Peter Vardy: fatherly influence
From selling cars to setting up lessons in leadership, Peter Vardy is on a new journey, he tells JOHN GLOVER
Leadership comes in many forms. A politician, a successful entrepreneur or maybe an inspirational boss. It is often stereotyped and misunderstood, but automotive entrepreneur Peter Vardy has never made a secret of the influence his father had on him. And he is drawing on that experience to help others learn the craft of leading others.
Vardy is best known for the car dealerships that he set up and ran after his father, also Peter, sold the family business. He’s since offloaded the showrooms and made the transition into the financing side of car ownership. He also has a passion for leadership and wants to make it more accessible and better understood, believing that doing so could help the UK, and Scotland in particular.
Vardy is behind the Glasgow leadership summit, The Calling, an event in Glasgow on 2 October targeting politicians, business people, charity workers, and anyone else who wants to learn from, and be inspired by, great leaders. Among the speakers is Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy, the head of Street Soccer David Duke, and Jo Salter, Britain’s first female fast jet pilot. At the core of Vardy’s approach to the event are the lessons his father taught him.
“He had a slogan, ‘in pursuit of excellence’. It was always about trying to have the best quality business. I learned about having a clear vision of where you want to go, and a strategy on how to get there. Another thing was the importance of the right leadership team, the right team of people in the right seats.”
The lesson Vardy returns to most, though, is what his father did as he was building his business. The government approached him to help turn around failing schools in the North East.
“I would have said, I’m too busy, I’ve got a company to run, it’s making money, I’m going in this direction with my strategy. I don’t know how I’d have reconciled stepping out of my lane to do that. But he did it.
“He worked out that if teachers could focus on teaching, the thing they’re good at, they’d get better at it, so he brought HR, finance, and IT into the school environment, to let head teachers lead teaching.
“He put the right structure in the schools, and lo and behold, schools went from a 47% GCSE pass rate to 98%. He did that five times, over five schools.”
Vardy, 47, is unambiguous about what he considers his father’s real legacy. “I’d argue his biggest success wasn’t the shiny thing about cars, thousands of people employed and all that. His biggest success was probably teaching 6,000 young people a year, from some of the most difficult areas of the North East, and achieving those pass rates, and changing a whole generation’s life opportunities, across two generations, over 25 years.”
After his father broke his leg in Edinburgh and had to get an operation, the surgeon who operated on him was one of the ex-pupils in one of those schools in the North East.
“The surgeon said, ‘I wanted to operate on you myself because I saw your name and I wanted to do it myself, because of who you were’.”
Vardy adds: “When you see an example like that as a leader, and see how they did it, it gives you a pattern to follow. I might not achieve as much as him, but I could have a stab at it, because I can see how it’s done.”
That same instinct to build something with lasting impact, rather than simply commercial success, is what led Vardy to launch The Calling.
“I thought, well, why don’t we do something that’s more Scottish, something that would fit with our time and our generation? I didn’t see anything in Scotland that was similar. I thought, why don’t we put on a leadership conference in Glasgow?”
“It’s a pilot. We’d like to do it for the next five years, that would be our ambition. But you also have to see whether it fits with the audience that’s coming, and whether they’re getting value from it. If it’s not what people want, then at least we’ve tried.”
Vardy says said the responses from the speakers has exceeded his expectations, singling out American author Todd Henry. “He said, ‘what else can I do for you?’ I wasn’t expecting that question. He asked if I wanted him to reprint his book and rewrite the first couple of pages for everyone coming to the event. Some of these guys and girls have been very, very generous.”
The Vardy name has been synonymous with the automotive industry for more than a century. His grandfather, Reg Vardy, started his business journey by selling coal from a handcart in Sunderland. His son, now Sir Peter, is worth around £140m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.
The young Vardy’s move into the car dealing business began in 2006 when his father stepped down as chairman of Reg Vardy and sold it to Pendragon for £506m. In May of that year Vardy junior set up Peter Vardy Ltd, and by June he had opened his first dealership in Perth.
Sir Peter instilled a strong sense of philanthropy in the younger Peter and the Peter Vardy Foundation delivers grants to numerous Christian charities.
In recent years Vardy junior has steadily exited the car retail market. In 2023, he axed the Carz used car supermarket sites and a year later he sold the majority of the dealerships to Parks Automotive Group. In May this year he offloaded the Porsche dealerships to Dutch firm Van Mossel Automotive Group.
In 2016 he launched CarMoney and in May this year sold it to Itochu Corporation. He is now focused on Peter Vardy Global Ventures which invests in startups.
Vardy, who has four children under the age of ten, is clear that he has no intention of building a business empire for them to inherit: a decision shaped by his own experience of being given the freedom to build something himself.
“I’m quite keen that my kids are allowed to go and do whatever they want to do, so if they want to be a professional sports person, or they want to work in the church, or they want to work in business, or work for somebody.
“I just want to encourage them, whatever it is, that feeds their tank. I don’t want to leave them a business that they had to run or be part of, that wasn’t what their strength was in.
“Some family businesses get handed down, and that’s right for other families. For me personally, with my kids, that’s not something I wanted to do. I want to try and help them find the thing they were good at and encourage them to be good at that thing.”
CarMoney, the car finance business, and Silver Bullet, the software company later bought by Keyloop, both followed that pattern.
“Our track record has been mobility, automotive, start, build, sell,” he said. “As we look forward as a family, we’ve clearly taken that into account in terms of what we do next.”
Additional research by Terry Murden
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