In focus


JCT600 Vehicle Leasing Solutions


Managing director Ben Creswick tells Jack Carfrae why size is not everything for one of the oldest names in fleet.


behind them, but JCT600 does. N


Below: Ben Creswick, Managing Director at JCT600 VLS.


The heritage derives from the retail business, which long preceded the leasing arm and operates as a separate entity, but it is a fun back story. The three letters that prefix the company name are the initials of Jack Crossley Tordoff, who took on the family motor dealer business from his dad, Edward, who himself established it as a single garage in Bradford in 1946. It has since mushroomed into one of the UK’s major dealer groups.


ot many leasing companies can trace their roots back more than 75 years and even fewer have serious motorsport pedigree


Jack’s Mercedes 600 provided the firm’s numerical suffix and bore the number plate ‘JCT600’. He was also a dab hand behind the wheel, and his exploits included winning the 1973 Circuit of Ireland Rally in a 2.7- litre Porsche 911 Carrera, featuring the very same plate.


He died in 2021, but the businesses live on in retail and leasing forms, the latter as JCT600 Vehicle Leasing Solutions (VLS). It does not go back quite as far as the sales arm, but nonetheless has more than three decades behind it, having been established in 1988. The whole caboodle is still owned by the Tordoff family, which has its perks, according to Ben Creswick, who joined the leasing division in 2018 as commercial director and has been at the helm as MD since 2019.


“It’s very, very different to what I have been used to in the private equity world with the likes of Zenith and FMG. They are on a different journey, whereas a family-owned company has a lot of benefits to it. “If I’d gone into a meeting [at a private equity firm] it might go something like, ‘we are going to do something with this department here and that will save us 200 grand, which will mean we can use that 200 grand to invest over here’. Here, it is very much, ‘that, over there, is actually OK. There are good people there, and they’ve been here a long time. Why don’t we just give you the 200 grand to invest?’ You don’t have to [lose] something over here to do something over there.”


The firm had 6,942 vehicles on its books in 2022 – up 9% year-on-year – so it is far from the biggest leasing firm on the block. Creswick reckons it will comfortably crack 7,000 in 2023, but he is not especially fussed about reaching Lex or LeasePlan levels. “We don’t want to be the biggest,” he says, “we don’t have some magic number that we’ve got to hit in terms of fleet growth. We’re there to deliver the best possible service to the customers that we have and attract similar companies.”


Its online platform, Origo, was launched in 2020 and is designed to direct companies and drivers to the most appropriate forms of funding in as straightforward a manner as possible. He says even he has been bamboozled by the multitude of tropes and


26 | May 2023 | www.businesscar.co.uk


issues in fleet, so the system needed to distil them to a level that could be easily absorbed by non-specialists.


“When I joined the business, I think at that point it was WLTP or some other such issue that we were facing – post-Dieselgate and all that kind of stuff. After being in the accident management world with FMG and coming back to contract hire, I suddenly realised there were more acronyms and things that I just didn’t understand. It seemed to have become more inherently complex, and I said, ‘there must be a system we can create that allows us to provide whatever the right scheme is, at the right time, for the right company, and the driver. And that’s what we built with Origo.”


The system is something akin to a price comparison website for fleet funding, because it is designed to steer companies and drivers towards whatever method makes the most sense. That is increasingly salary sacrifice, which the firm says now accounts for a lot of its current and new business, and it has arguably become a smaller version of the likes of Tusker and Zenith – larger leasing firms known for their emphasis on salsac.


“Size-wise, we can do small, medium, large corporates,” says Creswick, “we’ve got no constraints there, because the system can roll things out very simply, and we don’t particularly have a target market – it’s just anyone who is looking to launch a salary sacrifice scheme as an employee benefit. They can look at our system, see what it does and how it takes the employee through the journey.


“It’s a modular platform. The implementation team can go into the admin system and just say, ‘right, it’s Joe Bloggs PLC, it’s these 20 employees, this is their policy document with all their respective terms and conditions. It’s been built to provide clarity in quite a complex environment.”


He believes that level of spoon-feeding is useful for seasoned fleets and drivers used to company cars, but it is especially handy – if not essential – for salary sacrifice takers, many of whom are completely unfamiliar with the process.


“I’ve been dealing with salary sacrifice since 2008, when we created the product


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