Ling is in the well! Q&A with Ling from lingscars.

Atlas_IRL wrote: »

Hi Ling thanks for doing this!

Where you involved in the car business before you came to England? How did you get into it?

Nope. Before I came to the UK I was studying Wood Chemistry for MSc in Finland.

I got into it because my new hubby (Jon) ran a contract hire company in Bournemouth. But when I saw what he was doing, I know I could do it better. I had to learn every car from scratch, as I did not even know what "hatchback" meant.

In those days (2000), it was still done by phone and fax.

I moved it onto the web, really.

gabgab wrote: »

What does a average working day look like?

Are you physically active?

Yep, play ping pong, go to gym etc.

Start early at home (can work anywhere due to being online biz - for example I use laptop in bed (obviously I do not say I am naked in bed, nits), and just did 2 weeks work from China over Xmas, and did some when delayed 24hrs at Schipol) then get into office and continue, clear all overnight LINGO CRM and emails before 9am usually.

I will say, customers are classed as friends.

Then the day is a) loading car deals, b) chasing suppliers, c) dealing with customers (in any order). My server announces my customers going online and I know who is on my website if I already ID them... so customers get amazed that I respond to them predictively before they have asked their questions. Pride myself on max 5 minute response times to questions and LINGO CRM posts. Time over past 4 working hours is displayed on website, and to customers, so they know how long to wait for a reply. Most wait online. emails get answered as fast if they are customers/new visitors/enquiries, but customers 99% of the time are in my LINGO CRM on webserver. Car quotes typically take 90 minutes as they all need much pedalling to shop around for prices/stock/availability/alternatives. Quote time over last 8 working hours is displayed. I measure the times over several past hours to even out the peaks and troughs.

Emails are in a completely shared box by all staff, so there are never unanswered emails. Nothing is ever private, everyone knows everything, even company bank balance etc. We dish them out using outlook coloured flags but they never leave the central email box (staff/me do not have private email boxes) and we use peer pressure to make sure they are 100% up to date. We share opinions on stuff. We all suggest funny responses etc. None stagnate except ones selling stuff and spammy ****. If one staff member goes for a pee, others will answer the messages/mails because we are never behind the curve.

If we have cleared everything and have a brief free minute, we kick customers off by having fun with them and provoking responses depending on what they work at etc. I am terrible, we tease customers rotten. They love it. As we have built a trust, and the chat is 100% private, even people like bank chairman and police chief inspectors let their hair down. Customers give themselves a "friendly name" or nickname, for instance a customer called Mark Hudson uses "Rock", so I always call them by that name. Breaks all the barriers. Fun. We have money bets on when and what a customer will respond with. Customers are all kids at heart and cars are emotional. On the other hand I do not hesitate to be very hard on customers if they start to get ars-ey or make up stuff. I slap them down, then rebuild it, just as you would with a child.

All day is orchestrating my staff, between 3 and 6 of us depending on the day, working on quotes, customers in process, new deals, renewals, suppliers and IT stuff (we do all IT on the fly, live, I have 3 part-time Sunderland Uni students who can do ANYTHING and enjoy being given impossible tasks. We regularly accidentally take the server down and have to scream for a quick reboot, while doing the impossible stuff and making stupid errors. All live.). Then all post is cleared by 6pm and sent at the sorting office by 7pm, all messages cleared. Never any unanswered in the day.

I answer all phone calls personally. Usually direct people back to website, frankly, but always have a small chat. Many people just want to reassure I exist as some don't believe it.

All actions are done over local sound socket from website server with selection of tunes and noises and speech, so my office is a never ending stream of aural clues to what is happening on my website. Website can never be ignored!. We all hear when a quote comes in, when a customer leaves a message or visits the site, when a car is proposed or delivered or an invoice is raised. All by sound. Often we work in verbal silence (nice) with sounds playing all around to let us know what is happening on the website. Hard to describe until you experience it. For instance a car proposal (personal) gets a Chinese Numa Numa verse, a proposal (business) gets a Chinese punk Internationale verse and an Invoice gets a Chinese National Anthem verse. A customer message gets a "ribbit", a proposal message gets a "oho" (from ICQ noises), and a quote enquiry gets a foghorn. Customers are announced by name by an Indian girl voice (LINGANI, hehe) when they arrive online.

