 is when I joined the automotive industry completely by coincidence and overlap and people that I've worked with before, thinking that I did a reasonable job back in the project. And this was a new project, trying to do what we'd done to houses and house moving with used cars, which if you think about where we are now was quite a bit ahead of its time.

Andy: 52:00

Yeah, it's reminded me of a recent guest. Matthew Boguradzki who had a philosophy, if you like that was based on network, reputation and luck. So you had a reputation because of the project. You had the network with Margaret and the consultant. Yeah. And I guess there's some luck involved in that, Margaret, knowing about this and yeah, and getting you but looking with hindsight as we are, the fact that you were involved in that digitalization of the property market project. And now here's digitalization in automotive. And yes, it makes sense. As Steve Jobs said, you can always join the dots or you can join the dots looking back.

James Hopkins: 52:45

Yeah, indeed. So I ended up coming to work for Ford financial. And within seven weeks, the project got canned. Ah, so there was a change in leadership at Ford financial and the few million pounds budget that they had for this they decided not to spend on this. So my actual task was winding down project which had some rented offices in a Regis building, a load of IT, we'd taken on a load of people. We'd had some legal agreements and contracts in place with some contractors. So I probably spent three months unpicking all of that and winding it down and needed to work out in my head what the hell have I just done? I've just given up my great career at the Halifax that was sort of going reasonable places. I'd done the hard thing about the payout and the board, I jumped ship and lots of messages of sorry to see you go type stuff, started with Ford and that was it. What it did do and to be fair to Ford financial, they stuck by me, moved me down earlier, back to head office. And I took a job as European CRM manager for Ford financial, which got us involved in a whole project about how when people buy a new car, they get all of the bits of communication from the dealer from Ford from Ford credit with their direct debit with their PCP, all the way back then. So I got involved in that job, which was back out of corporate head office Halifax life into corporate Ford financial Europe and Ford of Britain life in Brentwood, moved back down, bought a house in Rochester. So I was commuting across the bridge every day. And life was was cool and good. And I probably did that job for a year or so and got the opportunity to then move internally. So one of the things I think you've mentioned and a few other people have mentioned in other podcasts is once you're in one of these manufacturer type roles, you're then into a sort of career management path and you do Two or three years in each job and you've got personal development committees and various other things. So I then took the job as Head of Insurance for Ford Financial Britain. So that was the we launched the Ford Driveaway Insurance, the PPP stuff and at the time in Ford financial Europe, I didn't know anything about insurance by the way, I had to learn it from going up to Norwich Union who were the underwriters and understanding about how the actuaries did stuff and burn rates and claim rates and everything else. But yeah, threw myself into the head of insurance role. And at the time, I was an external hire coming in at what was the sort of level four role which was the first sort of senior manager type role within Ford. So I worked for my boss was Peter de Ruse Hall, who you will have probably come across or heard the name of Pete if not Peter was very well known in the industry, will have been and anybody that's worked at Ford or Ford credit will know Peter. He's currently in one of the other insurance companies now doing some long since retired, but sort of part time chairman and some non exec roles and various other things, but ended up developing that job for a period of time. Slightly humorous story there. I mentioned at the very beginning, I was born in Gillingham. I am an avid Gillingham FC football fan. I've been a season ticket holder on and off for a long period of time. They are an interesting club, who got to the heights of the championship to subsequently then get relegated all the way back down and have bounced between League two and League one for a number of years. But, when I was head of insurance at Ford the people at Norwich Union decided one night when I was up there for a couple of days business meeting that Ford Insure would be the Match Day sponsor for Norwich versus Gillingham at Carrow Road. And we ended up getting invited into the directors box and having dinner on Delia's table when she was chairman of Norwich

Andy: 57:07

Delia Smith the cookery writer. Yeah,

James Hopkins: 57:10

indeed. So

Andy: 57:13

it was a she I think she was chair

James Hopkins: 57:15

chairman, Chairwoman chairperson. So we ended up getting invited for the for the evening, really lovely wine, great meal in the directors box, we had the match stolen from us, for a dodgy penalty in the second half, in my opinion, and ended up losing two one having been one nil up. And I'd probably enjoyed the wine a little too much at this point. So was a little more vocal than perhaps was prudent in the directors box. And one of my responsibilities at the end of the game was to present the Man of the Match award to the bloke that had cheated to get the penalty that had Gillingham lose. And I just about through gritted teeth was able to shake his hand and hand him the bottle of champagne and get the cheesy photo done. Able to do it. But I was that close to saying I can't do it. I absolutely can't do this. Got there in the end. Excellent. So lots lots of stuff through that as a career, I then ended up with Ford, I was an external hire in at a fairly sort of senior ish level. And they weren't doing a lot of external hiring at that time, a bit like the bank, there's a parallel there, I sort of came into the bank at that level and had to charm to everybody that had come through the ranks. And to do the same at Ford. So as I joined Ford, I just finished my banking exams. So back to filling in the education piece. I'd done my banking exams, and as I done a couple of jobs at Ford at the level I was at, they were then starting to talk about what what does the future look like? And I was starting to prompt those conversations. And so I got advised to join Ford's MBA programme. So Ford sponsored me, because I'd been identified as a potential future leader, through Henley management college to do what's called a consortium MBA, which I got put forward for, and started a month after my son was born. So we had two kids under four. And I was disappearing away for weekends to go and do part time MBA on top of the part time degree I'd just done whilst developing the career at Ford and the Halifax. So this piece around almost needing the academic validation to be able to go to the next level. And thank you very much to Ford for paying for it because it wasn't cheap. And so the insurance job was for a limited period of time. I'd been doing it for two years, and that career discussion came around again which was, you've come in to us you started doing this project, when you've done the CRM project. Now you've been head of insurance, but you've not done a proper job with the dealers. So I got shipped down to or got asked if I'd like to go and be the district manager for Ford credit in the southwest. And so went down to Bristol, to do the whole Ford credit, PCP options, higher purchase. So the retail finance, the wholesale, wholesale stocking plans, etc, etc, the funding for all of the dealers in the southwest and Wales. So standard, good, operational job which I needed to do to be able to prove I could do this stuff, which meant that I was living during the week in Bristol and coming home at weekends to my wife and the young kids in Kent which wasn't ideal, put a bit of strain on stuff, but it was the right thing to do for the career and everything else. So did that for a period of time, and worked well. But then an opportunity came up because Ford had also then established Mazda, as a national sales company in the UK had been an importership before that, and offered the opportunity to go and start up Mazda credit. Having sort of done a year, literally a year doing the Ford credit job in with the dealers, and then got the opportunity to do the Mazda credit. Start it up with the team that were then running Mazda at the time and establishing it in the UK as a national sales company as opposed to an importer. I see. And so that was moving back from Bristol, and developing a team and relationships with Mazda and the Mazda dealers. And I did that job for a couple of years, and was able to persuade my colleagues at Mazda that it was really useful for them in terms of selling and growing their number of Mazdas if they spent a lot of their variable marketing money on subvented finance rates, which worked very well for me, because we then did wrote an awful lot of finance.

