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How we built a business out of recession — Honda says goodbye — chapter 7
The story of CitNOW*
This is the 7th chapter about CitNOW, the company started from a kitchen table in Winnersh, Berkshire. If you’d like to read from the beginning, here’s a link to chpt 1. Each chapter is roughly a 5-minute read and is an early draft of a book.
CitNOW was founded by Andrew Howells and Donna Barradale in 2005, although the company was only registered in 2008. In February 2018, we sold the company to Tenzing, a UK private equity company. It has been sold again since.
Until now, I’d always assumed that Honda would want to adopt CitNOW for its dealer network, starting in the UK before spreading to Europe. It was because Honda was my only manufacturer relationship and partly a stubborn streak of optimism. After all, the only real success I had to show for my efforts so far was approval from Adam** for use in one Honda dealership in Stoke. Whether it would be used was a significant obstacle which I hadn’t even begun to address.
These were also unprecedented times. The 2007–2008 banking crisis had affected everyone, and the world was well and truly in recession. I was starting to look beyond Honda, hoping to find other dealers who might find CitNOW a service they wanted to use.
