BM did good business at Equip Auto

As the Equip Auto show in Paris drew to a close, CAT took the opportunity to ask UK exhibitors what they thought of the event.

On the whole their response was positive. Some even managed to do a good deal of business at the show. One of those was BM Catalysts, whose stand was full to bursting for much of the show’s duration.

Sales and marketing director Mark Blinston said: “We have had a fantastic show. As a company, we have invested heavily in our presence which is notable by the size and location of our stand at this year’s show.

“As a result of  this investment, and the growing reputation and awareness of our brand, we have been incredibly busy with both existing and prospective customers. We have had record numbers visit our stand over the week and we are excited about the future business that this will bring us.”

What was your experience of Equip Auto? Email your thoughts and comments to darren.moss@haymarket.com

Delphi's unit also offers TecDoc integration

Delphi has launched its own diagnostic tools platform for the aftermarket.

At the Equip Auto show in Paris this week, Delphi unveiled its Linked Diagnostics System. The company says its platform takes ‘being connected’ in the workshop to a whole new level.

Utilising TecDoc software, technicians can plug the unit into the universal connector in vehicles to get an immediate readout of technical errors. As well as determining fault codes the unit also guides technicians to the suspected fault.

Technicians then have the choice to order spare parts directly through TecDoc. Delphi says this will be the first unit to offer diagnostics and ordering through TecDoc in one step.

Delphi has also collaborated with TecDoc on another project, the WebCat – an internet-based catalogue detailing product applications and lines.

The past eighteen months has been very profitable for Delphi, as the company reports doing $35 billion worth of business.

The company’s Mike Rayne said: “As vehicles move from being the traditional mechanical model into a more electrically based unit, it represents a struggle for the technician. This is all about brining the technician along, it’s about Delphi participating in the natural evolution of the industry.”

The sale is subject to approval by the competition authority

Japanese firm Nisshinbo Holdings has agreed to buy TMD Friction.

The friction materials manufacturer will continue to trade as TMD Friction, operating as an independent wholly owned subsidiary.

The combination of the two companies will create one of the world’s largest brake friction materials manufacturers, with a projected revenue of £1 billion and employing over 6,000 people worldwide.

The transaction is expected to be completed following approval from the competition authority.

TMD has grown rapidly over the past three years, presenting a 20 percent increase in sales in 2010 up to €637 million and proforma EBITDA earnings up 160 percent to €71 million.

TMD Friction will continue to be led by Derek Whitworth along with his management team. NISH board member Koji Nishihara will join TMD’s board of TMD.

TMD chief executive Derek Whitworth said: “I am delighted to be joining the Nisshinbo group of companies. This is a great opportunity for TMD to continue our development with a strong and successful partner.

“Their expertise, particularly in the markets where we are growing fastest will be invaluable as we seek to accelerate our expansion and continue to provide innovative and leading products to our customers.”

Koji Nishihara said: “TMD is a leading global brake friction manufacturer with strong brand recognition and established technology leadership dating back 100 years. The combination of NISB and TMD under the ownership of NISH creates the largest, most capable global automotive brake friction manufacturer in the world.”

ECP has been sold for £225 million

Euro Car Parts has been sold to American aftermarket firm LKQ Corporation for £225 million.

The sale comes as LKQ Corporation, which is one of the largest North American aftermarket companies, continues to make a round of investments. The acquisition of Euro Car Parts marks the company’s first investment outside of North America.

The current sale price could rise by a further £55 million if certain growth targets set by LKQ are achieved in 2012 and 2013.

ECP founder and managing director Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia has said that he intends to remain at the company, as well as retaining a substantial financial interest in Euro Car Parts. Many of the current ECP board members also intend to remain with the company.

He said: “LKQ Corporation is arguably the most dynamic and successful company in the North American automotive aftermarket for collision parts. They have a dedicated and focused management team which has built an innovative company with a very strong work ethic. We feel very much in tune with this culture and with our new colleagues, all of whom have many years of experience in this business.”

“Under my leadership, this new partnership with LKQ Corporation will help the Euro Car Parts team continue our fast expansion in the UK parts aftermarket, in existing products and market sectors, but also in some new ones.”