Andy: 1:02:06

So you'd kind of come into automotive by by accident? Really?

James Hopkins: 1:02:12

Yes. It wasn't by design at all. It was by accident.

Andy: 1:02:15

And you've stayed in automotive ever since. So were you were you happy at these times with Ford and Mazda? Were you enjoying what you were doing?

James Hopkins: 1:02:23

really enjoyed it? It was interesting. I was learning all the time. I guess one of the things that I do do it like if I get into something, I throw myself into it and want to do all the background reading around it and understand who the key players are. And so it was all this sort of, I guess, this validation stuff all the way to try and be as good as I could be in the job knowing that I've probably not got the background that colleagues have got. So I was working hard to fill in the gaps.

Andy: 1:02:51

Yeah. I you had that ghost to bury if you like or that yeah, proving it, yourself.

James Hopkins: 1:02:57

A bit of Imposter Syndrome sometimes.

Andy: 1:03:00

Yeah. And there's more than one occasion where you're brought in and you're you're joining a cohort who've come up through the ranks of that business and have knowledge and experience that you don't have and you're playing catch up. So there's a catch up is a recurring theme, which could well be contributing to your motivation and just providing that sort of drive,

James Hopkins: 1:03:27

right, so So what that led to was doing the Mazda credit job for a couple of years fairly uneventful, but reasonably successful, which then meant, but that was still with Ford financial right. So I was on the financial services side of the business. So FC bank limited, I then got the whole call about right if you you're doing your MBA, you want a future career, you now need to go and do an international assignment, which then prompted and again back to your piece around the wheels of the organisation start turning because once you get on this international assignment merry go round stuff just starts to happen. Right. So from a call and a conversation, I ended up going to scope out and doing a sort of free assignment visit, which in theory is a yes, no. But once you've committed to the pre assignment trip, you're pretty much on the bandwagon. Right? You can see you. Yeah, I'm nodding getting there nodding, right. We've both been there. And I've done that twice in my career. Right. So the first time was going to Budapest, working for the very great Mr. David Bowles, who was responsible for the Eastern European markets at the time. So I went out to Budapest to be Country Manager for Ford Financial, and probably the most cringe worthy part of my whole career happened whilst in Budapest,

Andy: 1:04:51

oh, do tell.

James Hopkins: 1:04:54

So two things. I thought I was being really clever. And within my first two weeks there, it was 2006 at this point, so it was just before the World Cup. and England were playing Hungary in a friendly warm up. And I got the opportunity because all the dealers were coming into Budapest for a dealer session, to stand up and introduce myself. So the 57 Ford dealership principles that made up the Ford network in in Hungary. And I'd asked one of the team can you phonetically do a paragraph for me in Hungarian? Because I'm going to try and read it out in Hungarian. I spectacularly failed Andrew in terms of the phonetics and everything else, I think I swore twice in Hungarian when I wasn't expecting to and insulted someone. It was the most cringe worthy Tumbleweed moments, as I've got all these dealers looking at me, and I'm trying to say something and I realised, fortunately, I realised about a sentence and a half in that this just wasn't going to work. Right. And there was a few of them starting to laugh with me, not at me, if it makes sense, as I've like, started to call this thing. And I called the interpreter in and had to then sort of say the rest of my stuff through an interpreter. And that that's not the cringe worthy moment that was

Andy: 1:06:20

OK, I was thinking you got through that. Alright.

James Hopkins: 1:06:24

no, that wasn't too bad. So anyway, through all of that stuff, it was a fabulous time, expat in Budapest, learnt a lot about the market. Every pretty much every dealer interaction I had with my team was through an interpreter or through one of the team. And when you're trying to build a relationship with somebody, it's really hard if you don't know that that person's saying exactly the context of what you've said, or just repeating the words. So it was it's an interesting and challenging time. But the opportunity to sort of just grow and develop was was amazing there. The children came with me the family were living in Budapest, they went to an international school

Andy: 1:07:06

Did your wife come as well?

