That's Klassified

When one dealer sales manager was laid off during the pandemic, he started buying and selling used cars from home. Three years later, John Evans visits his showroom

- John Evans

What did you do during Covid? Start writing a book that you never finished? Fail to learn an instrument? Steve Kempster started buying and selling cars from his driveway and now is turning over around £300,000 per month from his first showroom.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? Bag a few cars for a song out of the classifieds, add a margin and ask the punters to form an orderly queue. If only...

"There are three ways to succeed in this business: work, work and work," says Kempster from his Sparco office chair, alongside that of his co-director, Richard Turrall.

For Kempster, work started the moment he was made redundant from his job as a sales manager at a major multi-franchised dealer group, where he had been for more than 10 years.

"It was July 2020, bang in the middle of Covid," he says. "They had to reduce head count and I was out."

So there he was with a house, responsibilities and £4000. What to do? Realise a boyhood dream and start buying and selling cars, that's what. Being a stickler for detail and doing things properly, in the first week he got the basics sorted: a website, advertising and warranty accounts, a card machine, branded clothing, business cards and trade plates. Oh, and a name: Klassified.

"It was inspired by an Instagram page I set up 10 years ago called Klassy Racing, full of pictures of modified cars," he explains.

Now to go shopping. With a golden rule to always source from private sellers, he bought his first two cars: a Ford Fiesta ST and a Vauxhall Astra VXR. They were sold in days, and by the end of August, he had sold 10 cars.