The Masterminds & Creativity Behind Cazoo’s Incredible Launch: Lucas Bergmans

Mike Lander (02:19.876)
Lucas, thanks ever so much for joining us on Higgle B2B Sales Club podcast. Great to see you.

Lucas Bergmans (02:30.768)
Thanks Mike, thanks for the invite, great to be here.

Mike Lander (02:34.882)
Pleasure. And yeah, so before we get started, let's just find out something about you, your background, and something unusual about your, probably your personal life.

Lucas Bergmans (02:44.164)
Great. Okay, so I'm Lucas. I've been working client-sized marketing for just over 20 years. Most of that was the first 15 years or so that in kind of FMCG UK based businesses or fairly established PLCs. So I was on the L'Oreal grad scheme briefly for my first job. Then I was at General Mills working on

Old El Paso and Green Giant and Hargandar. So that was kind of my formative years as a brand manager working on those brands and then I got kind of hired by Heineken. So I worked in the wonderful world of premium lagers for about five and a half years. Again, mostly in the UK but very much global brands like Heineken and Cronenberg. And then from there I moved on to Britvics soft drinks where I managed Pepsi.

7up and Tango, but most of my focus was on Pepsi, big brands competing with an even bigger brand with Coke. So that was great fun. I was there for just under five years. And then about eight years ago, I decided to pivot into the world of kind of digital businesses. So I worked at Money Supermarket for two years. After that, I was at Aviva for a couple of years. So broadly across those two, financial services and insurance.

Mike Lander (03:45.003)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (04:05.132)
And then my most recent role was at Kazoo. So I was kind of poached by my previous boss from Money Supermarket to come and join the founding team at Kazoo just before, well, as it started as a business about four years ago, so early 2019. And that was, so that's an online news car dealer primarily based in the UK.

And that was a chance for me to do something complete from scratch. I always wanted to launch a brand from scratch. Didn't know if I'd ever get the chance, but that was what I got to do with Kazoo. And it was, it was a lot of fun. It was super fast paced, works really, really well and enjoyed it greatly. But last year, pretty tough year, lots of cutbacks required as, as has been the case with a lot of kind of technology based businesses that are still scaling and still losing money.

Mike Lander (04:52.512)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (05:00.379)
So I left there at the end of December last year.

Mike Lander (05:04.798)
Okay, and just kind of before we get into the questions, just what was it like because Kazoo wasn't a small company. You went from kind of nothing to a multi-billion kind of pound valuation in a relatively short space of time. Not many people have done that. What was that journey like?

Lucas Bergmans (05:12.832)
NO!

Hmm.

Lucas Bergmans (05:22.364)
spatial space.

Lucas Bergmans (05:25.964)
No, in general I really enjoyed it. It was super fast-paced and intense. So I guess part of the reason why it got to that scale so quickly is a few things really. Firstly, it's a period of time where there was still quite cheap venture capital money going around and that's kind of not been the case for about 18 months now or so. You know, low interest rates and historic low inflation rates.

Mike Lander (05:45.377)
Yep.

Lucas Bergmans (05:54.796)
used car business in the UK as a massive category. It's something like a hundred billion pounds worth of revenue every year, but it's compared to a lot of other categories. It's relatively untouched by a lot of digital disruption in that actually almost no sales were happening through online. And partly that's because it's quite difficult. It's quite an expensive thing to buy on a website, frankly.

Lucas Bergmans (06:19.112)
There is still a business in the States called Carvana, which showed that is possible, that people will be open to buying used cars online and that e-commerce business model can be applied to used cars. So our founder, Alex Chessman, had an amazing track record of taking successful business models in the States and launching them in the UK. So he did that with Love Film, which was a copy of Netflix, while it was DVDs by Post. Yes.

