In my role as the retained marketer at Kalimex, the UK distributors of the JLM Lubricants’ range of products, I recently caught up with Barry to discover the secrets behind his success. Tell us about your business My Dad started Ewan Lawson Motors in 1983, moving it to Larbert in 1985. I joined in 2002 after finishing my apprenticeship at a Ford dealership. I was keen to share what I’d learned but found it hard for Dad and the techs to listen to me and to try out new ideas. We plodded along, not replacing techs that left so it was just me and Dad in a run-down workshop. Some days we only had a few jobs. There was no investment in tooling, no marketing. We didn’t push ourselves despite moving into one of the three units we now occupy. Our lack of investment in training was costing us dear. We were turning away loads of 20 AFTERMARKET SEPTEMBER 2023 BUSINESS www.aftermarketonline.net Dee speaks to the owner of Larbert-based Lawson Autotech to find out more about the business, and the brains behind it all diagnostic work, and I cringe at the thought now, telling customers to take their car to the dealership. In short, we were not making money and had zero commitment to the business. What was the turning point given you’re now in a vastly different situation? The DPF Doctor network. I’d started watching videos to learn more about the faults we were seeing in the workshop. I found a member of the network about an hour away from us who’d come out to do some DPF jobs. He suggested we join or at least think about it. At the time, the joining fee included 12 cleaning products and the JLM professional DPF Toolkit. But it was still a considered purchase given we were overdrawn. But we decided to try it. We realised how far behind we were and how we could use software to evaluate and find faults. It was a massive IN THE DRIVING SEAT WITH BARRY LAWSON BY Dee Blick
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