LKQ Corporation’s President Robert Wagman said: “The acquisition of Euro Car Parts represents an important strategic step for LKQ Corporation.  It has always been our goal to acquire the best companies in their respective markets.  Euro Car Parts represents that type of a company in the UK market with its impressive track record of growth, excellent distribution network and strong management.

“Euro Car Parts provides an ideal launching point for our European entry. With this acquisition we will work with Euro Car Parts’ customers and suppliers to expand the use of alternative automotive parts in the UK.”

Singh recently said he saw no reason why his dedicated and energetic team shouldn’t continue the drive to create a company with a turnover of £1 billion and 10,000 employees across Europe.

Over the past twelve months ECP has opened a brand new 500,000 sq ft National Distribution Centre in Tamworth, as well as adding 9 Regional hubs and numerous new outlets.

The National Clearence Centre has launched a scheme collecting and selling old or obsolete parts, with some of the profits being donated to the automotive industry charity, BEN.

The NCC, part of the Foray Motor Group says it will be working with dealers and other suppliers to collect and sell as many obsolete parts as possible.

The centre says it will be happy to arrange collection of parts from anywhere in the UK.

Foray’s parts director Howard Jenkins said: “These are parts which have sat on the shelf, gathering dust and taking up space and which in most cases have long since been written off.

“This is an ideal opportunity for dealers to clear space in an environmentally responsible way and support their industry’s charity – and of course while we are a Ford dealer group this scheme’s not just about Ford parts so we’re inviting businesses from all franchises to get involved.”

Dealers and other parts suppliers who would like to support this initiative and BEN should contact Gareth Taylor, National Clearance Centre manager on 07867 520268 or by emailing garetht@fmg-uk.com .

Comma's range of oils cater for the vast majority of the UK car parc

Life isn’t getting any simpler, whether you’re talking about tax returns or the fluids that the UK’s millions of cars need to keep ticking over.

The days when one or two different viscosities of oil would do for most of the car parc are long gone. As tolerances, materials and technology develop and change, engines are putting ever more specific demands on their oils.

Gravesend-based Comma Oil and Chemicals says coolants are going through the same proliferation, so garages face even more potentially critical decisions. What used to be a simple swap of liquids at service time has become a minefield.

For the garages, factors and manufacturers that can keep pace with the times, however, there are great opportunities.

Comma, of course, is keen to take advantage, protecting and building on its 24 percent UK market share of oils and the 30 percent chunk of the market for other fluids. Sales and marketing director Mike Bewsey believes getting Comma’s message and advice down the line to the garage, helping them to sell the benefits to the consumer, will have the company’s cashtills ringing.

“The extended chain of communication is difficult, it can break down at any point if you’re not clear about it. It’s very difficult to get the quality message all the way down to the consumer,” he says.

Comma has been hard at work on a new programme to help get that message across. To help garages and factors identify the right fluids for the right cars, Comma has developed new features for its website and updated packaging and marketing material. The company did research to find out what the market wanted.

“Rather than do what we believed would be right, we did research on it to make sure it was right,” says Bewsey.

Comma's new site promises big business opportunities

The new site, up and running now, features a vehicle registration look-up, as well as make and model dropdown menus, to display the appropriate liquids for a particular car.

Limitations with the information held on the DVLA database mean there isn’t always an immediately definitive answer, but in these cases the site asks the user questions to reach the right product. Is there a diesel particulate filter or catalytic converter fitted, for instance?

The results of the research that Comma did also means the site explicitly says when the company doesn’t have a suitable fluid – for the rear transaxle of a Ford Kuga, for instance – rather than leave a result field blank. After all, if there’s a gap, garages or factors might assume the fluid for a similar car will do.

It might, but it might not. It’s important not to underplay the difficulty in providing the information on which fluids to use, since it’s such a complex area. The website covers 98 percent of the car parc – more than 8500 different engine types.

Nearly half of these (48 percent if you want to be picky) are covered by 5W-30 oil. Not all 5W-30 oils are created equal, however. Comma has seven different blends, and the consequences of using the wrong one, or any other fluid, can be costly.

There’s the unfortunate case of one garage which fitted the recommended oil for a four-wheel drive 3.0-litre Audi to a two-wheel drive model. It ruined the continuously variable transmission and resulted in a bill running into the thousands.

