Why Steven Eagell deserved the Strategic Success Award at the 2023 AM Awards

This award enables AM and our awards audit partner UHY Hacker Young to give special recognition for the long-term strategic leadership of a motor retail business.

In the two decades since his business launched at Milton Keynes, our winner, Steven Eagell, has built extremely close manufacturer relationships and has taken selected acquisition opportunities as they came to expand into a significant partnership with Toyota and Lexus.

The outcome is a top-25 AM100 motor retailer by turnover, and one which is among the best performers for return on sales and profit per staff member.

And its portfolio of franchised dealerships, still exclusively representing Toyota and Lexus, now spans from King’s Lynn and Ipswich in East Anglia to Wolverhampton and Birmingham in the west Midlands.

A culture of competition, positivity and personal development underpins Eagell’s business, which expects its teams to be curious and to find even tiny improvements in its processes.

Such traits are shared by Eagell and his senior leadership team, which has honed the company’s processes to optimise customer retention and to ensure a strong balance of profit comes from new, used and aftersales, and which is also looking at non-franchised operations such as accident repair.

Diversity and inclusivity are at the core of Steven Eagell Group’s people strategy, and Eagell is a member of the Automotive 30% Club, which aims to achieve industry gender balance and fill 30% of leadership positions with diverse women by 2020.

Eagell told AM in 2022 how his role is to ensure the group recruits “better than me” so it has the ability to succeed, and he has great regard for his people “on the ground, that run the businesses”.

This article first appeared in the AM Awards digital report. Click here to read the stories behind all the winners.

Following the AM Awards, Steven Eagell has acquired 12 more Lexus and Toyota dealerships from Marshall.

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