Finelist Group plc

Background:

Prior to establishing Finelist, I was the Operations Director for Autela, a major player in the fragmented, £5 billion UK automotive aftermarket.

In 1991, I led a team that completed the management buyout of Autela, using our newly formed holding company Finelist Group and backed by 3i and Nat West Ventures.

Operations:

Our mission for Finelist was to consolidate the UK automotive aftermarket, establish strong organic growth and then float the company with a public listing on the London Stock Exchange. This would provide strong sources of equity for further opportunities, acquisitions and organic growth.

In 1994, Finelists’ public listing on the London Stock Exchange was achieved, placing us in an excellent position to further accelerate our rapid market consolidation, through being a ‘disrupter.’

Over the next six years, we had become the UK’s fastest growing national distributor in the automotive aftermarket. As well as continuing to achieve strong organic growth, we successfully acquired and integrated 60 businesses into the Finelist Group.

A major part of these business integrations involved onboarding staff. Headcounts at the newly acquired businesses ranged from 20 to 2000, with MotorWorld and its staff across 400 retail outlets at the top end of the range. It was important to manage this aspect effectively and efficiently too and we successfully achieved this with our own rigorously exacting 100-day integration programme.

By the start of 2000, Finelist had disrupted the market and achieved extraordinary growth, using various tactics. These included removing links from supply chains and introducing new digital ways to transact and communicate with our 7,000,000 retail and 40,000 trade customers, to maximise sales opportunities.

At this point, the Group had thirteen autonomous subsidiary operating companies organised into three divisions: retail, distribution and manufacturing, each with their own operating board. In February 2000, the business was sold to French conglomerate Autodis.

Outcomes and numbers:

During my time as founder and CEO of Finelist we achieved the following:

• Grew turnover from £10m to £482m and profits from £100k to £32m
• When we floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994, our venture capitalist investment partners walked away with a £15 million return on their original £600k investment.
• Employees increased from 150 to over 8000
• Number of sites grew from 25 to 800
• Became the number one company in the UK parts aftermarket
• Each pound invested in 1991 was worth £288 by the time the business was sold in 2000