James Hopkins: 1:07:07

wife came as well. Yep, everybody we were together there. It was, it was great times. I was going I was going out doing lots of dealer visits. I noticed these dealers in Hungary, were pretty the mayor of the town they were in as well and had a restaurant and all that sort of stuff. So if you went to do a visit to talk about their funding plan, you then had to go to lunch with them, obviously in their restaurant. And they gave you their best dish. And it was polite to accept that. And in Hungary, everybody had their dinner at lunchtime. Okay, all right, just the way the national thing worked. I of course was then going home to my wife and kids and having dinner at dinner time as well. So I was having two big dinners a day. And getting larger and larger. I reckon I put on 2.5 stone in about a year in Budapest, it was unbelievable. But anyway, so that the interesting moment there became fame at the Christmas party, which was 200 plus 250. Probably employees on a boat party boat up and down the Danube amazing night. Lots of free drink. Lots of everything flowing. Very, very good. And everybody was doing what I would classas group karaoke. Right? So you had a karaoke machine. But groups of people were getting up and singing songs. And some of it was Hungarian. Did you I don't know if you knew that Hungarian rap was a thing. I learned. I couldn't quite follow it. But it is thing. And if you google top 50 Hungarian rappers there are apparently 50 of them. So fair play to the Hungarian rap scene. But I was I was reasonably well oiled during the party. And so it became my turn to do a piece of karaoke. And I thought, Do I go safe? Something everybody will know. Or I thought, well, I'll go safe, but a slightly longer thing because the the mood the atmosphere was fabulous. So I chose Bohemian Rhapsody.

Andy: 1:09:03

Oh, my goodness, I didn't even see that coming.

James Hopkins: 1:09:06

It turns out, it doesn't travel well. So I'm stood at the front of the stage, 250 people looking at me so I'm the English bloke, right, Mama. And they were just looking at me like that

Andy: 1:09:20

I thought you were going to sing it for us now. All 6 minutes of it. And whoever's left, whichever listener is left, I tell you what, there's a prize.

James Hopkins: 1:09:32

I'll do one word. Oh, every other song that had come on. Everybody joined into. Mine, they're looking at me. And then out of pity a few people came up and started singing with me. But in the end, they got into the spirit of it, but it was two minutes of the most I almost wanted to shrivel up into myself

Andy: 1:09:56

I do and I'm just listening to the story.

James Hopkins: 1:09:59

Why didn't I just go for Sweet Caroline or something that would have been so much easier.

Andy: 1:10:03

It's a good film though. It's gonna be good in the movie I can see it

James Hopkins: 1:10:07

This romcom.

Andy: 1:10:11

It's going to be excrutiating, it's like Bridesmaids

James Hopkins: 1:10:13

absolutely. So not long after that episode, just so you're aware, an opportunity came up through network knowledge and lab, which was to potentially and this was way before the end of my international assignment, I got the opportunity to go back to Mazda UK as Fleet and Remarketing director, and I had to make the choice, do I see out the next year of my international assignment and the commitment I've made to Ford financial or do I put myself and my career first and look at this great opportunity with Mazda. And I chose a great opportunity with Mazda, which was a very awkward conversation with my boss at the time to say, I know you've paid for me to come out here. I know I'm living on this international assignment. And I know there's a job to do here. I've got this great opportunity. And because of the 1/3 ownership in Mazda that Ford had, it would have meant resigning from Ford financial, whilst on international assignment, and starting a new job with Mazda, with no continuity of service or anything. But that's the time I took the brave call and did it much to the annoyance, understandably, of my boss at the time, because that wasn't the done thing. You didn't do it. And quite rightly, Ford financial said, Well, if you're resigning, you get yourself home, then, yeah, you can appreciate being on an international assignment. And I had the remaining bit of the lease on the house in Budapest that I had to look after, I had to get myself packed up, myself moved back. And probably the only time in my career where I perhaps didn't leave on very amicable terms. Because I'd chosen a path that was for me, not for my employer if that makes sense. Now, clearly, they were sister companies, and there was still some overlap. But it was never quite the same Ford financial after I made that bold move. And I completely get that and understand that, but from my own perspective, the opportunity to go and work for the OEM, and you'll perhaps appreciate this from a to financial services company to an OEM. There's always a little bit of a hierarchy and a pecking order. Yeah, certainly my experience across Ford was very much that. So the opportunity to go into the national sales company in a role that I thought I could do, because I've done a lot of business partner stuff and funding on Contract Hire and everything else in my Ford financial career. And I could see this was a great opportunity to get into Mazda UK on a sort of senior job within that role. So I went for it with both hands, and came back to the UK having been in Budapest but relocated myself back at some financial personal financial cost, and a bit of probably reputational costs with my ex colleagues. But it was with hindsight, and at the time, I was convinced it was the right thing to do. Again, it was a challenge. It was a bigger job. And it was something I thought I could be quite good at. And I did two great years in Mazda, UK as fleet and remarketing director, and really enjoyed the job, a few little noxious relationships with my colleagues at Ford financial but over time, we sort of built some bridges, and that worked well. And then after two years doing the job in the UK, which would have taken us into 2008 Going into 2009, which for all our listeners coincided with the financial crash. I got asked to go and establish so the MD That was at Mazda credit at the time employed me had subsequently moved to Mazda Europe as Vice President of Sales responsible for all the national sales companies. And he'd asked me to come into Europe with him, go live in or go and work in Leverkusen at Mazda's head office. So we established a European fleet and remarketing business, because a number of the national sales companies in Europe weren't very well established in their relationships with the contract, hire companies, the rental companies, etc, etc.