Website traffic is a "click" each time a visitor lands, so when busy sounds like a Geiger counter, but if it goes silent we jump and say "check TOP, what's happened to the website, has it crashed?".

Must say the MD of BT Business stood in my office in amazement as we aurally managed 200 customers. He said he had never seen/heard anything like it and we have interest in developing the live website monitoring system with them now.

Often log in the evening to clear any customers urgent queries, it is fun as this is dealing with real, happy people who show amazement they get dealt with so fast.

Continual loop, every day, every day.

Do ad hoc on Sat and Sun, like now. It is quieter at the weekend, but for example, have had 10 car proposals today so far and 2135 website visitors (Sunday to 20:30, so it is always busy and active).

But, NEVER get a backlog. Most other car companies seem to work with a permanent backlog of emails, are slow, unresponsive and frankly, hard to deal with. Why people do that, I dunno. Easier to be ahead in my view.

Phew.

shoutman wrote: »

Could you give a brief history of how it all started?

What were the biggest pitfalls you had to overcome?

What, if any, were the mistakes you made which you wouldn't if you could do it all again?

Do you have any regrets?

What car do you drive?

Mistakes: I would design the website properly (backend). That is the most limiting factor and we are completely re-writing the CRM "properly" to allow multiple css style sites, white label, affilliate and 3rd party involvement. The site at the moment is a house of cards, and as I say we crash it often, but... hell better than being a boring flat dead site We have work arounds on the work arounds on the clagged up work arounds, so anything we touch has knogk on effects which have been forgotten over the years. 300+ database tables. You get the idea. What a laugh, eh?

But, as the BT boss admitted, many of their own sites are the same and are clagged together, he said ebay is like that, all glued together as things have been added and changed, etc, and I guess most sites that do complicated stuff are the same. If a website is perfect, I think it is not doing much. A bit like MS Windows, the pile of sh1t is built on so much old sh1t it just MUST break from time to time. Have you added a font lately? That is still Windows 3.1 dialogue box, in XP. For example.

shoutman wrote: »

Could you give a brief history of how it all started?

What were the biggest pitfalls you had to overcome?

What, if any, were the mistakes you made which you wouldn't if you could do it all again?

Do you have any regrets?

What car do you drive?

Biggest pitfall is that I am not in the boys club of UK car dealers so constantly get blanked. Eg Pendragon Uk - UK's biggest dealer group - issue commands like "I have been instructed not to communicate with you by our directors". That sort of terrible stuff. I get blacklisted (eg previously by Mazda UK).

Why do I write all this, you lot are in Free State? You cannot buy my cars. Who cares, I want more ideas, so I welcome any discussion. Please suggest brilliant ideas.

shoutman wrote: »

One more Q from me.

Are you involved in any other business' apart from lingscars.com
In the future would you like to expand into other areas?

Yep, I am developing the live web management software so other businesses can manage their own web visitors as they arrive, in a similar manner.

shoutman wrote: »

Also we are a republic now

Ah, but you are not a PEOPLE'S Republic

Hahaha.

tombull82 wrote: »

Why not spill over into Ireland. I would probably use it and alot of companies for fleet cars?

Well, no offence but .ie is a tiny car market compared to the UK.

And 75-80% of the cars I supply are "private", not "fleet". I avoid the fleet market as I am B to C, not really B to B.

God knows what the finance market is like in .ie, with all the hiatus lately post credit-crunch. Bad enough in the UK, where Lombard (RBS) have pulled out totally, Lex have stopped doing private, etc etc

Plus it is "foreign" for me, not sure if I can do that with all the data protection and consumer credit being based in the UK. There are sure to be legal issues with the credit docs etc.

Plus the Euro pricing and plus the Irish finance companies may be uncomfortable with me being in different juristiction.

Then, there will be the confusion in having another English text website in Euros with completely different pricing.

Then there are the different model/trim designations (remember I have 300+ database tables to maintain), which is a hell of a lot new stuff to find out. Often there are some significant differences in various models.

