Operations Manager — Minster Motor Group
Location: Hull (on-site, across both preparation sites)
Reports to: Managing Director
Salary: £55,000 – £65,000 basic + up to £10,000 performance bonus
Hours: Full time.
About us
Minster Motor Group is a used car retailer based in Hull, delivering nationwide. We sell well over 2000 vehicles a year — which means preparation throughput, is the engine of this business. We're currently building out a second preparation centre, and we're looking for the person who will run both.
We're systems-led. We've built our own vehicle preparation tracking system, we measure what moves through it, and we make decisions off the numbers rather than off the loudest voice in the room.
The role
You own throughput. Every vehicle from arrival to retail-ready to customer handover, across two preparation sites and the team that runs them.
The job is fundamentally about flow: finding the constraint that's limiting how many cars we can get out of the door, fixing it, and then finding the next one. Some weeks that's a bay, some weeks it's a paint supplier, some weeks it's a parts lead time or a piece of paperwork sat on someone's desk. Your job is to know which — from the data, not from a hunch — and to clear it.
You'll also commission our second preparation centre: getting it laid out, staffed, running to standard and hitting its run rate.
What you'll own
- Preparation throughput across both sites — units completed to retail-ready standard, week in week out, at the volume the business needs.
- Constraint management — identifying the current bottleneck in the prep pipeline, quantifying what it's costing us, and removing it. Then doing it again.
- Flow time — driving down the time from vehicle arrival to retail-ready, and killing the long tail of vehicles that get stuck.
- Work in progress — keeping the pipeline lean. We don't want cars sat half-prepped; we want them finished and out.
- Sold-unit priority — sold vehicles ready ahead of their delivery date, every time.
- The new preparation centre — commissioning it, staffing it, and getting it to run rate.
- Suppliers — turnaround, quality and cost from external prep, bodyshop, transport and parts partners.
- People — leading, scheduling and setting standards for the operations team across both sites.
What you'll be measured on
- Units completed to retail-ready per week — the headline number, measured on completion, not on jobs started.
- Median and worst-case days from arrival to retail-ready — we care about the tail as much as the average.
- Vehicles in progress and aged WIP — throughput achieved by flooding the pipeline doesn't count.
- Constraint actions — the current bottleneck identified, quantified and cleared, reviewed monthly.
- Prep cost per unit — held or improved as volume grows.
- Rework and post-delivery defect rate — a hard quality gate; throughput at the expense of standards is not throughput.
About you
Essential
- Proven operations, workshop, prep centre or aftersales management experience in the motor trade
- Genuinely data-driven: you build the report, you know your numbers cold, and you can talk us through a bottleneck you found in the data and what removing it was worth
- Track record of increasing throughput in a physical operation — more units out of the same or fewer resources
- Comfortable owning hard KPIs and being accountable for them weekly
- Strong with dealer management systems, stock software and Excel/Sheets — pivot tables and lookups should be second nature
- Practical understanding of vehicle preparation: what good looks like, what it should cost, how long it should take
- Full UK driving licence
Desirable
- Experience opening, commissioning or scaling a site
- Familiarity with lean, Theory of Constraints, Six Sigma or similar throughput-focused methods
- Multi-site or high-volume prep experience (100+ units a month)
- Experience implementing or improving an operations system rather than just using one
- Understanding of warranty, service plan or aftercare products
What we offer
- £55,000 – £65,000 basic depending on experience
- Up to £10,000 annual performance bonus, paid quarterly against the metrics above
- Company car
- A business where you own the whole operation, not a slice of it, with direct access to the owner — decisions get made in days, not quarters
- Real investment in the systems and tools you need to do the job properly.
Pay: £55,000.00-£64,534.02 per year
Benefits:
- Company pension
- Employee discount
- Free parking
- On-site parking
- Sick pay
Work Location: In person
