“The day after I left school, I had a job cleaning cars. My dad wanted to teach me the value of a pound, but I also learned about the value of doing a job with pride and passion.”
If that mantra needs justifying, the Bentley, Bugatti and Ferrari that flank Paul Jaconelli, now 72 and owner of the Romans International emporium in the Surrey town of Banstead, do a pretty good job of it. If you will excuse the pun, the teenaged car washer came, saw and continues to conquer the world of supercar and luxury car sales.
“After washing the cars for a few years, I started trading them when I was 18,” recalls Jaconelli. “I would buy what I could afford, clean it up and then put it back in the paper and sell it on. I wasn’t an overnight success; I was working at the BBC as a scenery technician to top up my salary.
“I enjoyed it and made some money, but it was very gradual growth. I didn’t have the money to have more than three or four cars for sale at a time initially, but eventually I got my first premises – in Wimbledon, under a driving test centre – and grew from there.”
Success kept coming. Jaconelli opened premises in nearby Sutton and then Epsom, but even then he couldn’t have dreamed being where he is today
His big break came when he was offered the chance to run neighbouring car business HF Edwards, a Fiat dealership.
“It had been established in 1938 and was run by a chap called Stanley Pickard,” he recalls. “We got on, we had lunch together, but then he got ill and I was asked if I wanted to buy the business. I had to be honest: there was no way I could afford it. But he turned round and asked if I would run it for him and pay it off that way. We became Fiat’s biggest dealer in Europe, winning the Dealer of the Year title three times. From that point on, I started to believe that I could make a success of it.”