… it’s also happened really fast too! Weren’t we just celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee and our sporting heroes’ fantastic successes at the London 2012 Olympics? Yes, that was all of 16 months ago, but 2013 continued to have some great highs. First we welcomed Prince George into the world, Andy Murray finally won Wimbledon, the economy grew in the third quarter by 0.8% and Kian Egan became King (of the Jungle).

At John Austin’s we’ve also been enjoying a great year.  This may not be in quite the same league but we put another ramp in our newest workshop, (you may remember that two years ago we doubled our workshop area to accommodate more vehicles and improve on turnaround times); this addition has been helping us to work on even more cars and further improve on those times. We now have three fully qualified MOT testers too. Earlier this year we also launched a dramatic new website, if you haven’t seen it, please visit: www.johnaustin.co.uk. And, finally, our latest recruit, John Finch, a very experienced car mechanic, was promoted to Workshop Manager. John is taking some of the workload off manager Paul Miller, allowing Paul to focus on the business and get the best deal on parts for our customers.

The fact that we keep expanding is because you keep using us; the customer surveys that you complete tell us that 95% of our new customers come to us through personal recommendation, and we’d like to thank you on both counts.

We’d also like to wish you and your family a very merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year and look forward to seeing you again in 2014.

Best wishes from your John Austin team – James, John, Marc, Paul, Simon, Sharon and Tom.