Robert Forrester was not an obvious car dealer. He studied geography at Oxford and initially planned an academic career researching Swedish migration. His tutor told him he was “much too competitive to be an academic”.

When Pendragon bought Reg Vardy in 2006, Forrester, who had been its finance director and managing director, did not leave motor retail. He and several former colleagues started again.

Asked whether he would have left Reg Vardy voluntarily, Forrester said in a September 2019 interview with Northern Business Leaders: “You have to be forced to do things like that.” Vertu began as a response to circumstance, not a planned venture.

In a 2016 profile for St Hugh’s College, he described Vertu before its launch as “an idea which, at the time, had no business and no money”.

Forrester became chief executive of Vertu Motors. Karen Anderson, who had worked in Reg Vardy’s finance team, became finance director. David Crane, Reg Vardy’s former commercial director, joined the new group soon afterwards.

Vertu was admitted to the Alternative Investment Market in 2006 and acquired Bristol Street Group in March 2007. Bristol Street had more than 30 franchised dealerships and three used-car hypermarkets.

The strategy was clear from the start. Vertu wanted to consolidate a fragmented industry, improve the performance of acquired dealerships and create a platform for more acquisitions. Aftersales, used vehicles, fleet sales, procurement, property and customer service all featured in the plan.

Forrester remains chief executive, Anderson chief financial officer and Crane chief operating officer. That continuity is unusual for a company assembled through acquisitions.

The business they built now depends on a less obvious part of motor retail.

Vertu sells new and used vehicles, commercial vehicles and motorcycles. It also provides servicing and repairs, sells parts, operates accident repair centres and brokers finance and insurance products.

In the year to February 2026, Vertu generated about £4.8bn of revenue and £540m of gross profit. Aftersales produced about £250m of that, or 46 per cent.

New retail and Motability, the scheme that leases cars to disabled people, produced a gross margin of about 8 per cent. Used vehicles produced a margin of about 7 per cent.

Aftersales as a whole produced a margin of about 44 per cent. Service alone produced a margin of about 73 per cent. The difference is because aftersales combines high-margin labour with lower-margin parts and bodyshop work.

Gross profit is what remains after the direct cost of the vehicle or service has been paid, before overheads and finance costs. A dealership group can therefore sell billions of pounds of vehicles while making much of its money from what happens afterwards.

The vehicle sale brings the customer into the business. Servicing, repairs and parts determine whether the relationship continues.

That relationship depends on people and premises, not just a digital transaction. Forrester made the premises side explicit in a 2020 interview with McKinsey, saying: “The importance of test drives and the physical visit is predominantly still there.”

He also said customers wanted to buy from people they trusted and that “that trust element is still of paramount importance”.

The workshop is where the recurring relationship becomes visible. In ITV’s Undercover Big Boss, Forrester posed as a history lecturer while working in the dealerships.

At Newcastle Vauxhall he met Terry Mason, a long-serving valeter who said he did not feel appreciated. Forrester later moved him into a vehicle-progressor role and gave him £15,000 towards a house deposit.

Vertu had approximately 160,000 live service plans at the end of FY26. It also managed more than 50,000 Motability vehicles under contract.

Those plans and vehicles give the group a recurring base of service work. Each Motability vehicle requires an annual service funded by Motability during the lease period.

Vertu has tried to increase the amount of work approved when a vehicle enters a workshop. Its Vehicle Health Check process provides customers with a technician video and a priced quotation. Repairs can then be authorised remotely.

Its Pay Later scheme allows customers to defer payment for repair work for up to five months.

Vertu’s workshops service customers’ cars and prepare the group’s used stock. They are the part of the business that turns a vehicle sale into a continuing relationship.

Vertu’s acquisition strategy has changed over time.

In a June 2020 interview with Car Dealer Magazine, Forrester said the financial crisis had been “the making of our company”. Vertu had been created only a few years earlier, and the crisis became the period in which its acquisition strategy accelerated.

Forrester once had an even larger ambition for the group. “I always wanted 400,” he said in a Car Dealer Magazine interview in October 2022. He later recalibrated towards 200 dealerships, but scale was always central to the business he wanted to build.