Andy: 1:14:37

You tell the story, James, a little bit to me like it's Yeah, no, I think I guess I've been fortunate to try and keep this stuff happened to you, if you like but there's clearly a reputation. You know, there's clearly there are people coming to you and asking you to come and do things come and rejoin them come and work on another project. Whether it was Margaret good relations wherever I've gone, which is I guess why I and the consultant or whether it's this gentleman now, there seems to be it sounds quite effortless if you like the trajectory, that progression. But there's this recurring theme of people coming back to you and saying, we're doing something similar to what you've done before or that we think you'd be good for. Can you come and do it? probably made so much of the having to let ford financial down by resigning while still on international assignment

James Hopkins: 1:15:38

Yeah, it still bothers you, you're still aware of it. It does a bit Yeah

Andy: 1:15:40

And it's not just relations, that there must have been some good work done there for people to, to want to work with you again.

James Hopkins: 1:15:50

Yeah, no, I'd like to think that and I guess, I was open to the opportunity, because I've always been open to the opportunity of taking myself out of my comfort zone. I think there's a bit of a theme of that this whole piece on catch up. So I did take the opportunity, much to the annoyance of my wife, if I'm honest, back into personal life, to go and work in Cologne

Andy: 1:16:13

Right? Did the family go with you that time?

James Hopkins: 1:16:16

So yes, my, my wife and the children came with me to Cologne. We had a lovely house in southern cologne, close to the Rhine River, swimming pool in the garden. It was a really nice time we were renting that property, I was back on international assignment again, and establishing a new team in Mazdas European head office. What I probably hadn't thought through was, as we were developing all of the European markets, we lived in Cologne full time, but two days a week, pretty much every week, I was flying out to one of the countries that we were supporting, and leaving my wife without a job. But a network of expat wives if you like, and kids go into the International School. And on a Tuesday morning, I'd get on a flight to Switzerland to do an overnight in Switzerland and work with the team in Mazda Switzerland to establish their fleet and remarketing strategy, or Spain or Portugal or wherever. So probably three weeks out of four every month, I was away for two days a week. And that was again, with hindsight, quite selfish of me because I was pursuing my career. But probably the balance of the family wasn't where it should have been at the time. And I had a really good, professional couple of years, developing the whole as the Europe thing, despite it being the start of financial, global crisis. So most countries in Europe, and most of our customers in Europe were encouraged to sit in Germany, choose German product, they didn't really want a bunch of Japanese cars on their fleet, even if they were fabulous Japanese cars that I was trying to sell similar in Spain, similar in France, as you can perhaps appreciate. So it was great. We did our first I managed to persuade our colleagues in Hiroshima at Mazda Global Head Office, to allow us to bring a bunch of the industry influencers and leasing companies on a future product tour. That's the factory them to the Tokyo Motor Show. So that was chaperoning a whole bunch of people from App and Glasses and Euro tax and Lacquer and the Spanish and the Italian and the French residual value guides as well as the global leasing company people procurement guys to go out and see the future product strategy of Mazda, which worked really well was quite a challenge to chaperone an interesting group of people around fan and was a massive positive for me, personally, and in my career wise. Very, very good.

Andy: 1:19:09

Was this out of Cologne?

James Hopkins: 1:19:11

This was out of Cologne. Yeah.

Andy: 1:19:13

OK, and was this starting to this all this travel you were doing? Was this then putting a strain on your family situation?

James Hopkins: 1:19:22

Huge strain on my family situation

Andy: 1:19:24

Was that coming out? Was it coming out? Or was it okay?

James Hopkins: 1:19:27

No, it was coming out. It was there was a lot of stress as well. And with hindsight, I can absolutely see it. The other piece of context is because I'd put on so much weight in Budapest, and done quite a lot of corporate entertaining in the fleet job when I was at Mazda in the UK, I was probably at the heaviest I'd ever been at this point. I was also on a health kick. So I'd started doing in parallel with all of this, there's another story from Mazda where we sponsored British triathlon. So I got into doing a bit of triathlon, which I've sort of kept going in background over the years, you can see the bike behind me on the wall. So I was also training for the Cologne marathon, the same time as going away two days a week and having my family in a foreign country

Andy: 1:20:16

living quite the single life, weren't you?

James Hopkins: 1:20:19

Well, I didn't think so at the time, I really didn't. I thought I was there and present. But perhaps with hindsight, I got the balance wrong, right, completely open and honest admission on that.

Andy: 1:20:33

And thank you for sharing that. And have you managed to work it out?

