A talk with Jim Mackenzie from the car dealership, Dicksons of Inverness, an independent business in a sector that’s dominated by national brands, and the importance of internal communication within the business.
“I think the heart is the internal communication within the business, right from the top, right through the business. We make sure that everyone knows very quickly what’s going on. Be it good or bad, they’re aware of it. We don’t like rumours. So, I think the heart of the business is we work from the director’s side through the management structure, into the other members of staff very quickly. And I think that’s the answer, we’re in effect we’re one body and we communicate within that body very quickly.” — Jim Mackenzie, Dicksons of Inverness
Podcast excerpts. Interview by Drew Hendry
Drew: It must be challenging, not to get crowded out by national marketing. It must take more independent thinking to compete. How do you tackle that?
Jim: I think in the early days of the motor trade everything was advertised through the newspaper and press. It was difficult then because some of the larger companies had a much larger budget than me and could plaster the papers with adverts. Things have changed dramatically over the last 10 years and I was lucky enough to get into the digital world quite early on and went on a course, out with the motor trade, that taught me about AdWords and Google etc. Now with our budget, which is still fairly high but nowhere near the size of the national companies, we’re able to compete now locally because we can pinpoint our market through digital advertising and that’s made a huge difference to us.
Drew: Your customers are coming back time and time again. But nowadays there’s more likely to be a ‘conscious consumerism’, an approach that is now at an all-time high. Customers are more likely to be driven by a commitment to making purchase decisions, have a positive social, economic, or environmental impact. Tell us what your business does to offer a conscious consumer something different.
Jim: I think in the motor trade that’s quite a simple answer — we’ve moved into electrification and we’ve had to, we’ve had no option. We would have anyway, as a number of businesses in town have. I think the problem up here in the Highlands is we we’re a bit slow in getting off the mark with that, but it’s really taken off now. Probably a third of our demonstrators we run on electric vehicles, solar electric vehicles. Another half will be hybrid vehicles. And within three or four years, we won’t have an option anyway. We’re going to have to run electric vehicles and we’re delighted with that. The biggest challenge now is getting the points within the area that we can charge these vehicles and make them work properly for us.
Listen to the full Podcast to learn more about Dicksons of Inverness and how they responded to the Covid pandemic by successfully implementing social distancing measures to protect their staff and customers.