Then there’s the different oil needed for Volkswagen Group cars on longlife service schedules rather than fixed intervals. Or unit injector engines versus common rail. Or delightful DPF differences on Renault Lagunas.

The 1.5-litre engine used in this model is available with and without exhaust after-treatment. Use the wrong oil, with too high a sulphated ash content, and you’ll clog the filter.

Bewsey says: “We’ve had two enquiries this year from factors over this model where the DPF has ended up broken when the guide wasn’t followed and a wrong oil was used. In each case, the factors ended up having to meet the cost of replacement systems, and they probably wouldn’t have got much change from £1,800.” Ouch.

These types of problems aren’t going to go away, either. In general the market trend towards smaller cars, with smaller-capacity engines with higher outputs than before, will drive the proliferation forward as tolerances get ever tighter and newer materials, such as magnesium alloy, are used.

Smaller and smaller engines are also using turbocharging technology, with the majority of failures in these systems being traced back to the incorrect fluids being used. They generate more heat, too, so coolants are having to do a lot more work to keep temperatures down.

Use the wrong coolant? It could cause erosion of the waterpump and turbocharger failure – not a cheap thing to put right if it goes wrong on your account.

“Modern day cooling systems are immensely sophisticated and even, most ‘basic’ are packed with different materials – aluminium, copper, brass, rubber seals, plastics and so on,” says Bewsey. “Finding a fluid that is compatible with, and crucially that prevents corrosion of these different materials isn’t that straightforward!”

If you happen to see a car within its warranty period, too, a manufacturer might well quibble over paying out if the wrong fluids have been used, even for an unrelated problem.

“The aftermarket did very well to retain the right to repair under Block Exemption. In this economic climate it’s a great opportunity for workshops to acquire new business as consumers trade out of franchised dealerships for better value servicing work.

“If workshops want to capitalise on that opportunity with 100 percent peace of mind, they need to get the right product – we can help them to do that.”

To keep in the game, Comma has invested heavily in its on-site laboratory in Gravesend. It tests deliveries of bulk oil, tests the different oil and chemical blends the company then mixes, tests fluids going down the production lines and then tests them again before they’re sent out.

Comma has also invested heavily in motorsport

Whether it’s oils, coolants or other fluids, the lab conducts more than 21,000 tests a year to ensure the blends exceed the tight ACEA specifications and perform exactly as they should. So far this year there have been only five instances were results were not immediately satisfactory and demanded further checks to confirm liquids conformed to the parameters.

Between the arrival of the raw materials and the dispatch of the goods, products go through a barrage of 30 tests to ensure they’re bang on the money.

It’s this work which backs up the company’s guarantee that a product is suitable. It aims to give garages the same peace of mind they’ll get with a Gates or Dayco timing belt promise, but the research Comma did into the new website and marketing revealed that many garages didn’t realise it even existed.

“The guarantee is what we put on as the ‘skin’ over all of those things, but if we didn’t have those tests underneath, the guarantee wouldn’t work at all. We couldn’t do it, and offer the guarantee, if we didn’t have the confidence in our product.

“In fairness, it isn’t new. We’ve offered our guarantee to the market place for some years, but what we are trying to do now is help distributors and workshops better leverage it.”

Bewsey believes there are plenty of ways to get that leverage and cement the relationship between consumer, garages and Comma other than price (see panel): “The UK is very price sensitive, although not as much as you might think. Price is there, but it’s not first or second – it’s around the sixth consideration.”

Besides the continual development and testing work at Gravesend, Comma spends a great deal of time on the road to reach the industry at shows like Mechanex. It says it has worked hands-on with 2000 technicians at TeckTalk Live events at shows last year and trained a further 3000 in partnership with factors like Camberley Auto Factors.

It also has 11,000 UK workshops signed up to its Professional Partner Programme, which it launched in 2001, all receiving the company’s printed application guide.

It’s not just about the UK for Comma anymore. Over the past eight years it’s enjoyed particularly steep growth in other markets. Export now accounts for 38 percent of the company’s turnover.