Mike Lander (06:44.566)
Ah yes, I remember the film, yeah. Yep, I remember. I was a subscriber, yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (06:47.784)
And that was sold to Amazon, became Amazon prize. Yes, I was too. And then Zooplo was more recent venture, which was a copy of a business called Zillow in the States that was all about property pricing. And then Kazoo was then inspired by Carvana. So for that reason, Alex was allowed, was able to raise a lot of money, was kind of really kind of focused on making something very, very big, very quickly.

Mike Lander (07:08.577)
Okay.

Lucas Bergmans (07:15.608)
And the opportunity was there in terms of the market, in terms of what consumers were looking for, what consumers expect from other categories and what they frankly are not getting from their used car buying experience. There was a clear, really big, really exciting opportunity. And what Alex was really good at was, you know, building a really strong team, having a really kind of big, ambitious vision, the right level of funding and just kind of that real culture of moving fast, but not...

Mike Lander (07:27.447)
Yep.

Lucas Bergmans (07:44.924)
in a way that compromises the execution, the quality of the execution and the quality of the customer experience. So it was my favourite job, I would say, so far. It was very intense. I think a lot of people probably felt that three or four years was enough. I mean, in that period of time, in terms of the number of companies we bought to expand, the number of different propositions we did, including launching in Europe, the sheer list of things that we achieved.

Mike Lander (07:51.726)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (08:11.42)
would be what a company might do in 10 or 20 years. So it very much compressed into an intense short period of time. But I enjoyed it, generally. It's one of those things where it's probably the hardest I've worked, but it just didn't feel like hard work in a way because it felt it was an exciting vision. Everyone was kind of broadly clear on the direction of travel. And there's always something new and interesting to get your teeth stuck into.

Mike Lander (08:15.839)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (08:37.666)
And that leads us nicely into, you can't clearly, as you were the group marketing director, weren't you? From memory at Kazoo. So you ran marketing.

Lucas Bergmans (08:45.508)
That's right. I think it started out as, yeah, I'm kind of most of, half of marketing. So it was a digital director and me as a brand director. So we kind of split it between us. And initially it was as we just launched in the UK, it was plain old marketing director. As we launched into Europe, we tagged on the group thing. But, you know, same pay, same hours. Yes, that's right. Yes.

Mike Lander (08:57.874)
Okay.

Mike Lander (09:06.794)
Okay.

Mike Lander (09:10.29)
Exactly. More responsibility. So you obviously can't build a brand on your own. You need to work with parties. So you need to work with agencies. And obviously the traditional route would be that you'd go out and someone would write a brief and procurement would probably get involved and they'd write an RFP and you'd get seven down to three. But it doesn't have to be that way, I think is what you're saying, Lucas. You said to me on the pre-call. So kind of...

Lucas Bergmans (09:17.04)
Yes.

Lucas Bergmans (09:21.405)
That's right.

Lucas Bergmans (09:37.353)
us right.

Mike Lander (09:39.838)
Why don't you always need to run an agency selection pitch? And how can an alternative approach work?

Lucas Bergmans (09:46.872)
Yes, so like we talked about the other day, Mike, so we appointed a creative agency, so Engin, now called House 337, I think they've rebranded, but Engin, a major London ad agency, and then good stuff for our media, buying another kind of major independent media company. And we appointed both of those without a pitch at the start of the first half of 2019.

Me and my boss Darren, we debated whether we would run a pitch and we decided ultimately we just didn't need to, at least not initially. Our approach was, my boss Darren had worked with Engine before, when he was at Money Supermarket, rated them very highly, had a good working relationship with them. On that basis, suggested that, actually, why don't we give them the opportunity to...

work on the brief, land the brief, and have that exclusively. But then we still had enough time if we needed it to run a pitch if they didn't crack that brief. So that's how we ran that process. It worked fantastically well. They did crack the brief. They worked really well with us for that whole period of time. So, you know, appointed and run that relationship without a pitch.

And it just saved us a huge amount of time, saved us a huge amount of energy. I think both me and Darren had been through pitch processes and the like in previous roles and just didn't really feel that it was that necessary, frankly. So that was our approach on creative and then similar on media. Well, there was to an extent that we were in a bit of a hurry and we certainly weren't a business that

Mike Lander (11:27.47)
And why was that Lucas?

