Holman: "We're not the business in the UK we used to be"

The recent rebranding of ARI Fleet UK to Holman – the same name as its US-based parent company – comes more than a decade after it entered the UK market.

Its acquisition of one of the UK’s largest fleet management companies, Fleet Support Group (FSG), gave Automotive Resources International (ARI) – a Holman subsidiary – a strong foothold in the sector.

Ten years’ later and UK managing director Nick Caller (left), who took over from Keith Allen in 2019, says the name change reflects how the business has evolved and how fleets can benefit from its global reach.

“We’ve always been Holman,” says Caller. However, ARI – like other businesses owned by the group – had its own distinct branding. That changed in March, with the entire global organisation, including retail dealerships, vehicle up-fitters and fleet management, coming under the Holman name for the first time in almost 100 years.

“The world has been through unprecedented change over the past few years,” says Caller. “The impact of that on the automotive sector has been quite significant in many ways and this space is continuing to evolve so rapidly that it made perfect sense.”

Holman began trading as a single Ford dealership in New Jersey, USA, in 1924. Today, the global family-run business employs around 6,500 people and has more than two million vehicles under funding and fleet management.

Holman says its global team will work even closer together to deliver customers additional insight around supply chain, best practice, finance and electric vehicles (EVs), supported by local expertise to help implement fleet solutions for its customers.

The recent rebranding of ARI Fleet UK to Holman – the same name as its US-based parent company – comes more than a decade after it entered the UK market.

In the UK, the business was named Leasing Company of the Year (up to 20,000 vehicles) at this year’s Fleet News Awards, after restructuring its offering and focusing on fleet management and the growing opportunity offered by finance lease funding.

“We took a huge amount of pride in the award, because it really is only over the past couple of years that we shifted to a much bigger emphasis on funding,” says Caller.

“I’m hugely proud of the efforts of many people that put us in that position to be successful. But ifyou look at it as Holman, this is what we’ve been doing for decades. We fund billions of dollars of vehicles globally.

“Given the market shifts, given how we have evolved, it made perfect sense for us to go out there and say, we’re not the business in the UK that we used to be.”

Its FlexLease finance lease product has proved popular, with an 80% rise in enquiries in the first 12 months of the pandemic, while it has also restructured the way it offers fleet management services for the 100,000 vehicles it looks after.

Fleet News: How has providing two different fleet management solutions, with the launch of Complex and Complete, helped service delivery to fleets?

Nick Caller: What that’s enabled us to do is ensure that, while we operate these business lines in parallel, we leverage where it makes sense, but we don’t distract the other from executing as well.

It’s a very different conversation with a fleet manager or an HR manager around a salary sacrifice relationship, to going into a transport manager or logistics director of a big haulage company.

What we wanted to do was have people that understood those specific business lines and we’ve recruited a lot of people over the past couple of years with that in mind. They’re experts in those lines.

We’ve also invested differently in them, as well. In our Complex business, we’ve invested in new IT infrastructure, which gives real-time data around our customers’ fleets.

We’ve made those investment decisions specifically for what the customer wants to drive the customer intimacy in that business line.

FN: Why do you think your FlexLease product is appealing to more fleets?

NC: The unprecedented times we’ve been through over the past couple of years has opened people’s eyes to a different way of doing things and flexibility is key. That’s really what we provide, that flexibility that will maximise your investment in fleet, or give you the flexibility throughout the lifecycle, to make the decisions that are right for your business. There are no hidden costs; we don’t make 30-40% profit at the end of the term. It’s all about serving the customer.

FN: How does Holman’s global reach benefit customers?

NC: The world is driven by data and, if you consider we either fund or support well in excess of two million vehicles globally, the rich data that brings us is huge. We can leverage that to give our customers the insights they’re looking for.

As ARI, we also had strong relationships with OEMs, we prided ourselves with those, but as Holman, for example, we buy more Ford vehicles than anyone else in the world. That is a huge amount of leverage we now have, that we can take advantage of.

FN: Given Holman is one of the largest retail groups in the US, are you considering developing a retail business in the UK?

NC: What we’re going to do is take advantage of what that provides. But we’re not looking in the short term to bring it over to the UK.

In time, if it made business sense and it was right for this market, and it was right for our customers, we would look at that. But for now, it’s about continuing to deliver the service excellence and continuing to bring the benefits of that one unified operation of a corporation to our customers.

FN: Having only launched your FlexLease product in 2019, what’s the ambition for the business in terms of vehicle funding in the UK?

NC: One of the targets we have is we do want to be an FN10 player (more than 49,000 funded vehicles) and we want to get there quickly.

We’re not putting any specific timing on that, but we are seeing rapid growth in that space.

For me, it’s about getting the right business with customers we know we can support; it’s about driving what’s right for our customers. That’s what we are here to do. We want growth, but we want smart growth, because that benefits us long term.

With the fleet industry facing long lead times for new product due to a global shortage of semiconductors and other raw materials, Holman says its scale has enabled it to weather the storm. Caller says:

“We are very fortunate in that it has probably impacted us significantly less than it has many, because of our OEM relationships which are fuelled by our retail business in the US."

However, he acknowledges that as its funding businesses has accelerated in the UK, deliveries of those vehicles have not been able to keep pace.

“I think that will right itself over the next 12-18 months,” he adds. “But we’re using our relationships where we can.”

Judges’ comments:

ARI (as it was called when it entered the awards) demonstrated a clear link between the results of customer surveys and taking them through to improvements or new solutions.

Judges were impressed with its understanding of how the marketplace is moving, identifying future constraints for fleets.

The company was also praised for its business adjustment model and for its aspirational approach to the future.

It offered some great examples of how it has taken a flexible approach with customers in response to the vehicle supply shortage.