Award-winning vehicle leasing firm Silverstone Fleet Management is celebrating a decade of trading.
The Northamptonshire firm, which champions first class customer service while looking after fleets, was the brainchild of Managing Director Scott Norville and incorporated in August 2012.
SFM started life with Scott hotdesking at his sister’s office on the Brackmills industrial estate in Northampton. Scott was a one-man-band with a dream.
He said: “Before I started the SFM journey, I worked for a dealer supplying cars and quotations to the broker market. This gave me a great insight into how the world of brokers worked.
“The leasing broker market was saturated and had been for years with many ‘bedroom brokers’ offering services with extremely poor customer service. On the flip side to this, many other brokers were high volume brokerages focusing on churning out cars, rather than on the customer and journey.
“Silverstone Fleet Management was born out of recognising the gap in the market for a customer-focused solution.”
But the country had just come out of a recession, so it took a lot of long hours to build the business and a lot of rejection in the early days from finance partners.
With a lot of perseverance and small steps Silverstone Fleet Management delivered 50 vehicles to customers during the first full year of trading.
In 2019 before the pandemic, the company handled 756 vehicles and – even with the more recent challenges posed by Covid-19, semiconductor shortages, Brexit and the Ukraine war – this year (2022) SFM anticipates sales of up to 1500 vehicles nationwide with a continued yearly growth of 25%.
Silverstone Fleet Management work with the top finance providers in the UK- which enables them to provide exceptional market leading offers and support to clients. All vehicles are supplied through a national network of main dealers.
In 2017 SFM moved to a purpose-built barn conversion at Preston Deanery where the family has grown to a ten-strong team.
Together the firm give back to the wider community by sponsoring a grassroots lady’s football team and in 2021 became a sponsor for Northampton Town Football Club. SFM also work regularly fundraising for charity, in particular Cynthia Spencer Hospice.
Scott said: “To say I am proud of what we have achieved as a team would be a huge understatement. Despite all the recent challenges, we continue to work hard, stay positive and provide a first-class customer service, which is why I started SFM in the first place. It is a dream come true to have successfully reached the 10-year milestone.
“The positivity and willingness of the SFM collective alongside our hoard of awards and valued collection of online reviews is both humbling and inspirational. We always strive to be better, to do more and to be the best possible version of the industry for our clients and will continue this in the next decade to come.”
For more information on Silverstone Fleet Management, contact 0800 6127184 or visit: www.silverstonefleetmanagement.com.
