The first thing Fraser Bryce talks about is not profit. It’s pay. It’s respect. It’s the feeling he remembers from his early days.
“I don’t have any staff,” he says. “I don’t have a single member of staff.”
It’s deliberately provocative. He knows it lands. Then he explains what he means. Not that there is no hierarchy or no accountability. Rather, that he refuses a culture where people are treated as disposable. Mistakes are coached, malice is dealt with quickly, and the organisation does not run on fear.
That insistence on dignity is the thread that runs through his story, and through the recent reshaping of Dicksons of Inverness. The dealership group carries a name that stretches back decades, into a blur of family ties, and the kind of business evolution that rarely fits into a clean corporate diagram.
As managing director and owner, Bryce’s job now is to puts nostalgia aside and develop a platform for growth.
He speaks about scale, too. He has targets and talks about turnover targets of £100 million and 100 staff, while prioritising revenue growth over adding bodies.
Dicksons brand story and legacy
The Dicksons name, Bryce says, begins with Tommy Dickson, a racing driver associated with Lotus, and later with a dealership site that became a foundation for a bigger retail business.
Over the years, the group grew, and at one point, he suggests, it carried around 20 franchises across different locations. Like many long-running family businesses, it evolved through partnership, informal trust and occasional fracture.
A key twist in the story is that the name itself is not singular in origin. In Bryce’s telling, two men were appointed to run the company in earlier decades. One became chairman. The other was Bryce’s father.
Over time, the chairman Alistair Scrimgeour, left to run a Fiat franchise elsewhere and, crucially, kept the Dicksons name.
That frames what Bryce later had to do. If you inherit a simple business, you can modernise it with a clean narrative. If you inherit a story with history, you have to be careful that your modernisation does not become erasure. Bryce does not tell the past as a fairy tale. He offers it as context.
From early salesman to trainer
Bryce’s own entry into the trade is not framed as destiny. He reports that he went to university “for five minutes” and left. He got his driving licence at 17, and by December of that year he was working in a Toyota dealership as a used car salesman, receiving the early exposure to customers, stock and the reality of earning.
From there he moved through roles with the speed of someone who learns fastest under pressure. He references Scotland’s retail giant Arnold Clark, describing being promoted young, before running larger sites. Eventually he worked for a big English plc, an experience that seems to have left its mark.
He describes the plc world as a place where the business becomes “a faceless entity”, where memos contradict each other, where the people at the top are remote from the places where the work actually happens. It is a memory that shaped his later decisions.
By 2005, he says, he bought a farm, a move that might sound like an escape but did not function like one for long. He started retailing cars from the farm until 2012, buying stock at auction and selling locally, keeping it real but the trade far enough from corporate noise.
Then he read something that changed the direction again. He recalls seeing an article about youth unemployment in the area where the farm was based that hit him as a source of shame.
His instinct was operational. He knew people. He knew the trade. He believed he could connect employers and young people, teach interview skills, build confidence and open doors.
So he walked into the job centre, queued, and asked what programme existed for volunteers who wanted to help young people get ready for work. The staff did not know what to do with the question.
He tried the local college next, asking whether there was a “get ready for work” programme and whether he could volunteer.
A week later, a letter arrived. He had been unsuccessful. He still has the letter.
It matters because it shows what kind of person Bryce is when he hits a dead end. He does not retreat into resentment. He looks for another door. But as it happened, the door rang him.
A training consultant contact called after hearing that Bryce had “retired”. During that phone call, Bryce told him what he had been trying to do.
“Is that what you want to do? Just help people?” the contact asked, before offering Bryce a trial opportunity in sales training.
Training culture built on the floor
Bryce advocated the opposite of dealership training as an off-floor event. “I didn’t train in the training room,” he says. “I trained on the floor.”
He describes working alongside teams and being honest with customers about his presence. The honesty did two jobs at once. It built trust with customers and it modelled a culture for the team.
“I wasn’t teaching hard closing skills,” he says. “I wasn’t teaching how to cover the numbers. It was all to do with building relationships.”
He talks about becoming known as “the Scottish” trainer who could actually sell, precisely because he had done the work, not just studied it.
He tells one detail that reveals how far he pushed it. In 2016, he says, he went to work on 10 January and, with the exception of two days, didn’t return home until 30 March. He sold every day.
Consultancy fees were high, demand grew, and he built a team of former general managers who had become similarly tired of corporate life and willing to embed in dealerships, sometimes camping out for weeks.
For Bryce it also became a kind of apprenticeship where he learned how different parts of a motor group fit together.
Sales, aftersales, parts, funding and facilities. He learned what banks worry about, how growth gets funded and how fragile expansion can be if it is not matched by capability.
The Dicksons acquisition battle
By the time Bryce began seriously discussing buying into Dicksons, he had done enough work in enough organisations to see the same pattern repeat.
The version of Dicksons he describes at that point had become a Highland lifestyle business and was at risk of becoming sleepy.
He began negotiations with the familiarity of someone who had known the family for decades. That familiarity did not make it easy.
He describes the first plan as staged ownership, buying around a third and then adding slices of equity over time. It was a practical approach because franchise partners can react negatively to changes in control and reassess agreements.
Then the world shifted. Covid arrived. Even so, the business began to perform. At which point, the owner rediscovered their appetite for the business.
The deal structure changed and the negotiation became more intense which meant having to fight for control in order to protect the outcome.