Lucas Bergmans (11:39.072)
was particularly focused on process for the sake of process. I think if you are a big established, particularly a listed business, you probably do need that much more rigor. And there is a stronger role for a procurement team. But in truth, we didn't really have anyone else to rely on. We felt that we had enough experience and knowledge to be able to select an agency, but also the fallback.

of actually did have just about enough time to run a pitch if it came to it. But if we could appoint an agency and develop a relationship we were happy with without having to run a pitch, that would save us a huge amount of time and energy. And I guess hours for the agencies as well, because often they do that sort of thing pro bono.

Mike Lander (12:28.467)
Exactly. And how does that process work? So just give us some insights into because I get why and I get why it can give you a huge advantage in terms of less process, more fleet of foot. But how do you collaborate with an agency in that kind of whatever the exclusivity period was, say six weeks, how do you make sure that the agency's got enough access and enough creative input?

to get the brief spot on.

Lucas Bergmans (13:00.152)
Yeah, I mean, I think we managed engineers we would, and any agency that we would have appointed in a previous railway. So you get them as close as you can to the business. I mean, when we started working with them, we had no real data to share at all, because we hadn't started selling any cars, we had no trading data. So we had a clear vision. We could really articulate what it is that we wanted to achieve, and we could write a really clear brief.

And off the back of that, we're clear on what our ambitions were in terms of scale and then in terms of budget. So in that respect, not really fundamentally different from how you would manage agency through a pitch process or agencies through a kind of working relationship. We actually needed some help even designing a logo. So we didn't even have a logo when we started. So we actually initially started the relationship.

Mike Lander (13:57.403)
Okay, yep.

Lucas Bergmans (13:58.316)
on that basis. And then some strategy work, which they support and asked did a very good job on that. So really understanding the UK car buyer. The truth was, with a couple of exceptions, we had almost no one in the business had experience of working in the automotive centre. And in a sense, slightly deliberately, particularly in the customer department, because we wanted a kind of very fresh perspective. And so we did need to get close to understanding

Mike Lander (14:22.509)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (14:28.112)
the used car buyer in the UK and what their kind of pain points were, what the whole process of buying a car was. So we partnered with Engine to do a lot of kind of strategy work and insight work. And then went into a process of developing creative ideas, putting those into QoL and testing and then ultimately producing a set of ads that we launched at the start of 2020.

Mike Lander (14:56.162)
So interestingly, so years ago, I was at KPMG. And often as consultants, we'd get appointed by clients because of our sector knowledge. So obviously we've got deep capability knowledge, but also we'd have very deep sector knowledge. But occasionally you get appointed because actually you're bringing knowledge from a different sector into a new relatively untouched, almost like the kind of the blue ocean kind of strategy area. So quite interesting about.

Lucas Bergmans (15:19.652)
Yep. Yes. Exactly that.

Mike Lander (15:25.27)
you don't actually need or sometimes want sector expertise, sometimes. Mostly you do, but occasionally you don't.

Lucas Bergmans (15:30.172)
That's true. Yes, I mean, I think where we did definitely hire people with sector expertise, it was in the operations and purchasing side of things. I'd say people to refurb cars and buy cars, clearly you need a lot of expertise, but certainly within our kind of broader customer team, actually, there was a benefit of having a completely fresh perspective. So another perspective on that, I hired a head of brand, was Dallas, the one I worked with in a previous role.

Mike Lander (15:40.427)
Yes.

Mike Lander (15:46.656)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (16:00.792)
was fantastic as kind of leading the whole content for Kazoo. She doesn't even have a driving license, well certainly didn't then, so kind of really looking at things with fresh eyes. And I think most of our team weren't particularly kind of focused on cars before they joined the business. And where that really helps is that you can really put yourself in the shoes of a customer. And when we as kind of

content writers and content developers look at what other brands do within the sector. They tend to talk as if everyone reads Top Gear every week because that's how often they think. They always are really into thinking about cars all day, every day. And reality customers just don't. They want to know often quite practical information. They don't want huge depth around things like torque and horsepower, all that kind of stuff.

