Unfiltered with Lochan Sim: What a Day at Silverstone Revealed About the Motor Trade

What a Day at Silverstone Revealed About the Motor Trade

I recently spent a day at Silverstone with a group of customers from across the motor trade. It was a great event, and as always, the most valuable part was the conversations.

Spending time with people who run businesses day to day gives you a very different perspective to what you see in reports or dashboards. It’s grounded, practical and often more honest.

Across the day, a few themes kept coming up. None of them were surprising in isolation but hearing them repeated across different businesses made it clear just how consistent some of these pressures are.

The reality facing garages and motor factors

Running a garage or a motor factor business right now is not straightforward.

Finding good staff continues to be a challenge. Several people talked about how few applicants they’re seeing, and how difficult it is to attract skilled workers into the trade. In some cases, they said people would rather take less demanding work elsewhere, even if it pays slightly less.

Rising employment costs are also making it harder for skilled roles to remain financially viable, leaving many motor factors balancing the need for expertise against the cost of developing new talent.

At the same time, margin pressures are forcing businesses to think more carefully about expansion. Several described a balancing act between taking advantage of growth opportunities and protecting profitability, with decisions around staffing, stock levels and investment coming under greater scrutiny than in previous years.

Customer expectations are also evolving. Speed matters, whether that’s getting parts delivered quickly or being able to pay through different channels. A number of businesses are investing in ecommerce, even if it is still only a small part of their revenue today. There’s a recognition that customers want choice in how they interact and how they buy.

All of this sits in the background of every operational decision.

Cash flow is still front of mind

Cash flow came up in almost every conversation.

Being able to invoice and collect payment as quickly as possible is seen as critical, particularly amid economic uncertainty. The longer the gap between those two things, the more pressure it puts on the business.

These businesses are still heavily reliant on traditional ways of taking payment, including cash on delivery and phone payments, but there's a clear effort to move away from that. They know they need to shift customer behaviour, but it's a balancing act. Push customers towards digital payments too quickly and some may resist the change. Move too slowly and businesses risk falling behind competitors that offer a more convenient digital experience.

One of the more interesting discussions centered on what had and hadn't worked when encouraging customers to adopt new payment methods.

Several businesses shared positive experiences of introducing pay-by-link gradually, using it first for specific customer groups or alongside existing payment options rather than forcing an immediate change. Others spoke about the challenges of changing habits that had been established over many years, particularly among long-standing trade customers who were comfortable paying the way they always had.

The consensus was that success comes from making the new process easier and more convenient than the old one, rather than simply asking customers to change. For example, where pay-by-link has been introduced, the feedback is consistent. It helps shorten the payment cycle and improves the likelihood of getting paid without chasing. That combination is what people are looking for.

As Dylan Allan, Administrator at BVS Brackley, noted in a recent conversation with us: ‍

There's no excuse for people not to pay. It's as easy as sending them the link."

Learn more: How BVS Brackley Cut Outstanding Debt by 75% and Stopped 'No-Show' Losses

Too many systems, not enough visibility

Another common theme was how much time is spent managing across different systems.

Payments, invoicing and reconciliation are often handled in separate places. That creates more work and makes it harder to see what’s going on at any given moment. Several people talked about the cost of having either multiple systems, or multiple people trying to keep everything aligned.

What people are looking for is something simpler. They want to be able to see what's been paid, what’s still outstanding and what needs attention without having to piece that together from different sources. They want clear dashboards that reduce the amount of manual tracking.

Instead of adding new functionality, what really matters is making what already exists easier to manage.

Fraud is becoming harder to ignore

The topic of fraud stood out across our conversations.

One customer talked about being hit with a £2,000 chargeback from a phone payment. It was a single transaction, but the impact was significant enough to change how they approach payments going forward.

Awareness of the risks associated with taking payments over the phone is growing, and more businesses are trying to move away from that approach. More secure methods, like sending a payment link, are increasingly seen as a better way of handling those transactions.

It’s not just about avoiding losses. It’s about having confidence that when a payment is taken, it won’t come back to cause problems later.

There’s still a lot of efficiency to unlock

Beyond payments, you could sense that across the businesses we spoke to, there’s still a lot of room to improve how things work.

Sourcing parts was mentioned as a particular pain point. It can still take too long and require too much effort, especially when availability is tight and customers are waiting. Discussions of how to simplify refunds and returns also occurred, along with how to improve communication through better notifications and order tracking.

None of these are new problems, but they add up. Small inefficiencies across different parts of the business can quickly turn into a significant drain on time and resource

Where payments fit into this

What these conversations reinforced is that payments shouldn’t sit in isolation. They should be connected to cash flow, customer experience and how efficiently the business operates overall.

When payments are slow, difficult to track or spread across different systems, they create extra work and delay getting paid. When they’re simpler and more connected to the rest of the business, they remove friction rather than add to it.

That was the common thread across everything we heard. People are looking for ways to make every day processes faster, clearer and easier to manage, not for new functionality and advancements that only make things more complicated.