James Hopkins: 1:20:37

No, we're now divorced. All amicable but yes, it's it's in a in a reasonable place and the kids and I've got a really great relationship and still spend lots of time with them. And in fact, today is my daughter's 24th. Birthday. So we're all out to dinner tonight. Yes, Isabel so. So the Mazda thing was going very, very well. But in fact, my daughter got to secondary school age. So she because we lived in Kent, she So you had another right fork, left fork moment between Mazda took the 11 plus abroad and managed to pass it and got a place at a grammar school in Maidstone. And so we were faced with the decision of do we stay in Budapest? at the time, that sales director at Mazda UK left to go to join Jaguar Land Rover. And so I'd started making noises about look, I've been abroad for a couple of years now, I think it might be time to go home. And this opportunity came up to go and work or Mazda UK. At the same time, I'd also been looking at other opportunities. So I'd started to leverage the network point. And I'd already put in place in my Mazda role, the global agreement with Leaseplan for the terms we would offer them for various volumes of cars they would buy across the globe, and ended up talking to the head of remarketing globally for Leaseplan, and one thing led to another and I happened to see a job available, at Leaseplan in the UK as head of remarketing. And so I applied for that and sort of named dropped Wolfgang who was the global head and booked myself an interview with that. So I was having two conversations for jobs at this point, one to come back as the Sales Director of Mazda UK, with potentially a view to go and take over the MDs role. Or I had this opportunity with LeasePlan. So another left fork, right fork moment we've talked about. One thing, I thought about it long and hard. And I chose the Leaseplan route. I don't know why there was something inside me that just felt that was the right way to go. I like the culture at Leaseplan, I like where that career could take me, it was something different. So I'd done a number of years at this point within an OEM, it was a new part of the industry for me to go and work in. And again, subsequently looking back and I'm still very fond of and in good contact with a lot of the people at Mazda UK. But the guy that took the job, the Mazda UK as sales director in 2011, is still the sales director in 2022. Because the very well established and great Jeremy Thompson, who's the Managing Director of Mazda UK is still the managing director of Mazda UK. Because he's got a very established team, a very established network, and they do a great job there. So interestingly, from a career perspective, the Leaseplan piece has worked out well and in my favour moving that way and I did five great years at Leaseplan growing the remarketing volume, the relationships with all of our partners, all of the end of life damage recharge, the inspect and collect. Sitting on the RV committee I got involved with the BVRLA. And I've chaired the BVRLA residual value and Marketing Committee there and done some speaking at events and various other things with the BVRLA and really enjoyed my time in the leasing industry. and Leaseplan and at the time you chose Leaseplan and that worked out really well. So I want to ask you what happened after those years at Leaseplan but before I do, I've remembered that you said that, at some point, your mum, your original mum got in touch with you through friends reunited after many years of not having heard from so please tell us a bit more about that story. Of course. So this was probably back in about 2004 I can remember sitting in Mazda credits offices in Brentwood, and it was a wet Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, I was due in to London for a meeting with I think our insurance partner Norwich Union at the time. And just on my screen, an email message popped up. And it was just two lines of this friends reunited website which said, hi James, don't freak out. I'm your mum, I've been looking for you for years. I can't believe I found you on this. I'm so pleased you've got a career and you did well at school, here's my details if you want to get in touch, it was sort of a pindrop moment for me, it was oh

Andy: 1:25:41

oh, my goodness my goodness, it took me a while to think it through, didn't respond immediately didn't know how to respond. Phoned my younger brother on the way to the station to say that I'd had this phone call his response because he was younger than me and probably had a different perspective on it was just delete it and don't do anything. He's a little more black and white than me, my brother, I appreciate in life, there are shades of grey in between one end of the spectrum and the other where you've sometimes got to compromise and do stuff. It's probably how my career's gone a little. My brother is a little more. Yes, a little more linear than that I think in his thinking. So I sort of ummed and ahed on this for ages, probably a day or two before I replied, and it wasn't to try and that wasn't sort of just to make a point to my mum, it was more I didn't know how to respond. And I think I just replied back with a line or two going, Oh, wow, I don't quite know how to respond to this, give me some time and I'll be in touch. It was literally that much. And I deliberately took it very, very slowly. It probably took, can I jump in? First of all, I'm imagining the absolute shock that it must have hit you when you saw that message. And just picturing you in your office sort of looking left and right thinking that, yeah, what has just happened here? At that time, though, was your understanding that your mum had just gone and not bothered to contact you?

James Hopkins: 1:27:29

I think I'd probably as I got older, I appreciated that she may have tried to contact, from gaining a bit more life experience. What was I then 34, 35. And I hadn't seen her since I was 10 years old. So 24, 25 years of a gap.

Andy: 1:27:48

So you weren't holding a grudge at that point.

James Hopkins: 1:27:51

To be honest. Andy, I was probably a bit ambivalent. I wasn't sure which way. I didn't have this yearning gap that I needed to go and find her but equally I wasn't angry or upset the other way.

Andy: 1:28:04

Yes. You you weren't looking for her?

James Hopkins: 1:28:07

No, I wasn't at that point. I'd thought about her occasionally, most definitely. And wondered, but I never quite did enough to then go and track her down. So fair play. And just the exact summary at the start of this is we did connect and we had a really good relationship together. But it took a long time to get to that. So it probably took a year for us to meet face to face of just writing emails backwards and forwards just of probably a paragraph or so each. And then it got to the point the Christmas after this had happened and this probably happened in April or May, I can remember it was boxing day and I was at home you know what Boxing Day afternoons like when you've had a heavy Christmas Day and everything else. The kids are charging around doing whatever I just went upstairs into the spare bedroom where the PC and everything was and just started writing an email and probably did two sides of A4 to her, which was quite cathartic and got a load of stuff off. And within about three weeks of that email, we ended up meeting up face to face which was a very emotional reconnection, as it were.

Andy: 1:29:17

Where did you meet?

James Hopkins: 1:29:19

at the Marriott Hotel in Maidstone in the lobby?

Andy: 1:29:22

And what were your thoughts going into that meeting? Who was there first?

James Hopkins: 1:29:27

Me

Andy: 1:29:28

So were you waiting in the lobby?

