Used car buying platform CarGurus has appointed Amanda Symonds as its new UK managing director.
She will lead both the CarGurus UK and PistonHeads teams.
Symonds joins the business with more than a decade of online marketplace business experience, helping to drive consumer demand, supplier engagement and revenue growth.
She began her career as a chartered accountant before moving into the investment banking realm, managing several successful merger and acquisition transactions. Her finance role took her to Boston, USA, where she worked on several cross-border deals and later studied for a Masters in Business Administration at MIT Sloan, graduating in 2010.
Post business-school, Symonds spent almost seven years at Tripavisor in a broad range of roles for the Vacation Rentals business, giving her an in-depth understanding of online marketplaces. As a senior product manager she worked on the integration of strategic partners, and as VP of Marketing she built out high-performing teams in CRM, SEO, Brand and PR.
After leaving Tripadvisor in 2017, Symonds went on to become chief growth officer for a start-up where she was responsible for growing tenants and landlords for an online real-estate business. In 2020, she launched her own executive coaching and strategic consulting firm.
Sam Zales, president and chief operating officer at CarGurus, said: “I couldn’t be more excited to add Amanda’s broad talents to our international leadership team. We are fortunate to be acquiring her strategic, operational, and – most importantly – career development and people management ability to lead our UK business.”
Symonds added: “I’m thrilled be joining the Senior Leadership Team of CarGurus and to be taking on the managing director role of the UK business. I know the UK car market as a consumer and I’m excited to apply my online marketplace knowledge to the rapidly changing automotive space.”
CarGurus acquired the PistonHeads used car retail website from Haymarket Media Group, in 2019. The two firms combined their online dealer offerings, last year. The arrangement provides expanded audience reach and greater stock visibility for dealers across both sites.
The audience overlap between the two sites is less than 10%, resulting in a combined audience of more than six million unique monthly visitors.
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