The early years involved rapid consolidation across the North East, the rest of England and Scotland, with manufacturer franchises including Honda, Ford and Land Rover added to the group alongside used-car operations.

By FY26, Vertu had 191 sales outlets. The reason scale matters is that each dealership adds another place to sell a vehicle and another installed base of vehicles to service.

That ambition was balanced by a reluctance to overpay. In the same October 2022 interview, Forrester said he expected to run Vertu for another 15 years and did not want to look back on acquisitions he had overpaid for.

The largest deal came in 2022, when Vertu bought Helston Garages in the South West. The acquisition added 28 franchised outlets, including BMW, MINI, Land Rover, Jaguar and Ferrari.

Vertu said the acquisition would deepen its manufacturer relationships and give it a stronger position in the South West. It later said the financial contribution was below expectations because the used-car price correction affected premium dealerships particularly hard.

By FY26, the group was buying smaller businesses while closing or selling sites that did not meet its return expectations, including sites in the North and the South West.

Its freehold and long leasehold property portfolio, valued at about £327m at the end of FY26, supports those decisions by providing operating space, borrowing capacity and an exit option.

Vertu’s latest results show why aftersales has become more important. Revenue was broadly flat in FY26, but adjusted profit before tax fell by 16 per cent to £24.5m from £29.3m.

The main pressure came from new vehicles. Vertu said core new-vehicle gross profit had fallen by almost £20m over the previous two years.

The causes include greater discounting, the Zero Emission Vehicle mandate, which requires manufacturers to increase the share of zero-emission vehicles they sell, weaker Motability volumes and lower manufacturer support.

Agency arrangements in the MINI and Honda businesses also changed how revenue and margin are recorded. Under an agency model, the manufacturer invoices the customer directly and the retailer receives a handling fee.

Vertu is responding by adding newer Chinese brands, including BYD and Geely, while preparing to introduce others. These brands may produce volume and new franchise opportunities, but the company says they currently generate lower returns because the number of their cars on UK roads is still small.

The first BYD sites show how Vertu is managing that transition. At Morpeth, the new showroom sits alongside existing Ford and Honda operations, with Adam Prudhoe moving from Vertu Ford Durham to run it.

At Macclesfield, BYD replaced Ford sales while Ford servicing and repairs continued and service staff were retrained to support BYD customers.

The new brand is therefore being built on an existing network of sites, skills and customer relationships. That is a different proposition from starting an online car business from scratch.

That creates a difficult balance. New manufacturers may provide the next source of volume, but the most valuable service relationships take time to develop.

Aftersales is becoming more important as new-car margins weaken. But it depends on a large installed base of vehicles. That base has to be acquired, sold and retained before the service revenue arrives.

Vertu’s North East identity is more than a registered address.

The group was created by North East executives, its head office remains in Team Valley and its central functions are still based in Gateshead. More than 250 colleagues work across the company’s head-office buildings in human resources, marketing, information technology, finance and commercial operations.

In 2025, Vertu said more than 1,500 of its approximately 7,500 colleagues were based in the North East.

James Collingwood was unemployed in 2012 when Forrester met him on a live BBC discussion about the Budget. Impressed with the young man, Forrester offered him an interview and Collingwood later became a senior manager at the former Bristol Street Motors dealership in Sunderland, now Vertu Vauxhall Sunderland.

It is the kind of internal mobility a national dealership and workshop network can create.

Forrester’s original company was sold. His second company has survived nearly two decades of changes in vehicle supply, finance, technology and consumer behaviour.

In 2026, Vertu promoted Leon Caruso and Anthony Masterson from operations roles into two managing director roles overseeing the group’s dealership operations. Both had been identified through the group’s internal leadership programme.

Their appointments sharpen the question of who makes these decisions next. Someone has to decide which dealership to buy, which manufacturer relationship to accept, where to add workshop capacity and when to leave a site.

Forrester’s tutor said he was too competitive to be an academic. The question now is whether Vertu’s next generation can make that instinct their own and keep customers returning after the car has been sold.