James Hopkins: 1:29:30

I was waiting just off the lobby on a little you know where in these big hotel rooms in hotel lobbies you have like a coffee table and two chairs either side of it type thing. So I was sat at one of those. The reason we met in Maidstone was my mom's journey really interesting. She was a journalist for a local newspaper moved with her husband to Derby. They then moved to Sheffield she got a job on BBC Radio Sheffield as a local presenter. She had her own weekly radio show I used to go and open fetes and stuff and I've still got the old reel to reel tapes of her doing her radio stuff in the 1980s, which is unbelievable. She then moved, her husband then moved to the Sunday Times, they moved to Wapping. I didn't know this, then moved from there to Ashford in Kent. So all the while in that 25 years, she'd done this huge journey round and ended up 25, 30 miles down the road from where I lived. And the hotel in Maidstone was right in the middle of where we both lived.

Andy: 1:30:35

So what did it feel like sitting there waiting for your mum to walk in when you hadn't seen it for how many years by

James Hopkins: 1:30:41

25 years, it was nerve wracking, exciting, didn't now? know quite how I was gonna react. And we just hugged each other and just started talking, she was crying, I was crying. People in the hotel lobby, were looking at as if we were a bit nuts. You could imagine. And we probably just sat there for a couple of hours and just talked loads of questions. What happened here? What happened there filled in the gaps. And it was Yeah, amazing. And from that period, in January, probably the rest of that year was just sort of gradually rebuilding the relationship and introducing her to my wife and then over time the kids. But because it was a very acrimonious divorce from my dad and step mum, and this is one thing I'd probably do regret, I never told my dad I'd got back in touch with my mum. Now they're both they're both passed now. And there was probably eight 9, 10 years when I saw my mum, saw my dad and my mum knew all about my dad, my dad never knew about my mum. Just to add another layer of complexity to this.

Andy: 1:31:57

Another plot twist.

James Hopkins: 1:31:58

Absolutely. So really went well. And we we rebuilt a really good relationship over a period of time I was able to convince my brother, I sat him down, probably six months after I met my mom and said, Look, I've now been in touch. She'd love to meet you. Here's the story, as I've heard it. He reacted initially badly, then thought about it, and then came back. And then the three of us met. So I brought my brother into the fold. And then that worked. So there was a real rebuilding of that relationship. And I'm smiling as I say this to you because, you know, I sort of found I saw bits of myself in her all the way through as we rebuilt that and that probably helped me quite a lot.

Andy: 1:32:40

Isn't Yes. Fascinating. And that that you saw bits of yourself in her even though you were seven when when she went and but obviously a lot of that was either genetic or already we take on board a lot in those early days. So yeah, I'm smiling. I'm also my eyes are a little moist, it's a hell of a story.

James Hopkins: 1:33:05

It absolutely is. And we sort of went through rebuilt. In fact, when I was in Budapest, she came out to visit with her husband, which was fabulous. And she also came out to visit us when so I got back together my mum, literally 18 months after we re established a relationship. I then moved to Budapest, right. So we were in Budapest for a while, came back, and then two years later went out to Cologne. So there was a lot of periods of time where whilst we re established the relationship, it sort of work through, the twist in the tail here is in 2013 My mum got diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and on the day she got diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I was due, I was working at Leaseplan and I was due at the Fleet News Awards that night, as a guest of BCA. And my mum got the diagnosis, her friends were around, my brother was there. I didn't really know quite how to deal with, we'd sort of suspected something wasn't right with her. But I went to the fleet news Awards, which I shouldn't have done with hindsight, but I decided to keep going, be strong you've committed you're gonna go. I think within about 45 minutes of sitting down at the table, I'd probably drunk two bottles of red wine, just because I didn't quite know how to deal with it all. And I didn't stay very long as you can perhaps appreciate but at least I showed my face. But my mum, my mum deteriorated really quickly. And five months after she got her diagnosis, she died. So and we'd been back together, probably at that time for about eight years. So she passed at a young age. But we had a great time together.

Andy: 1:34:55

Yeah, I was gonna say were you able to take some comfort from the fact that you had reconnected and had those eight years

James Hopkins: 1:35:03

had we not reconnected, she still would have got motor neurone disease and she still would have passed. In fact, her husband that she married just after she split with my dad in the 1970s died before her, he got cancer and passed away. So she her last two years, two and a half years she was a widow. So we spent quite a lot of time together in that period. And as I say, unfortunately, the she got this disease. And this is one of the interesting things in life, I've now got a one in four chance of having inherited the mutant gene that gives you motor neurone disease, and a 50% chance of that kicking in. Right. So in effect, I've got a one in eight chance of some time in my late 50s to 70 of getting motor neurone disease. So there's one way to look at it. The other way is I've got a seven out of eight chance of not getting it.

Andy: 1:35:54

That sounds like a good reframing of it. Yeah, right.

James Hopkins: 1:35:57

So we'll just go with it. And part of the reason I'm now setting myself up to work for myself, which is something I've always wanted to do is partly that at the back of my mind,

Andy: 1:36:08

I was going to ask has that impacted you in terms of your outlook, and it has

James Hopkins: 1:36:13

most definitely, and I think much more living for the moment. That drive of my career that did impact on my family life has now been replaced by a desire to do some really good work. But do that in the context of a work life balance? Yeah, that's probably best served working in the way I'd like to think I can establish the business moving forward.

Andy: 1:36:40

There are many people who have experienced the same as you, James in the sense of really focusing on a career and it unfortunately resulting in the marriage not working out or a marriage working out. And my question would be to you, you know, what, it's almost like you don't need to say anything, anyone who's listening to this, let it be a lesson isn't it that if you do single mindedly focus on your career, it can have a negative effect elsewhere. And if it does, you won't be the first you'll be among a very large group of successful career minded individuals who who've had that.