The company does particularly well in Iceland where there’s more Comma product in each car than in any other market. A shame for Comma, then, that the Icelandic car parc is 100th of the size of the UK’s, but the company’s still proud about the achievement.

It likes to think Icelanders go for its products because they have the confidence that they’ll continue to work no matter what the extremes of weather.

Wherever the market happens to be, though, it’s the 100 percent attention on the aftermarket that Comma also thinks gives it an added edge.

None of the growth in export has come at the expense of market share or service in the UK, Bewsey is quick to point out.

Comma has unrivalled access to base oils, to keep the UK demand fully met through peaks and troughs, and since the company is able to switch blends and make most of its own containers on site it can very quickly respond to changes in what the demand is for.

“We focus on the aftermarket, that’s what we’re about. If the aftermarket dies, we die with it,” says Bewsey.

As long as both stay on their toes, there doesn’t seem to be any danger of that happening to either, thankfully.

Rotating electrics remanufacturer Autoelectro is celebrating passing it’s annual ISO9000 inspection visit.

Autoelectro managing director Tony Bhogal believes the company is the only independent full-line remanufacturer of rotating electrics in the UK to have the standard.

ISO900 is awarded when companies are able to demonstrate efficient management which help to provide customers with excellent service, improve motivation amongst staff and reduce waste.

Established in 1986, Autoelectro has gained approval from leading buying groups this year and also recently completed a round of investment in more warehousing and stock.

We at CAT need to gather as many opinions from as many sections of the industry as possible, so please take time to fill out our BIG CAT questionnaire.

Tell us where you think the industry has come from, where it’s at and where it needs to go in the future. What are the opportunities you’re most excited about? What are the biggest problems the industry is facing?

It shouldn’t take too long to fill in, and every scrap of information we get from you will help to make CAT and even bigger, even better aftermarket magazine with even more bite.

So, click here and start telling us what’s what…

The ECP rocketship shows no signs of slowing

Whichever way you cut the company numbers it looks deeply impressive, daunting even. It’s now 35 years since the original Highways Autos store was opened by 18-year-old Sukhpal Singh in Wilsden but, with a projected turnover of £340 million this year, ECP seems nowhere near the zenith of its rocketship growth trajectory.

Singh recently said he saw no reason why his dedicated and energetic team shouldn’t continue the drive to create a company with a turnover of £1 billion and 10,000 employees across Europe. That’s about three times the size of the company now, but could just be the tip of the iceberg.

When CAT went to meet the ECP team at its Wembley HQ and massive Tamworth national distribution centre, we discovered turnover could get close to £1billion in the UK alone. And expansion into Europe? Why limit yourself to looking at Europe when the rest of the world is there, too?

ECP’s journey could eventually take it around the world, powered by a philosophy of getting every detail right at a local level, but how quickly can it get to the £1 billion mark and where will it go from there?

Let’s start here at home. Singh says expansion into Europe and beyond is not in his ‘immediate plans’, with a target to get to half a billion turnover in the UK over the next 36 months: “There’s enough to do here in the UK for the next three years. We’ve got geography to cover and product ranges to cover as well. There’s so much to do.”

ECP people’s director Martin Gray says: “For every £10 spent in the UK we only £1 to £2 of it. There’s still 80% to 90% of the mark left for us to acquire in the UK.

“I’m not saying that we want all of it, but could we get 30% of the spend? I wouldn’t say that was unreasonable. Could that get us close to £1bn in the whole of UK? I think so. At that point we’d be looking at other expansion as well.”

More of that added expansion a little later on, but development of the network will drive growth in the UK until then. New ECP branches are currently opening at the rate of 10 to 15 a year with the immediate target of having 110 branches to cover 97% of the UK.

At the time of writing there were 87, the 87^th opening in York the day after our visit, but this figure will already be out of date by the time you read this. Huddersfield also arrived in July, with Singh saying ECP is now looking at Potters Bar, Stoke and further north to Scotland.

With this sort of branch rollout rate, ECP has got well practiced in the art of rolling into town. It uses geomapping technology developed at the University of Leeds to find appropriate locations and, says Gray, has a ‘cookie cutter’ approach in setting up shop – up to a point.

The difficulty comes in finding the right people, says Gray, who is ready to spend £1 million next year in employee development. Each region will have a centre of excellence, in branches, were training is available.

