The big leasing companies generate the big headlines. Alphabet’s merger with ING and Lombard’s exit from leasing and subsequent cleanup by ALD, for example, made the cover of BusinessCar and soaked up their fair share of column inches last year.
Look a little further down the leasing company list and things become quieter, so the smaller firms have to work harder to get themselves noticed, which often means doing things a bit differently to the establishment.
Ogilvie, which currently sits just inside the top 20 in BusinessCar’s BC50 list of the top 50 leasing companies, took the highly commended spot in the Best Leasing and Contract Hire category in our 2012 Techie awards with its Mi Fleet online reporting system.
The swish technology has proved a hit with those using it and came to existence as part of a rebrand and customer service drive over the past four years which has also seen the firm grow its fleet size.
The company has positioned itself differently to your average leasing outfit. Sales and marketing director Nick Hardy reckons that the majority of his rivals are reasonable in terms of what they offer but, by and large, they offer the same thing to the same audience, so the only way to stand out is to be and look unlike the norm.
“The majority of leasing companies out there aren’t bad. We wanted to differentiate ourselves, so we told our marketing partner to look at all the BC50 companies’ sites and make us different. We want to be visually more interesting than anyone else and a leader with customer service and IT,” he says.
The upshot of that is that the company isn’t chasing numbers in the way the larger leasing operations are, instead placing an onus on customer service and sophisticated technology for smaller fleets. It introduced its Mi Fleet reporting system around 18 months ago and the idea was for it to be better looking and to produce more visually attractive reports than the industry equivalents, as well as being easier to use and navigate.
Hardy continues: “We said, ‘why should funky IT be the domain of 1000-vehicle fleets?’ We don’t have 1000-vehicle fleets but there’s probably an attraction for a 100-vehicle fleet or a 150-vehicle fleet in having all of the funky IT that will help them to better manage their fleet.
“It works on a traffic light system. It shows progress: how many deliveries you’ve got in place; have you got any invoices overdue – red if they’re overdue, yellow if they’re due, green if they’re not; how many vehicles you’ve got overdue for service; how many vehicles have an MoT overdue; how many renewals are due. So instantly a customer looks and says, ‘if they’re all green, everything’s tickety boo. If I’ve got any red lights, I need to do something about it’.”
Sales and marketing executive Matt Topham claims the reports contain standard-issue vital stats, but it’s easier to see and process them via the software: “You used to just get files dumped on your desk and you’d have to wade through them. The data that lies behind that is what we’ve been providing for years, but it’s how it’s presented to you. We’ve turned data into information, and visually attractive information at that.”
Before the rebrand and the introduction of Mi Fleet, Ogilvie had around 8000 vehicles on its books. It has grown and continues to do so but bosses have no desire to be crossing swords with the six-figure fleets of Lex Autolease or Leaseplan.
“The 8000-vehicle fleet, three years on, is now a 10,700-vehicle fleet, and we’ve aspirations to get to 12,500 in the next couple of years. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that, but there’s no time scale on it. There’s a danger of writing business you wouldn’t normally write, because it’s not profitable,” says Hardy. “Over the next two years or so we’ll get close to 12,000, so 12,500 is realistic in the next two to three years. After that point we’d like to get to 15,000. When we get there I think we’ll cap things ourselves; after that, we potentially wouldn’t be able to deliver the customer service we provide because you can’t be as close to everybody. If you grow much more, the way you’d have grow the business would change our ethos.”
That size – or lack of it – means the company isn’t afraid of writing business that normally deters the bigger players, such as extended contracts. “Sometimes you can get burnt – you can get hit with high maintenance costs,” says Hardy. “But it’s profitable and it’s flexible for the customer. Most clients want some flexibility and they don’t necessarily want to commit to another four years. As long as the costs allow us to, we’ll discount it by up to 10%. It’s good for us and it’s good for the customers. It’s not extremely profitable, but it is still profitable, and why would you want to prove your inflexibility to customers by saying they can’t? It keeps and wins us business.”