Bryce also talks about signing borrowing documents for sums that would shift anyone’s sense of reality. “You’re into signing bank finance documents for £1.56 million,” he says, describing the moment where a normal life, mortgages and credit cards, collides with business debt levels that can change everything.
He describes how lenders hesitated to fund across jurisdictions, and how commercial logic, and a desire to keep valuable finance flows, eventually changed minds. In early 2024, the deal concluded.
Leadership, equity and retention
One of Bryce’s sharpest instincts is that ownership change is not just legal. It is emotional. Staff have to believe the future will not erase them. Customers have to believe the business remains local.
So he made the transition visible. Key long-serving leaders within Dicksons were brought into equity, given small stakes and elevated roles.
“I wanted these people with me,” he says, explaining that they were present on the ground and had the credibility the new structure needed.
He also restructured titles, shifting the leadership language into a more modern C-suite format. Not for corporate theatre, he insists, but to match reality. If leaders are shareholders and directors, they are not just heads of one department but carry responsibility across the business.
He also created a layer beneath them, promoting operational directors. This, again, is not framed as succession planning in a generic way. It’s framed as removing the ceiling that often makes ambitious people leave. “There has to be a path,” he says, adding that in a tight labour market, retention is strategy.
Technician pay and dealer margins
Ask most dealer leaders about recruitment and you will get a familiar list. Technician shortages. Sales attrition. Apprenticeships. Competition from other industries.
Bryce gives you something sharper. He talks about margin.
He employs 21 technicians and pays them above market levels, using a banding approach where earnings increase through training and franchise qualifications.
He then makes an argument that is uncomfortable for the industry because it suggests the old pay logic is upside down.
Technicians can now out-earn salespeople, not because sales is less valuable, but because the economics of service have strengthened while the economics of car retail have been squeezed by transparency and pricing pressure.
He makes the point using simple maths. A good technician can generate a steady monthly value in labour and parts. A salesperson is expected to be a regulated professional, a marketer, a product expert, a relationship builder, and a closer, yet often earns what Bryce suggests is no longer a sensible wage for that level of expectation.
“The business model doesn’t make any sense,” he says.
Gender balance and culture change
One of the most emotionally resonant parts of Bryce’s story is his determination to change the gender balance in the business, not as a PR line, but as a structural redesign.
He talks about wanting to transform the old stereotype of the car salesman, and about how the easiest way to change behaviour is to change the dynamic. “I wanted to take it so far from that,” he says.
He is candid about why it matters. A diverse business is easier to recruit for while a better communicator base improves customer experience.
He also acknowledges the hard part. Female technicians remain rare, shaped by decades of cultural history and practical barriers. But he talks about flexibility, job share, and designing work around the reality that many women are still primary carers.
This is where his earlier “I don’t have staff” line lands differently. It is not that he is anti-establishment in a corporate sense. It is that he sees humans as the operating system.
Growth, but in the shape of the Highlands
Bryce is not shy about targets, but his targets are shaped by the geography. He talks about the Highland market as a place where you can still go into work in the morning and by 10 o’clock have spoken to everyone. “Scale has a different meaning here,” he says.
He also talks about growth coming from selective franchise additions and from building non-franchise business lines that better fit the local customer.
In the past six months, he says, they took on Korean brand KGM, framing it as a response to market need and a way to add meaningful turnover without massive headcount increases.
He also acknowledges the limitations of pushing new car share when you already have a large slice of a small total market. Striking a balance between adding another brand and stretching existing capacity is crucial.
He references being offered BYD but about being sceptical about what it would add in his local context, pointing out the mismatch between full-EV commercial offerings and the reality of rural charging infrastructure.
While Bryce talks about possibly expanding in commercial vehicles if the right mix appears, the most important growth lever will be aftersales. A new aftersales-focused website is being developed with service booking by registration, menu pricing, add-ons and finance options to make the customer journey less intimidating.
It is the same theme again. Reduce friction. Reduce cynicism.
Moving beyond marketplace pricing
He pushes the argument further into marketing and technology, describing walking away from digital retail platforms such as Autotrader altogether, long before it was fashionable, because he believed the pricing algorithms drove customers into a race to the bottom.
He argues that consumers are moving away from marketplace browsing anyway, and towards intent-led search that can be done through tools like ChatGPT, where a buyer can specify exactly what they want and receive options without scrolling pages.
Whether or not you agree with every detail, his underlying belief is consistent. The future is not won by shouting loudest. It’s won by being trusted.
When Bryce talks about future expansion, he does not sound like someone chasing size for status but for genuine fit.
He talks about potential targets in rural markets and semi-rural England, about avoiding dense regions where competition becomes destructive, “the same as the Autotrader problem”, he says, where price competition becomes the product.
He is open that he likes being able to touch the business, to know what’s happening by walking it so would not try to replicate his current success in a place where it would require a helicopter to keep up. That humility is another form of strategy: knowing what kind of scale fits best.
The boldest thing about Bryce’s story is not the target. It’s the refusal to let growth become an excuse to harden.
He talks about recipes for targets, not just demands. He talks about freedom for leaders and support when life happens outside work. He talks about building an organisation where accountability is real but humiliation is not a tool.
Bryce keeps dragging the conversation back to people. Because in his version of the business, the point of modernisation is not to become more corporate.
It is to become more human and still win.
Ensure you always receive AM insights. Make us a preferred source of news on Google