My first taste of business began in my father’s Toyota dealership in Liverpool where I spent a solid five years learning everything ‘automotive’ – from how cars go together to what happens when they crash. It was the latter area which captured my imagination and I soon became a self-employed automotive crash repairer. It was a passion which often saw me working beyond midnight.
After landing a role as production manager at Wirral repairer, Fred Littler (now Nationwide) in Moreton, I was catapulted into a larger organisation which ramped up personal development. I remember dealing predominantly with Direct Line who had fastidious customer service standards – a key area which I greatly value in my businesses today. I was soon headhunted to work for Howard Basford flagship body-shop in Ellesmere Port, and had quickly amassed more than 10 years in the motor accident repair industry gaining in-depth knowledge and expertise.
However, I had always wanted to be a motor engineer. A fairly new motor assessing company had opened up and were looking for engineers. It was a massive learning curve becoming an engineer. I became a ‘poacher turned game-keeper’ going from body-shops to assessor. I was there for the three years loving my job before receiving a sledgehammer blow of redundancy.
I was out of work within days. It was sink or swim. But it was this adversity which brought out the best as I spent a weekend setting up Laird Assessors (LA). I started trading on the Monday. We act as an expert witness firm supplying the legal, insurance, motor trade, police and fleet firms with independent motor vehicle reports.
Necessity is the mother of invention and I ran LA from my spare bedroom for the first year, in 2000. When staff joined I needed office space and moved to what is now Whitfield Business Hub, in Heswall. At the time I was just a tenant, but as Laird grew we expanded and I bought the site two years ago.
We carried out a complete overhaul dragging the office space into 21st century and created a modern business hub. We soon recognised a lot of businesses within the hub, while excellent at doing their core job, struggled in areas outside their skill base. It reminded me of my early days and led to the development of Whitfield Business Support – which runs within the hub and delivers ‘full circle’ business support services for firms across the region. We love to see business flourish and grow, and we recently took on chairing the Heswall District Business Association providing pro-bono work for the local businesses and the community.
Customer service is at the heart of everything we do. This has been key to our success. We also look to innovate and developed our own software system to log data. Other companies then wanted it so this led to the creation of our software company, Livepoint, based in Hoylake.
Laird now employs more than 60 staff and is the premier automotive assessor in UK. Much of the success is down to our amazing team excelling at customer service. We focus on being honest, skilful and acting carefully with integrity.
We have been able to attract and retain these employees by making Laird a busy, exciting and fun place to work. We are committed to profit linked bonuses, training and development and plenty of extracurricular including skiing holidays, cycling, runs, rowing, community events, charity fund raising and staff parties.
I couldn’t have predicted this outcome and every day is wildly different; but I wouldn’t have it any other way – loving every day!