Mike Lander (16:36.109)
Yes.

Mike Lander (16:45.764)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (16:55.096)
for real car enthusiasts want to hear about, you know, your average consumer is not interested in that at all. So actually having people come in that are that much closer to kind of normal people and looking at it from that perspective is really helpful.

Mike Lander (17:12.738)
So we're going to come on in a second to how to design and negotiate creative media deals. But just before we do that, when you appointed the agencies that you work with without the long formal pitch process, when you negotiated that commercial structure with them, how important was it to maintain the relationship as well as the content of what you were negotiating around the contract?

Lucas Bergmans (17:20.036)
Yes.

Lucas Bergmans (17:36.179)
Hahaha

Mike Lander (17:42.23)
How do you get that balance right?

Lucas Bergmans (17:44.792)
Yes, I think so. No.

Mike Lander (17:46.53)
So we haven't prepared this for the audience. So this is just like a kind of, let's see what Lucas thoughts are on that. But I think it's an important point.

Lucas Bergmans (17:51.768)
No, sure. Yeah, look, I think the really important fundamentals, and I think we really leant into this in a way that I probably haven't done in other jobs, is having real transparency and building that kind of relationship from the point of view of, from the foundation of transparency. And where that was particularly prevalent was actually more on the media side. So we appointed good staff. Actually, neither myself or my boss had worked with them before, but it was more like,

my reputation, we had a couple of meetings with them, and we felt that they were actually a really good fit for us. And their real focus as an agency around transparency was a key part of that. They'd also worked with other scale-ups and DTC brands as well, which helped. But it felt there was a kind of really good cultural fit. And the way that we then designed the contracts, I was at a point still pretty much a one-man band in terms of my team, maybe one other person, but certainly what I didn't have is a...

Mike Lander (18:47.118)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (18:47.928)
an experienced procurement department, which I might have had at someone like Aviva. So really designing and agreeing a contract from scratch, from first principles, in a way that I probably hadn't really done before. But actually that was really useful because again, a fresh set of eyes, why do you need to take the standard approach that you would have done in other businesses? The approach that we took was actually we want and we actually use the ISBAR,

Mike Lander (18:52.768)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (19:17.784)
media contracts that is very much focused on transparency. So we'll let's use that as a starting point. And what that meant, therefore, is that we didn't want the agency to be getting a commission from media owners. We only wanted their funding to come directly from us. And the reason that would be was that they don't have different incentives versus what we have, which is what can be done.

Mike Lander (19:41.664)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (19:43.62)
can happen so that they're not incentivized by certain media owners to propose different media plans if that's not on strategy. And that was among other things that was

Mike Lander (19:46.027)
It can.

Mike Lander (19:51.522)
Correct. So that transparency is complete transparency on media costs. So all media costs is basically a pass through. There's no markup and there's no commissions on that media.

Lucas Bergmans (19:57.316)
Yep.

Lucas Bergmans (20:02.796)
No, exactly. So all their revenue is based on their team's time. And we pay that fee, which ultimately means is that our monthly return is probably higher than it would be. But it also means the kind of benefit to us is that we have complete transparency in terms of kind of what they're incentivized to do. And it's the same as our own incentive, which is to grow the business.

So having that level of transparency and trust from the get-go, I think, is really critically important. Actually, that was really useful through the relationship because what we didn't know was going to happen was there was going to be a global pandemic within the first three months of us going live with a very major national campaign and we had to pull everything, we had to renegotiate everything, which I'm sure a lot of other brands did, but actually I think the fact that we had built a really good working relationship.

Mike Lander (20:47.009)
Exactly.

Wow.