Gray says: “There’s not a people tree I can pluck the right kind of people off – it’s our biggest single barrier to growth. We do work at a ferocious pace, it’s very intense, and for a lot of the time business can be very full on. It’s a bit controversial but it’s like a positive drug, it’s intoxicating.

“It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay,’ says the ever-enthusiastic Gray, “but why don’t you come touch us and feel us and see if you like us?”

After branches, there’s an even more rapid story of growth story with the Bosch-backed AutoCrew garage concept for which ECP is the exclusive distributor. The first opened in February, there were 70 when we visited ECP, but this will number 80 by the time CAT lands on your lap. By the end of the year there will be 150.

The process of percolating and integrating into the marketplace doesn’t end there, either. Right now, garages are also trialling a brand-new ECP garage management system. With a new catalogue in the pipeline, too, the aim to help garages with a suite of support and, of course, ensure ECP’s closer connection with their business.

“You’ll be able to press a button and get repair times, ordering schedules, technical information and all of those services,” says Singh. “A lot of garage workers today are very good guys and very hard working, but they might not be business people. We can help with that.”

The system will roll out officially next year with ECP hoping to have 2000 garages using it by the end of 2012. We don’t doubt they will, so watch this space.

Singh says growth the impressive national distribution centre in Tamworth can cope with growth up to £700 million with increased throughput.

It’s a model of efficiency. Voice verification means pickers have two free hands to grab parts. At the moment the pick rate per person is 145/150 items per hour, helped by the usual trick of having the most commonly-needed parts at eye level.

There is, of course, the ‘long tail’ of parts which logistics director Steve Horne says ECP has to have to ‘have a ticket to the party.’ This means Tamworth has 100% coverage of the car parc with 114,000 parts available to branches overnight. Every part for every car, after all.

ECP’s hubs mean it can get parts for 92% of the car parc to branches within the hour, however, while the branches themselves carry 15,000 different parts to cover 85% of the car parc.

Improved return rates will also help to save the company a fortune and boost profits going forward. At the moment it’s running at 18-19%, which is pretty good, but the target is to cut this to 10% in 12 months. The new catalogue and garage management system will help with this and encourage garages to order online by offering discounts for doing so.

And then there are the new product lines for the UK. Horne is having to move some things around at Tamworth to make room for some tyres – 60,000 of them. If ECP are sending vans to garages with injectors, pumps, belts and oils on them, why not tyres?

What about acquisitions? Do other companies need to be looking over their shoulders?

At the moment organic growth is the name of the game. Singh says he did enter negotiations with an unnamed company in the UK, but back out, preferring the less messy blank sheet of paper that comes from starting new branches.

“There’s always room for a fresh idea,” says Singh, reflecting on how a demand-driven delivery process would surprise those in, say, Germany used to allocated slots. “They’re quite rigid and inflexible, If you introduced the concept of on-demand you could change things. Our cataloguing would be a big advantage.” Other markets excite Singh, too.

“Eastern European markets have another ten years of growth. It will be one of the considerations. We might say let’s do China, let’s do India because they’re going through phenomenal growth – it’s double-digit growth, year-on-year.”

There’s enough to be getting on with in the UK for now, but what of the tactics when the time is right to explore the globe? Gray says: “We have the ambition and appetite for expansion in various parts of the globe, but it will be driven through in a risk-averse way.

“We don’t have a plan for world domination – we’re not a James Bond villain stroking a cat. We’ll go for controlled expansion, looking at the markets locally, assessing the market, looking at our supply relationships and then driving that very aggressively. When we go into a country, we will do it very aggressively.”

Is all of this happening too fast, though, even the growth just in the UK? Singh answers. “Read the balance sheet. Last year, for example, to show our faith in the business, we capitalised our reserves  – £28 million. We could have taken as a dividend in one hit, but we capitalised it to show this a long-term situation.

“We have very little borrowings, we don’t operate on an overdraft. Our growth is financed through our cash flow. We buy very well, we sell well, make good profits and reinvest it.”

In any case, the £1 billion figure isn’t being chased for the sake of it, says Gray. It’s a very big number, and one that’s easy to get fixated on, but Gray says it’s just a future milestone that will be pass on ECP’s journey into the future. It’s not the final destination, because there is no final destination.