James Hopkins: 1:37:19

And do you know, from my experience that work both ways, whether it's men or women, that's not gender specific at all. I think if I look back on it, I probably concentrated on my, there's only so much time in a week, or a day to spend. And if you think about the balance of work, the relationship with your children, your relationship with your spouse, touch wood, and I'm there, my relationship with my kids, I think is as strong as it's ever been. And I probably unconsciously prioritise my relationship with the children probably over my my wife, which, if you've got a number of focuses and and things you need to drive through, you can't do everything, I think is the lesson that I will have learned from it. And I think increasingly with the experience I've gone through with both of my parents who have now sadly passed in the period of sort of 2013 to 2016 17 as I got to the next career fork in the road that we talked about, I ended up losing my mom, getting divorced and losing my dad, all in about three years, three and a half years. And I guess that's partly why I'm now doing what I'm doing and why I've just taken that time to restock. It was one of those things, it's always been at the back of my mind. I know I needed to focus on building something for me, having that work life balance. And I guess, coming out the back of the pandemic now, that gave the second catalyst. It's been sort of two jolts if you like around, life's more important than chasing a career. Although I look back, hence the career review thing. I look back and think, wow, it's been a journey. And I've really thrown myself into loads of things that are outside of my comfort zone. But now's the time to focus on the balance.

Andy: 1:39:08

Be really intentional about where you spend your time and who you spend your time with. We've that's quite a quite a sombre passage that, James and thank you for being so incredibly open with me about it. And with listeners, of course, and I'm thinking if any of my listeners are feeling uncomfortable, then that's probably a good time to start thinking about where are you spending your time? Yeah. Are you spending enough time with the people you love and you really care about and that you want to grow old around? Because we're we'd seem to be getting even more busy even more, you know, corporate life is taking even more of a toll than allegedly has

James Hopkins: 1:39:52

Well I guess and the absolute extreme of that just to bring this bang up to date is Elon Musk today saying everybody's got to work really hard at Twitter, right? We want you to be hardcore whatever it was, which is just nuts. Right. That's the complete opposite of the conversation you and I've

Andy: 1:40:08

He sometimes, yes swims against the current but so very just had a thought provoking passage there that you shared. Thank you. I'm thinking, let's start to look forward in a moment, let's start to talk about what the future looks like for you, James and your new venture. Before we do that, a quick summary of what happened after after Leaseplan and your most recent professional experience that you're talking into your consulting career.

James Hopkins: 1:40:40

So I guess my my last six years have been incredibly enjoyable, massive learning experience with Constellation Automotive Group. So that spun out of the acquisition of BCA by the business that became BCA Marketplace PLC. So at the time that business was bought, that was predominantly BCA, and We Buy Any Car.com, those two paths were pretty much the sort of entity. That then spun out into the acquisition of Scottish Motor Auctions. I joined in early 2016 as a customer. So the whole point around, put your money where your mouth is James, from my Chairwoman, and joined to try and pull together all these disparate parts of the group in a role that was Director of Group Solutions, which was basically saying we had a marketing business, a logistics business, a remarketing business, a car buying business. And we began to then go and purchase some refurbishment capability. So a company called Amber Zeti, and a company called Paragon that were the biggest Efleet business in the UK. And my job was to try and pull all of those strings strings together into one seamless solution for our customers like a BMW Financial Services, like Volkswagen Group, Mercedes Benz UK, in terms of the cars that they brought into the country, port of entry, put out on company car fleets, press and demo fleets, rental, stuff that then came back at the end of that period whether it was a captive car or a rental car was then refurbished to a standard, and then supported by BCA through its platforms to remarket back to the dealer networks predominantly, with all of the transport in between being done by the various transport divisions of BCA. And that worked really successfully. The business won a number of contracts and I moved on to be managing director of what was the fleet solutions business, which was the 12 B fleet refurbishment centres across the UK that had the capacity to store sort of 70 80,000 vehicles on the ground, predominantly big old airfields, with lots of runway space and large aircraft hangars that we turned into body shops and mechanical workshops and smart repair shops and various other things. So I guess reflecting back on my time there, it was about companies being purchased by a bigger organisation and being assimilated into some of that culture and the values of that organisation. So I guess some of the knowledge and skills that I acquired there were about trying to create teams, create teams with a purpose and a vision, but also understand their part in a much larger group. So if you're trying to produce provide a service from the start of the automotive supply chain, right through the first life of a vehicle and the second life of a vehicle, why is it massively important that we execute our part of that because we're a cog in a bigger machine. And if our cogs turning well the whole supply chain continues to move and supply well. So it's a very interesting time in terms of pulling some of those parts together. Alongside that was a small wheel refurbishment business in Milton Keynes that we bought a company called Supreme Wheels. And I was very, very proud of what we did there. I worked as Director of Supreme and the sort of key interface from the wider group into supreme wheels set up by two very entrepreneurial and inspirational people Peter and Sue Dobson, who, in their mid 50s, sold their house, everything into setting up a wheel refurbishment business for Mercedes over the road from Mercedes Benz UK and lived in their daughter's garage for the first year. 10 years on had a really successful business that was bought by BCA. They then had a three year burnout period with the business and I was very pleased to work with them, to get them to the point of the profit in that business going up four or five fold over the three years that we had it together because we brought the power of the group there and some extra customers expanded the business out and they were able to sell the business and retire a couple of years ago. So that was a real leap of faith for them into this business. And it it worked really well for them and fair play to them having the confidence and bravery to everything on the line that 55, 56 and at 65 you know, they were really successful in terms of selling the rest of the business to BCA.

