Autosmart Welcomes New Sales Development Manager In The South East

Richard has spent the last 20 years in the telecoms industry, most recently as a director of the Carphone Warehouse Group in charge of developing, recruiting and running their international franchise programme. He has masses of experience in working with franchise start-ups get the most out of the opportunities open to them by supplying objective and supportive coaching, solid development programmes and achievable plans.

Richard tells us, “Working along-side Gary Salters, my role is to help our franchisees reach new levels of business performance by focusing on improving key business drivers. This is a two-way approach of which the most important aspect is listening to our franchisees and to their customer’s needs.”

Justin Woodman, Autosmart’s Managing Director, says, “We are excited to be working with Richard during this next phase of the company growth and look forward to improving our two-way communication with all our franchisees”.

Richard continues, “I took the role with Autosmart as the company has the golden combination of a long-standing and widely regarded brand; a reputation for quality; a desire to grow significantly by challenging the competition and most importantly for me a franchise network of professionals hungry to take on this challenge, to beat the competition and be rewarded for it.”

Richard has a collaborative approach with his franchisees and encourages them to work “smarter not harder” to find cost savings, develop direct marketing and drive sales opportunities from group buys.

Richard says, “My current focus is working with four of the Kent franchisees. Just like the rest of the franchise network, they want their businesses to grow and own as much of the local business as possible. Spending time with each of these four franchisees individually and then working on our findings as a group has allowed us to find and win new customers whilst retaining existing accounts. There is nothing better than taking a large customer order out from under a competitor and seeing their barrels of cleaning products chucked out!

“We finished January with a spectacular result with each of the four franchisees posting fantastic sales and growth; two of them showing growth over 20% up on last year. I look forward to adding value to all of the franchisees in the South East and to help them achieve their goals.”