“I don’t think there is an end game. For true entrepreneurs, people who build real value, it isn’t about the exit or the end. They don’t actually get there. Am I at the end point? No. And if the answer’s ‘no’ then lets keep on doing it and doing it and doing it – there’s still so much, if only I had more time! That attitude is quite rare.”

Singh giggles and says: “You can have a busy day, and do a extraordinary amount of business, but then you get maybe 6% missed calls and you think ‘my God’ – if we didn’t miss those calls it could have been even better!”

Did he ever dream the shop in Wilsden would turn into the ECP we have today? “I wasn’t aiming this high,” he admits, but he must have been aiming pretty close.

With relentless energy and a huge amount of momentum, the ECP team is heading into orbit from where it need never fall back down to earth. The view from up there can be dizzying.

The ECP spaceship is still taking off

Whichever way you cut the company numbers it looks deeply impressive, daunting even. It’s now 35 years since the original Highways Autos store was opened by 18-year-old Sukhpal Singh in Wilsden but, with a projected turnover of £340 million this year, ECP seems nowhere near the zenith of its rocketship growth trajectory.

Singh recently said he saw no reason why his dedicated and energetic team shouldn’t continue the drive to create a company with a turnover of £1 billion and 10,000 employees across Europe. That’s about three times the size of the company now, but could just be the tip of the iceberg.

When CAT went to meet the ECP team at its Wembley HQ and massive Tamworth national distribution centre, we discovered turnover could get close to £1billion in the UK alone. And expansion into Europe? Why limit yourself to looking at Europe when the rest of the world is there, too?

ECP’s journey could eventually take it around the world, powered by a philosophy of getting every detail right at a local level, but how quickly can it get to the £1 billion mark and where will it go from there?

Let’s start here at home. Singh says expansion into Europe and beyond is not in his ‘immediate plans’, with a target to get to half a billion turnover in the UK over the next 36 months: “There’s enough to do here in the UK for the next three years. We’ve got geography to cover and product ranges to cover as well. There’s so much to do.”

ECP people’s director Martin Gray says: “For every £10 spent in the UK we only £1 to £2 of it. There’s still 80% to 90% of the mark left for us to acquire in the UK.

“I’m not saying that we want all of it, but could we get 30% of the spend? I wouldn’t say that was unreasonable. Could that get us close to £1bn in the whole of UK? I think so. At that point we’d be looking at other expansion as well.”

More of that added expansion a little later on, but development of the network will drive growth in the UK until then. New ECP branches are currently opening at the rate of 10 to 15 a year with the immediate target of having 110 branches to cover 97% of the UK.

At the time of writing there were 87, the 87^th opening in York the day after our visit, but this figure will already be out of date by the time you read this. Huddersfield also arrived in July, with Singh saying ECP is now looking at Potters Bar, Stoke and further north to Scotland.

With this sort of branch rollout rate, ECP has got well practiced in the art of rolling into town. It uses geomapping technology developed at the University of Leeds to find appropriate locations and, says Gray, has a ‘cookie cutter’ approach in setting up shop – up to a point.

The difficulty comes in finding the right people, says Gray, who is ready to spend £1 million next year in employee development. Each region will have a centre of excellence, in branches, were training is available.

Gray says: “There’s not a people tree I can pluck the right kind of people off – it’s our biggest single barrier to growth. We do work at a ferocious pace, it’s very intense, and for a lot of the time business can be very full on. It’s a bit controversial but it’s like a positive drug, it’s intoxicating.

“It’s not for everyone, and that’s okay,’ says the ever-enthusiastic Gray, “but why don’t you come touch us and feel us and see if you like us?”

After branches, there’s an even more rapid story of growth story with the Bosch-backed AutoCrew garage concept for which ECP is the exclusive distributor. The first opened in February, there were 70 when we visited ECP, but this will number 80 by the time CAT lands on your lap. By the end of the year there will be 150.

The process of percolating and integrating into the marketplace doesn’t end there, either. Right now, garages are also trialling a brand-new ECP garage management system. With a new catalogue in the pipeline, too, the aim to help garages with a suite of support and, of course, ensure ECP’s closer connection with their business.