Lucas Bergmans (20:59.008)
allowed that to be something that we could navigate pretty well actually and come out the back with. Again, we came back while we kind of pulled off air probably the same time as most people, whatever is March, April, we actually came back on air pretty quickly and we could trade pretty quickly and we could benefit from pretty cheap pricing for a little while. So having that real kind of solid working relationship and the same on an engine side as well.

just having a really open relationship. And, you know, certainly in the first year where we had the time, direct access to our founder, direct access to all the people they needed to really. And so they could really get a feel for the business and feel for what we're all about. And we moved quickly. We didn't really kind of beat around the bush and go through lots of layers of approvals. So I think having that kind of fairly agile.

Mike Lander (21:41.966)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (21:57.392)
to use the coin of phrase, a fairly kind of agile way of working that we could, you know, we didn't have to kind of dwell on things too much. And we had that kind of real culture of moving quickly.

Mike Lander (22:08.374)
Yeah. Something I was talking to a friend of mine, David Meikle, about the other day, who works in this space, more on Brownside, was about this kind of working, non-working chaos that goes on whereby procurement people insist on, well, you know, we've got 10 million to spend, but I don't want more than 1.5 million on your non-working fees because that's not productive. And I get why those discussions go on, but it seems a bit bonkers to me.

Lucas Bergmans (22:20.805)
Right.

Mike Lander (22:37.71)
to reduce the spend on creativity when it's the creativity that makes the difference in the ad. What's your just kind of like headline view on that?

Lucas Bergmans (22:47.208)
Yeah, I mean, I think in previous roles, I've had kind of benchmarks percentage of working to non-working. And we took the same principle, I think, because we were very, very clear that we didn't want to use up too much money on non-working spend. So we were, I think we were very focused on making sure that was tight. So, for example, we didn't pay a large retainer to engine outside of the period of time when we were actually developing creative. You know, you have peaks and troughs when you're...

developing creative in terms of your time through the year. And often, a big established business will still keep a large retainer outside those periods. We were quite focused on that actually we're not really going to do a lot outside of that period of time. So I think we were very focused on keeping our non-working spend down as much as possible, but equally not to the extent that compromises on the creative. So I think we still developed.

really good quality creative. We executed it very well and it worked very well, but we didn't spend more than we needed to. We were very well funded. We had a lot of money, but we were very careful about how we use that money. And then conversely on the other side, as we were actually bringing quite a lot of new money to the market from the media point of view, not a lot of spend in terms of the retail side of automotive. There's lots of the, can the OEM spend tons of money, but in terms of actual

car retailers is quite small before Kazoo! came to market, we could negotiate a lot of value deals. So for every pound we spent on media, we were really pushing to get in two, three pounds. If we could cut a particular deal with a media owner, again, either direct ourselves, actually, or through good stuff. So across TV, radio, out of home, we did either effectively share deals

Mike Lander (24:25.313)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (24:39.192)
distressed inventory deals. So we would get a lot more extra value for every pound that we spent because we're bringing new money to market and we were just really pushing for those kind of deals within kind of fairly clear quality parameters. We didn't just want to be buying a lot of junk inventory but we had a good position to be negotiating and we were willing to kind of make commitments upfront for the year.

Mike Lander (24:55.15)
show.

Lucas Bergmans (25:06.825)
as well, which is not always possible. So yes, we're very focused on value.

Mike Lander (25:14.002)
Exactly. And that brings us on to that kind of point about how do you negotiate creative media deals? And yeah, just like talk through what does that mean in terms of negotiating creative media deals?

Lucas Bergmans (25:26.116)
Yeah, so I think a lot of those, you know, we just gave a very clear mandate to Good Stuff, is that we want to see kind of value deals in a kind of broader sense. So kind of come to us with ideas. So some were fairly straightforward commercial deals whereby we commit X, you know, for the full year and we'd get X plus extra value back. That was, I'm sure, not easy to negotiate, but kind of a fairly straightforward relationship.