Andy: 1:45:33

Very good, very inspirational.

James Hopkins: 1:45:36

That was a great piece. And then I guess it spanned through there and into to the last three years, which has been all about online used car retail. So I was the key interface in the group for our relationship with Cazoo when they started.

Andy: 1:45:52

Very interesting.

James Hopkins: 1:45:53

Yeah, it was very, to the point that Cazoo bought a bunch of cars off of BCA and asked us asked me and the team, to receive them on one of our prep centres, assess them refurb them and start to get a pool of a couple of 1000 cars ready for their launch to the public. So we got the first cars in in May 2019. And they went live in October, November 2019. So if you think about it, a car get prepped to a perfect standard, or the standard that Cazoo wants. In the period of time that you're building that stock of cars to launch is you need a decent stock of cars on the website for all the marketing that Cazoo have done to bring the traffic to the website. So probably over a period of about five months prepared 3000 cars for them. Now, first cars that were prepared, got finished in May, but the site didn't go live until October. So those cars have been prepared to a standard they have to be perfect to be by definition imaged and videoed. They then go get parked in a storage compound for a period of time, you then need to think about what does the maintenance programme need to look like to support those cars? And how do you keep them turning over and keep the batteries right and ready for when they're sold. Because of course the customer can choose to have that car delivered within 72 hours,

Andy: 1:47:20

I was thinking very fluid, very focused on really getting cars in and out as fast as possible, not preparing them to a wonderful standard and then storing them for six months while you build the website

James Hopkins: 1:47:31

you needed to get the business started from scratch. So it needed to get to a critical mass of vehicles. Once it was up and running, it became very fluid, right? The learnings in that first six months became really valuable as we then went through the longer period of time. So actually the the immediacy of that consumer reaction, so a lot of those sites went from a b2b business to a b2c business. And the b2c element of that became really important in terms of the attention to detail. Now subsequently, Cazoo bought Imperial cars and had some physical locations that were customer contact centres. Predominantly, the model is different because the car has to be perfect when it leaves on the car transporter.

Andy: 1:48:20

Yeah, there's a there's a whole separate conversation we could have around that model, and how the extent to which it does differ from the traditional world and also what has subsequently happened to Cazoo

James Hopkins: 1:48:34

Absolutely, yeah,

Andy: 1:48:35

you're setting up a business so what are you doing now? Tell us about it.

James Hopkins: 1:48:40

So I've set up a business, Kendall One Consulting, which is really pulling on my experience of everything I've done. You've seen, I've worked for an OEM. I've worked in this fleet business, I've worked in the retail business, I've done the whole Ford options selling piece with dealers, big leasing company remarketing. And then most recently, all of the defleet and the used car online stuff. So I guess my pitch is I've probably got a broad range of experience across the whole automotive supply chain and increasingly, if you are a retailer or leasing business, that maybe needs to get into shorter cycle stuff like subscription or Flexi rent, or indeed you're a small, medium, large franchise or independent dealer group, taking advantage now of the way technology is supporting culture and people in terms of delivering a better consumer experience is where I think I can add some value around various businesses.

Andy: 1:49:55

And how can people get in touch with you if they want to

James Hopkins: 1:50:00

People can get in touch with me via my LinkedIn profile, which I think will be.

Andy: 1:50:06

I can put that in the show notes. Yeah.

James Hopkins: 1:50:09

And there is a very simple email address, which is Kendalloneltd.

Andy: 1:50:16

How would you spell that?

James Hopkins: 1:50:23

Kendalloneltd@outlook.com which isn't the snappiest of email addresses, but it will do for now

Andy: 1:50:31

Okey doke. We can put that in the show notes as well. James, thank you very much indeed, for sharing your story with me so openly, it's been a really great way for me to connect with you. And I hope my listeners will feel a similar sense of connection because of the way you've you shared your story. So thanks very much for joining me today. And maybe we will have a conversation again in a few months time about a topic that's happening in the industry and get your thoughts on that.

James Hopkins: 1:51:02

Andy, no problem. It's been a pleasure. And I guess, hopefully what this has shown is I am fairly open and bring a degree of enthusiasm to everything that I do. So yeah, look forward to catching up again, thank you very much for the opportunity.

Andy: 1:51:19

You've been listening to Career-view Mirror with me, Andy follows, I hope you found some helpful points to reflect on in James's story that can help you with your own career journey or that of those who lead parent or mentor. You are unique. And during my conversation with James, you will have picked up on topics that resonate with you. A few things that stood out for me were his parents divorcing when he was seven years old and him not having contact with his mum for 25 years, him messing up his A levels, which meant that he didn't get the place at Oxford University that he'd been offered, the sense of playing catch up that stayed with him for a large part of his career, and may well have acted as an intrinsic motivator to keep pushing himself, the thread of digitalization that runs from the early project to put property details online through to his most recent exposure with Cazoo and Cinch, how, to quote our previous guest Matthew Boguradzki from Virgin Galactic, James's reputation network and luck played a part in him being offered some roles along the way. How, as is the case for many hard working men and women, ultimately, his focus on his career contributed to the failure of his marriage, and how as a result of that he advocates for a more intentional balancing of life's priorities. You can contact James via LinkedIn or email and we'll put links in the show notes to this episode. We publish these episodes to celebrate my guests careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. And I'm genuinely interested in what resonated with you. Thank you to all of you for sharing your feedback. Thanks also to Hannah and Julia, who as part of the Career-view Mirror team here at Aquilae work so hard to deliver these episodes to you. Thanks for listening