“You’ll be able to press a button and get repair times, ordering schedules, technical information and all of those services,” says Singh. “A lot of garage workers today are very good guys and very hard working, but they might not be business people. We can help with that.”

The system will roll out officially next year with ECP hoping to have 2000 garages using it by the end of 2012. We don’t doubt they will, so watch this space.

Singh says growth the impressive national distribution centre in Tamworth can cope with growth up to £700 million with increased throughput.

It’s a model of efficiency. Voice verification means pickers have two free hands to grab parts. At the moment the pick rate per person is 145/150 items per hour, helped by the usual trick of having the most commonly-needed parts at eye level.

There is, of course, the ‘long tail’ of parts which logistics director Steve Horne says ECP has to have to ‘have a ticket to the party.’ This means Tamworth has 100% coverage of the car parc with 114,000 parts available to branches overnight. Every part for every car, after all.

ECP’s hubs mean it can get parts for 92% of the car parc to branches within the hour, however, while the branches themselves carry 15,000 different parts to cover 85% of the car parc.

Improved return rates will also help to save the company a fortune and boost profits going forward. At the moment it’s running at 18-19%, which is pretty good, but the target is to cut this to 10% in 12 months. The new catalogue and garage management system will help with this and encourage garages to order online by offering discounts for doing so.

And then there are the new product lines for the UK. Horne is having to move some things around at Tamworth to make room for some tyres – 60,000 of them. If ECP are sending vans to garages with injectors, pumps, belts and oils on them, why not tyres?

What about acquisitions? Do other companies need to be looking over their shoulders?

At the moment organic growth is the name of the game. Singh says he did enter negotiations with an unnamed company in the UK, but back out, preferring the less messy blank sheet of paper that comes from starting new branches.

“There’s always room for a fresh idea,” says Singh, reflecting on how a demand-driven delivery process would surprise those in, say, Germany used to allocated slots. “They’re quite rigid and inflexible, If you introduced the concept of on-demand you could change things. Our cataloguing would be a big advantage.” Other markets excite Singh, too.

“Eastern European markets have another ten years of growth. It will be one of the considerations. We might say let’s do China, let’s do India because they’re going through phenomenal growth – it’s double-digit growth, year-on-year.”

There’s enough to be getting on with in the UK for now, but what of the tactics when the time is right to explore the globe? Gray says: “We have the ambition and appetite for expansion in various parts of the globe, but it will be driven through in a risk-averse way.

“We don’t have a plan for world domination – we’re not a James Bond villain stroking a cat. We’ll go for controlled expansion, looking at the markets locally, assessing the market, looking at our supply relationships and then driving that very aggressively. When we go into a country, we will do it very aggressively.”

Is all of this happening too fast, though, even the growth just in the UK? Singh answers. “Read the balance sheet. Last year, for example, to show our faith in the business, we capitalised our reserves  – £28 million. We could have taken as a dividend in one hit, but we capitalised it to show this a long-term situation.

“We have very little borrowings, we don’t operate on an overdraft. Our growth is financed through our cash flow. We buy very well, we sell well, make good profits and reinvest it.”

In any case, the £1 billion figure isn’t being chased for the sake of it, says Gray. It’s a very big number, and one that’s easy to get fixated on, but Gray says it’s just a future milestone that will be pass on ECP’s journey into the future. It’s not the final destination, because there is no final destination.

“I don’t think there is an end game. For true entrepreneurs, people who build real value, it isn’t about the exit or the end. They don’t actually get there. Am I at the end point? No. And if the answer’s ‘no’ then lets keep on doing it and doing it and doing it – there’s still so much, if only I had more time! That attitude is quite rare.”

Singh giggles and says: “You can have a busy day, and do a extraordinary amount of business, but then you get maybe 6% missed calls and you think ‘my God’ – if we didn’t miss those calls it could have been even better!”

Did he ever dream the shop in Wilsden would turn into the ECP we have today? “I wasn’t aiming this high,” he admits, but he must have been aiming pretty close.

With relentless energy and a huge amount of momentum, the ECP team is heading into orbit from where it need never fall back down to earth. The view from up there can be dizzying.