Name: Tom Buckley
Job title: Director of TAP Retail, and general manager of Pricewatch Group
Tom Buckley met his employers Anthony and Paul Salvidge when he was working at BMW, upgrading their cars, he admits now, probably more than they needed to be. He is now employed by the Salvidges as general manager of their forecourt business Pricewatch Group, and he has become a director of their Gulf-branded leasehold sites under the umbrella of TAP Retail. All three men now share a passion for developing the business as well as for fast cars.
01. Your career history: The Salvidges started the business back in 1997, long before I joined. The number of sites has gone up and down since then as opportunities arose to develop, dispose and go again.
We started TAP Retail in 2022, primarily to operate the Gulf branded leasehold sites. Paul and Anthony kindly allowed me some physical and metaphorical ownership of that business, so now I have more skin in the game which is always extra motivation to keep going and keep improving!
Currently site numbers are eight petrol stations, across Pricewatch and TAP Retail, plus two standalone convenience stores.
The forecourts are branded with Esso, BP and Gulf, and shops are Morrisons Daily and Nisa.
My career path is a little bit different from most. I started working in Next when I left college, left there to become area manager of River Island, and then in 2008 switched to car sales for BMW. I spent 11 years with BMW/Mini and ended there as general manager of Mini, with a few management positions inbetween. I moved to Mercedes as used car manager in 2019 where I worked for three years before joining Pricewatch.
I have known Paul and Anthony for over 10 years. They were regular customers of mine at BMW and then Mercedes. They both love cars and I may have played a part in them changing slightly more often than they needed to. Once I was working at Mercedes, they were the only customers I would deal with directly. They had become more friends than customers. We had built up a trust, which is when we started discussing opportunities to come and work for them.
Initially I joined Pricewatch to work as general manager at the Shoreham Oil Terminal, which is our bulk fuel distribution side of the business. While it is very different from cars it is also very similar. It is high turnover, low margin: just liquid instead of vehicles.
It didn’t take long until I was working more on the retail side of the business. At the time Pricewatch had nine sites, The Ukraine war had made it harder to secure certain grades consistently so we started to look at branding the sites, so our tanker fleet could be used exclusively for the distribution business allowing overnight expansion of our delivery capacity. I began working more closely with Paul at this point and after a few staff changes we decided not to hire anyone and I would assume the general manager role across the retail business too, under Paul’s guidance of course.
Finding a good team at our oil distribution terminal in Shoreham Port meant I could concentrate on the sites more, but I love working down at the port. My desk is still there, it’s my kind of a happy place and frankly a bit more relaxing than the hectic world of retail. We have lots of laughs with the team and we have some exciting plans for 2025, plus I get to listen to all the tanker drivers moan about everything – joking, they never do that!
02. Dream job: I don’t know the answer to this question, I genuinely love what I am doing now. I used to think that I would struggle outside the automotive industry, but I have never looked back. I have never really thought about what I would love to do, outside of what I am doing at the time.
03. What do you drive? A Land Rover Defender, although I have a hybrid Kia Niro for work, which isn’t quite as exciting but a good workhorse.
04. Perfect day: I love day two or three of a holiday abroad. I usually spend the first few days still working and then after day five I get a bit bored, so I enjoy those few days in the middle.
05. Best holiday: When my daughter Niamh was younger, my wife and I took her to a hotel in Tenerife (bit boring I know), the place had so many swimming pools and themed restaurants, I don’t think I have ever seen her that happy. That said, she didn’t like the salmon sushi. She is 12 now, and holidays with her parents are rapidly becoming uncool and spent with us telling her to get off her iPad.
06. Holiday wish-list: I want to travel more, I plan to take the family to New York in 2025, and I want to try and get a few city breaks in too if I can. Once Niamh has finished school I want to take a longer trip to New Zealand and Australia, I have some family there I am always saying I will visit one day.
07. Favourite read: I don’t read books much, I used to listen to Diary of a CEO and The High-Performance Podcast when they first started and it was all about business. However, they have lost that now, so I have stopped listening. Back when I was at Mini I had some challenging staff, my then manager told me to read The Chimp Paradox. I got the audio book and that helped me understand people a little better.
Now I just listen to Peter Crouch, not quite as inspirational but definitely funnier.
08. Three words to describe yourself: A bit boring.
09. Possessions you could not do without: I don’t really own much that I couldn’t live without. I spend way too much time on my phone so would struggle without that, but it would probably be a good thing. Like most men, I have very little say in what is inside my house and would happily see the back of most of it. I do love my car though, it is one half of my dream garage, and I wouldn’t want to get rid of that now.
The other half of that garage is a Porsche 911. I don’t know that much about them, but I have always wanted one. Just love them.
10. What do you most admire? People who don’t care what other people think, I mean people who really don’t care. The bloke on the train singing to himself or the lady wearing a sausage dog patterned dress, I have so much admiration for those people. On a professional level, those who have built a business up from nothing, that is why I loved those podcasts so much, listening to the story of BrewDog, Gymshark, etc. It is so inspirational to hear how many times these people get knocked back, fail and keep going again.
11. Favourite sports person: I don’t really have a favourite sports person. I have a favourite sports team, West Ham United. I am a season ticket holder at the world’s worst Premier League Football Stadium, any football fans will understand why I say that!
12. Best news over the past 12 months: Sounds a bit boring, again. My daughter started secondary school this year, and she had to go to a school where she didn’t know a single person as we had moved towns. To hear how many friends she had made within a few days made that last 12 months of worry all float away.
13. Recent achievements: I haven’t achieved many personal goals recently. I did run the London Marathon but that was six years ago. I cannot live off that forever, but I am going to anyway. I would struggle to run a bath right now, but I aim to get back to a bit of running and losing some of the weight that is creeping back on.
14. What’s your pet peeve: People who stop across junctions, entrances or roundabouts in traffic, meaning you cannot get in/out, because they are so desperate to be that one car ahead. Oh and slightly more annoying than that, people who don’t understand how filter lanes work. Honestly if everyone went 1/1/1, traffic jams would be so much smaller. I do suffer from a bit of road rage.
15. Biggest fear: Heights. I don’t even like standing on a chair to change a light bulb. You’re probably looking a cliché like “failure”, but it’s really not that, it’s just heights and needles.
16. Most important qualities in the workplace: Honesty, integrity and kindness, with a decent work ethic thrown in!
17. What motivates you? Providing a better childhood for my daughter than I had. I don’t want her to be the kid with the naff trainers, etc. It sounds silly but that was me. It’s not nice when you are young. We need to make sure that she is balanced and not spoilt though, so she will be stacking shelves on her 14th birthday.
18. Best thing about the job: It has been seeing the transformation of the Pricewatch sites from unbranded to great Esso/BP/Nisa/Morrisons stores. I got a bit addicted to it.
19. Best bit of business advice you have ever received: Employ people you trust. I worked for a man called Toby Burton at BMW who told me to always employ/promote people you trust. You can teach them anything else. I have a lot of time for Toby. He changed me from a very negative person to a very positive one and is probably the biggest influence in my professional life.
Working with Anthony and Paul Salvidge has been great too. I have learnt so much from them on a business level and they have given me the freedom to really try and change their business for the better, I haven’t got it all right and they will respectfully point that out, although Paul does like to tell me I should have listened to him in the first place.
20. Most recent business achievement of note. Wivelsfield Service Station, and taking that from a closed down car showroom with a few pumps from the 80s to a thriving Morrisons Daily and Gulf petrol station. We expected it to be a good site, but nothing as good as it has become. We have lots more to do there.
