Beely – prioritising customer experience

Beely, a Finnish growth company focusing on mobility solutions, provides cars as a service without the worries of ownership. Unlike traditional leasing firms, Beely concentrates specifically on used cars. As well as the car, their monthly fee includes maintenance, repairs and inspections without surprising extra costs. Clients can also purchase extra services including tyre change.

Beely invests particularly in the digital service experience – choosing the right car and signing an agreement are easy to do online. Beely’s service model has taken Finland by storm, and their wide partnership network covers not only car dealerships and repair shops but also inspection facilities and tyre companies.

For Beely, the past few years have been a time of extremely strong growth. CEO Pertti Pigg emphasises the role that Beely’s staff have in developing the digital element and introducing client insight into the core of the business. For companies, combining expertise with a growth-seeking culture is the recipe for generating their greatest competitive advantage.

“Clients are at the centre of Beely’s business model, and cars are practically just an instrument. We invest strongly in artificial intelligence-based customer experience while also doing a great deal of research to achieve the best client insight in the automobile sector.”

Beely has grown from the startup phase into a major player in the Finnish automobile sector. The company’s flexible service model is seen as one of the motoring trends of the future, whereby clients shift to using different monthly-billed service packages suitable for each particular life stage. Consequently, Mr Pigg finds that the automobile sector in undergoing transformation, also in more general terms.

“Beely’s story has roots in how our founding partners started thinking about whether the used car stocks of car dealerships could be utilised in some more flexible way. In addition, a megatrend we observed was that attitudes toward ownership in general are undergoing a transformation. We see that clients are already pretty good at calculating the total costs of owning a car, including loss of value. We believe that in the future, car ownership will no longer be considered an end in itself.”

Growth – but not at any cost

According to Mr Pigg, cash management and striking a balance between rolling operations and long-term investments constitute the most challenging part of heading a growth company. Although clearly a growth company, Beely doesn’t want to chase growth at any cost. They therefore want to hold on to profitability, even though turnover is multiplying on an annual basis.

“In many respects, our business model is a forerunner, even internationally. Unlike traditional players, we deliver clients flexibility that they cannot get elsewhere. For example, compared with traditional leasing companies, we do not tie clients to new expensive cars under multi-year contracts. We’ve sought a new kind of angle to a familiar business – meaning less focus on cars and more on people.”

In the Finnish market, Beely still has lots to capture, but an ambitious growth company is naturally also considering how to go international. Consequently, there is active exchange of information between European digitally oriented car-sector service companies about how the sector is developing. At the core of growth lies the development of digital customer experience based on an unrivalled client insight. In particular, businesses want to maximally exploit the opportunities brought about by artificial intelligence, for example in customer service.

“At Beely, the client experience is almost entirely digital, and international upscaling is built on the best client insight in the automotive sector combined with top-tier digital capabilities and leading market partners.”

Recipe for success: growth ambition, consistency and the right financing solution

What is the recipe for a successful growth company? Mr Pigg sees there are two dimensions to growth ambition. The first is the mental side and creating a growth mindset. The management should build a functional team and a shared belief that the set goals are achievable. Mr Pigg believes that as CEO, he plays an important role in making it possible to find growth‑oriented individuals and creating the conditions for them to succeed. Growth and courage are present in Beely’s everyday operations at all times.

“A company’s sense of capability is important. That is why Beely’s culture is well suited to giving people room to succeed. It is important to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit and strong execution capability even as the company grows into the next size category. What’s more, you must have confidence that the chosen path is the right one.”

However, the right attitude alone is not enough – the prerequisites, including financing, also need to be there. Seed financing is often available for early-stage businesses, but for a rapidly scaling growth company, financing processes are often too slow. Mr Pigg therefore calls for agile financing instruments, especially at the stage when the aim is to accelerate growth.

“From the perspective of a small company, due diligence processes are often heavy and resource-intensive. They also take resources away from what matters the most – developing the business. In Beely’s case, I was personally responsible for the necessary fact-finding investigations, and naturally I learned and gained a deeper understanding of financing, but the amount of work required for that was nevertheless significant.”

Mr Pigg reminds us that the planning of financing solutions should be one of the core processes of any growth-seeking company.

“Financing often appears on a growth company’s list of priorities at the wrong time: ideally, you should focus on financing before there is an acute need for it.”

Naturally, growth also requires the right financing partners. An international capital investor may seek a quick exit and steer the company toward growth at the expense of profitability.

“We had extensive discussions with various financiers both in Finland and internationally, and at the current upscaling stage, an institutional financier like LocalTapiola was the right solution. LocalTapiola seeks a return on its investment with more patience than a capital investor, thus enabling profitable growth. Furthermore, we already had broad cooperation with LocalTapiola, so the synergy benefits were clear.”