I hate to be sensible, but it would be a BIG amount of work for a small return, as the car market is just not massive at all in .ie and it takes many years and much work to build up in Google etc.

Does that make sense? However, it will be easier when I have my LINGO2, white label, css-based site engine running.

===

I am seriously looking to open a (not leasing as leasing is virtually unavailable there) car buying assistance website in China, but China needs to be regionalised.

nice1franko wrote: »

You were very quick to spot the criticism your site was receiving here. I think I remember you reg'd to defend it another time here (maybe a couple of years ago) too.

How are you so quick? I assume you have google keywords alerts or something set up (rather than being a boards.ie lurker) so you can keep abreast of what people are saying about your business, is that right?

What have you learned and how have you improved your business with the information you've received this way?

Well, it is good for Google for people to talk about my business.

I do use Google alerts, BUT - they are after the event things. Useful, but old. The reason I know what is happening is that I monitor my website, live. For instance, currently there are 42 people online, I see all referrers and google searches that bring people, I know the names of pre-ID's visitors (usually customers) and I find out where people come from. For example, someone is on from here: http://clusta.blogspot.com/ scroll down that page to see why, an awful blog but hey, it brought a visitor.

I have a graphical interface (Camp Ling) of my live visitors: watch this, turn up the sound and wait for it to load http://www.lingscars.com/sitemap.php No one else has this in the world. You can make the cat sing and make the visitors dance (click the jam jar in bottom right corner).

As soon as I recognise a referrer, I join in... this is the whole point, live interactivity with people (even Irish ones, hahaha).

I learn loads, keep giving me ideas!

Axwell wrote: »

Q1: What are your 3 best/worst business qualities?

Q2: What do you think is going to be the next big thing online?

Q3: If I didnt know who you were and came across your website I would probably think on a quick first look that it looks fake or some sort of advertising/spam website and would probably move on. Do you think that without the exposure on Dragons Den your business would have taken off like it has and be doing so well?

Q4: If you could start again tomorrow what would you do differently?

aaaaagh multiple questions!

1. I am quite naive, I open my gob and I don't maximise profit on cars. I treat all customers alike, I don't rip people off. I decide margin and stick to it. I could make more money if I was more opportunistic, but I like being nice to customers and will choose to save them cash instead.

2. Live website visitor interaction - I am building this product

3. DD was good, and gives some credibility. Gave me a boost. I thought it was great to get 5,000 visitors a day (day after DD). But now, I often manage to do that midweek, with a bit of tickling. But now, I am past the critical mass. From 100k visitors a month, business cannot fail to happen. Just need to make people react when visiting my site and keep it up the top of Google. Of course the basic service has to be good, and work.

4. Build the website properly in a css framework and a more considered database structure. Doing that at the moment.

Actually, on my sitemap page http://www.lingscars.com/sitemap.php if you scroll below the sitemap, you can see a list (next to where I am standing with a green ready-brek radioactive glow) of live Google (etc) searches that people used who are currently on my website. (ie, my current visitors from search engines). You can see what they searched to get here. Again, I don't know any other website that knows this stuff live, let alone shows it.

Axwell wrote: »

You know their business backgrounds etc, surely you have a preference of one of them over the others. I for example find Peter Jones to be very shrewd and great on the show.

The last question was a fun question, not every question in the Q&A sessions has to be serious and revolve around business.

Must be my free stater sense of humour..:rolleyes:

Hahaha, well, I do not know them as people. All we see is TV personas. So who knows?

Well, my sense of humour is different Hahahah, ice cream choice isn't a big thing for me, you know Chinese don't do puddings very well. Have a Werthers!

-Chris- wrote: »

Hi Ling,

You mention your database tables for model/trim designations, do you populate & update these yourselves? Would you not just buy in an external database like Jato?

Thanks,

Chris

I don't know what Jato is.

I get the model info from loads of different sources. I compile it from many published outlets. I refine it myself. I guess I could buy it from somewhere like CAP, but that is like being addicted to their information and data like hooked on heroin. I do not want to be under the control of others. Plus it would cost maybe £10,000/year. I want to be very independent so no one can control me.