David Kendrick takes UHY Manchester CEO role as business restructures for growth

UHY Hacker Young’s automotive-leaning Manchester operation is aiming to double the scale of its business following the creation of an executive team led by new chief executive David Kendrick.

The chartered accountancy firm – the AM Awards 2023 auditor – also officially installed Paul Daly as chief financial officer and Stephen Grayson as chief operating officer from April 1 in a restructure that Kendrick told AM made the business “better positioned for growth”.

UHY’s UK business is made up of 23 divisional offices, with Manchester its second largest after London, with around 145 employees.

Kendrick said: “What we wanted to do is create a more familiar corporate structure that will help us to deliver the growth that we hope to achieve.

“We’ve been at UHY for nine years now and we never imagined we’d be in the position that we’re in. We represent around 80 car retail groups with a combined turnover in the automotive sector amounting to around £5.5 billion.

“As a business our objective is to double our scale over the next five years. That won’t be done to the detriment of the service we currently provide to our existing clients, though, and the restructure ensures we can make it happen in the right way.”

UHY Manchester’s existing team of partners remains unchanged in the change of structure, and includes: Peter Williams, Chris Oxley, Kevin Blakemore, Ian McMahon, Ryan Wear, Zoe Duffy, Sarah Whalley, Clive Gawthorpe, Sheila Berry and Simon Denye.

Kendrick told AM that the business expects to be busy in 2023, despite nerves that the year might deliver a slowdown in automotive activity.

UHY’s Manchester team count automotive as around 50% of its workload and Kendrick said: “At the start of the year we thought it would be a quite years for the automotive retail sector. There was uncertainty around the switch to agency, in particular.

“As it turns out the sector’s M&A activity has increased and – although agency and OEMs network restructuring plans have impacted saleability in certain cases – we are engaged in some exciting conversations, with both small and large businesses.”