32 entrepreneurs
A personal approach in the pursuit of excellence
Graeme Potts’ CV reads like a who’s who of the business world. Marks & Spencer, Inchcape and the RAC are just some of the corporate giants he’s worked for, yet he readily admits his achievements have been driven by good fortune rather than a grand career plan. Today he is best known as the founder and managing director of the Eden Motor Group, a network of 12 dealerships across the south and south west of England, which employs 500 people and has a turnover of around £200 million. An armchair sports fan, he still manages to attend home games at his beloved Sunderland Football Club and enjoys nothing more than mentoring up-and-coming young managers. Alison Dewar found out more
Now 56, Potts was born and brought up in a former mining village just outside Sunderland. With both parents working – his father was a clerk and his mother a shop assistant – he says he and his two siblings enjoyed a happy, if not especially affluent, home life. Academically bright, but probably not focused enough, he attended the local grammar school before studying economics at Leicester Polytechnic, a result that didn’t sit well with his teachers, who said he was clever enough to go to Oxford. On leaving university, he beat competition from fellow graduates to win a coveted place on a Marks & Spencer graduate training programme and four years later was headhunted to join the motor giant Reg Vardy plc, going on to become CEO. From there he took on the role of group managing director of newly-demutualised RAC Motoring Services, turning around a sharp decline in membership numbers and returning it to profitability. Several years as Inchcape MD UK, Europe and Latin America then followed, giving him the chance to fulfil his international ambitions. In 2008 he changed tack and, striking out on his own, went into a joint venture with Vauxhall, buying five car dealerships with a turnover of £60m in 2008, transforming them into the business they are today. Potts has two adult sons, both of whom work in automotive retail.
Who inspired you?
I had a headmaster at primary school who used to talk about a desire for excellence and I still remember it very well; that pursuit of excellence has stayed with me in everything I do. I also admired my father, who worked exceptionally hard in what was probably a very mundane job in order to provide for the family.
Take us back to your first job at M&S, what was that like?
Were you always ambitious?
I had one driving ambition from the age of 12, and that was to buy a car of my own. As a family, we didn’t have a car until I was 15, but I worked hard and saved hard to reach my goal. My elder brother and I had paper rounds, but he used to spend his money every week at the football, whereas I saved mine and had a second Saturday job as well. I passed my test quickly and bought a battered old mini-van with a bus seat mounted on blocks in the back – I bought it for £70 and sold it six months later for £110, which wasn’t bad.
Career-wise though, I never had a plan. Apart from my first job at M&S, I have never applied for a job in my life. When things have come my way and they have felt right, then I have done them to the best of my ability.
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I was hugely impressed with their culture. Every manager was expected to know how to do the jobs of the people in their teams, so that meant working in the warehouse, in packaging, on the shop floor. They also taught me that with seniority comes responsibility and accountability and that’s something I hold dear today. I spent four and a half years with M&S and that time was very formative in terms of attitude to business and an unremitting focus on standards which could never be compromised.
Why did you leave to join Reg Vardy?
I knew Peter Vardy personally and he wanted to develop the business. One day he said why didn’t we combine his salesmanship and my retail expertise and work together. That was in 1983 and the next 16 and a half years were a rollercoaster. Peter was an out-and- out entrepreneur, whereas I see myself as an entrepreneurial generalist, but we worked well and it gave me a great experience in taking a smaller business up through various acquisition and expansions and on to flotation. It was a very small senior team so I was dealing with all sorts of things, from HR and training to lawyers
THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – THAMES VALLEY – OCTOBER 2014
and accountants. I called it the “university of business experience”.
What I particularly loved in the later phases was being able to take those younger managers who had a real commercial drive and business nous and coach their business careers. I believe that some skills are more innate, they can’t be taught because it’s all about passion and mindset that moulds them into good business people. When I look around today, I still see several of my alumni in the industry, it was a bit like giving them a masterclass in business skills.
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