Bill Ward, Managing Director, Mill Garages

Jan 11 2010 by Iain Laing, The Journal

A familiar face on TV, Bill Ward now owns the business he has worked for for the last 30 years. Peter McCusker reports.

IF a car was a person, then a Volvo would be a Geordie, pronounces Bill Ward, joint owner and managing director of the region’s Volvo dealership Mill Garages, of Newcastle.

“They are both strong, reliable, caring and Nordic. The Volvo is a great car for the North East.”

Watchers of local commercial television will be familiar with Ward espousing the merits of Volvo in the Mill adverts which he fronts for his company.

He continues: “I frequently get stopped with people saying, ‘I know you from somewhere’.” And then it dawns on them and they repeat his TV mantra ‘now is the time to choose Volvo’.

He chose Volvo back in 1981, and in September 2008 he bought the Mill Volvo company from Inchcape plc. Ward, who was brand director for Mill at the time, recalls how at meetings with Inchcape he petitioned senior executives not to cut loose the Mill brand.

Mill had been taken over by Inchcape the previous year and Ward recalls a conversation he had with an Inchcape director at one of many meetings which followed the takeover.

“One of the Inchcape executives said to me ‘if you love the business so much, then why don’t you buy it’. So I did.”

Ward, who had risen to the top in his business in the region, says he took that observation on board.

“I had always been embroiled in the plc world. I had always had big jobs, but I had never taken that step. It was really about having the confidence to do it.”

With the seed planted in Ward’s mind, he approached Bob Nicholson, a former Minories financial director who now runs his own commercial property business and invests capital in new business ideas.

Nicholson climbed on board, and on September 11, 2008, the deal was done and the two became owners of the Mill Volvo brand with Ward as managing director and Nicholson as chairman. As Ward points out, it was a significant day in a number of ways.

“We took the business at the worst possible time. Not only did we sign the contract on 9/11, two days later Lehman Brothers collapsed!”

Securing bank support to bring in the deal had proved a challenge in the preceding months.

“All the local banks loved the deal, but once they submitted to the London-based credit committees, they would turn their noses up at it. The motor sector was one sector they did not want to touch, but we were grateful to the Co-operative Bank, a traditional bank, who backed us.” In the following weeks, as the financial world collapsed and as the global economy almost drowned in the ensuing tsunami, Ward held his nerve.

“We were still very confident about the business. Mill has been around since 1947. It’s a great business, a fantastic brand, one that is synonymous with quality.”