Mike Lander (25:47.262)
Exactly.

Lucas Bergmans (25:55.924)
Where they came to the table with some really interesting things was where you get these contradeals with particularly TV media owners. So Sky, for example, certainly would have a selection of shows that they want to produce, but they don't have their own investment enough to cover them. This is where advertisers can come with some investment to effectively fund the production of a TV.

Mike Lander (26:04.799)
Yeah.

Lucas Bergmans (26:22.948)
a show in return for that value of media plus a bit more. So a real win-win sort of a no-brainer, you get more than a pound for every pound you put in for media, they get additional production to produce a show that they want to produce. We had the option to sponsor that because it was broadly in the world of cars but it wasn't really a sensible fit in terms of our

without going into the details. But even without that, it made total commercial sense to go ahead with that. So we did that a couple of years in a row. I think we might have even done two similar deals in the second year. So things like that made total sense. And again, it comes down to having a really good agency that is really open to those kind of discussions and deals and us really kind of pushing for it,

It doesn't always happen actually in other businesses, but because we were real entrepreneurs effectively, it was that kind of spirit of the entrepreneur is that you really wanna make sure that you are using every pound, which you'd like to think would happen everywhere, but I think it's just very much part of our culture. Because it.

Mike Lander (27:29.473)
Yep.

Mike Lander (27:42.394)
Lucas, this has been genuinely fascinating about listening to how do you scale a business from zero to a multi-billion dollar proposition in a very, very short space of time by being creative with your agencies. Just a couple of takeaways for the audience. What are the two things that you might say in order to get value from an agency and for you to get value from an agency as a brand, what are the couple of big things that you'd say?

Lucas Bergmans (27:53.944)
Yeah, definitely.

Mike Lander (28:10.85)
for anyone listening about how they negotiate deals with their agencies.

Lucas Bergmans (28:15.736)
I think that point around having a really open and transparent relationship, particularly on the media side, and then particularly making sure that it's baked into your contract then as well. And for me, that was quite a different approach to what I've done before. Whereas I think I'd probably been used to having a kind of standard type of contract. And we took a very different approach to Kazoo. So I think having that real...

transparency and that real kind of clear relationship. And there might be plenty of more established network agencies that aren't necessarily open to those kind of conversations. So it might be down to who you actually choose to work with. So that would be number one on the contract side. But I think there's also, it's the relationship and really putting the energy and the focus into the relationship. And I think I always do this.

Mike Lander (28:57.025)
Yep.

Lucas Bergmans (29:11.992)
put a real focus on making sure that they are as close to the business as they possibly can be, particularly when it's business like Kuzu that is really fast-paced and changing all the time and you're doing something that's completely new, keeping everyone abreast of exactly what's going on. Of course, there's information you can't always share, but there's plenty that you can to give them a picture of this is what's going on, this is how we're kind of growing, developing, and lots of positive news most of the time. And that became a...

particularly important when there was a global pandemic. Now, hopefully that's not going to happen again anytime soon, but a huge amount of uncertainty, whether it's that or something else. So keeping that really close relationship, seeing your agencies as an extension of your team and people that should be as close to your business and what's going on as they possibly can be. So I'd say those two things.

Mike Lander (29:45.908)
Exactly.

Mike Lander (30:06.282)
Lucas, it's been brilliant. Thank you. Where can people find out more about you?

Lucas Bergmans (30:10.7)
So I'm on LinkedIn, so Lucas Bergmans. I've also started writing a blog in my spare time. So it's called Notes from the Rocket Ship. So it is aimed at scale ups and sharing some of my kind of experience of Kazoo and speaking to other people in similar kind of businesses. So I do try and do that a couple of times a month. So hopefully there's some useful stuff in there, but otherwise just DM me on LinkedIn.

Mike Lander (30:22.219)
Ah.

Mike Lander (30:36.958)
Lucas, it's been amazing. Thank you.

Lucas Bergmans (30:38.704)
Thanks, Mike.