Every company has a founders’ story, this is ours…
Hi. We’re David and James Sweeney; co-founders of Used Car Guys.
We’re two brothers with a history of car sales and customer service, working alongside the U.S. Military in Germany for over 23 years. We are from a large Irish family and grew up in Cambridge, England – a place we definitely recommend you visit and have written a blog post here to give you our best tips when you do too!
Family First, Community Always
We founded Used Car Guys in January 2012 on the principles of providing great quality cars, superior customer service and being all-round good guys. We want to be the car dealers that you would recommend to your boss, your buddies and your grandparents. We wanted to build the company our mum would be proud of and the company that you would recommend to your mum.
We all have to earn a living and we wanted to do something we felt pretty confident about without having to answer to a big corporation that only cared about sales and profits. So that’s when we decided to start our own company selling cars to the Military community based in Germany.
It’s a pretty niche business, but we knew we wanted to be in this crazy and exciting little world. Why? Because we had a LOT of experience doing it, but more importantly as a couple of Irish-guys, raised in England moved to Germany, we know how it can feel being in a new environment and not entirely knowing the lay of the land. It’s extra complicated living in a country where you might not speak the language too. So we knew we could be of service and though our German is still pretty sketchy (!), we knew we could help people navigate the customs, insurance and finance processes of buying a car overseas and at least make that aspect of living in Europe easier; perhaps even exciting and pleasant! After all, buying a car is the second largest purchase you will make in your life (after a home), it should be a great experience, right?
We also wanted to create a working environment that meant we felt good about going to work everyday and so would anyone else that worked with us. So we choose our team pretty carefully; we like to build a team of people around us that care about the experience our customers have and care about each other as team. A sales company doesn’t have to be a competitive, cut-throat environment. Heck, it’s not always perfect but when we talk about our team we are proud to consider everyone of them a member of our family.
Back to the start…
Let’s get back to how it all began. After over 12 years of working for a Military car sales company, we just wanted to break out of the straight jackets and do things our own way based on our own ethics and principles.
We started off with a tiny little porta-cabin and a small car lot just outside of the West Gate in Ramstein. Since then, the business has grown up a bit. We now have numerous locations; three shiny showrooms (Kaiserslautern, Ramstein and Stuttgart), a car lot in Kaiserslautern, a satellite location in Spangdahlem, and a service centre in Ramstein.
A lot has changed since we began – we’ve survived a roof collapse at our flagship showroom in Ramstein, numerous rumours of troop drawdowns in Europe, a global pandemic and almost year-long lock down! It’s been a ride!
We of course don’t always get everything right all the time. Whilst we like to think we sell hopes and dreams, we really sell metal and machines and despite a top-notch inspection and the finest warranties we can offer, there will always be some mechanical issues that we may need to address once we have sold a car. Our ethos is not to avoid these problems but to fix them and provide the best customer service we can in the process.
Well, it’s been a good few years since we started this journey and boy have we grown as a company and as a team, but our principles have remained the same. And we still feel good about going to work everyday! We’re proud of the business that we have built and of the fantastic group of people that we work with. We couldn’t manage a company of this size without having the best people alongside us.
Thank you for trusting us with your business and allowing us to be part of your community.
We’re only the good guys as long as we have the greatest customers!
Cheers!
David & James
