About Us
We will invest in companies at an early stage and work closely with founders providing significant sweat equity backed with our investment committee with over 150 years of combined experience in the automotive industry. We are targeting scalable business including sustainable mobility, as well as other emerging models in the industry that have the potential to deliver significant returns and become market leaders utilising our support and back testing the opportunity within the Cambria Group.
Team
Mike Allen – Investment Manager
Mike has over 20 years of investment experience starting his career at UBS Global Asset Management in 2001 running >£1bn of funds as part of a 4-man team focused on Pan European small-mid cap equities. Since 2003 Mike has been a sell-side analyst focused on Automotive Retail/Business Services and has been ranked as a #3 analyst by the Thomson Reuters Extel survey in this period alongside numerous stock picking awards including “Europe’s Best Analysts” by The Wall Street Journal in 2013. In his last role at Zeus Capital as a Board Member/Head of Research, he worked on 8 transactions raising c£2bn of equity capital. Mike has acted for or been retained by most of the leading PLC automotive retail groups in the UK, and also currently serves as a Board Advisor/Non-Executive Director on numerous companies including carwow, Bumper, DSG Group, and Aures Holdings.
Mark Lavery – Founder of Cambria Automobiles
Mark has nearly four decades of automotive experience and is considered to be a highly effective leader in the sector. He worked for Hartwell for ten years and ended up running the Group as Group Operations Director until 2003, an Operations Board Director of Reg Vardy from 2003 to 2004.
After leaving Reg Vardy Mark started the process of arranging funding to start his own group and became the founder of Cambria in 2006. With Initial starting equity investment of £332k, Mark took the Group private in 2021 for £82.5m after admitting the Group onto AIM in 2010 consistently demonstrating during the period sector-leading levels of Return on Equity above 15%.
Aside from Cambria Private Capital, the Group now has 5 operating divisions as it continues on it's Chapter 2 journey after delisting the company from the London Stock Exchange.
Paul Buddin – Group CFO
Paul joined in 2022 having spent 8 years at KPMG in Audit and Advisory. Prior to that he spent 11 Years at McLaren (6 years as CFO); took the McLaren Automotive division from £6m of turnover to £1.3Bn. As well as 2 Years at TopHat as CFO - a leading start-up in the modular housing sector with Goldman Sachs as the Private Equity investor. He also spent time working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.
Rodney Smith
Rodney has considerable financial and leadership experience in the automotive industry spanning over six decades. He has held Board positions within Dutton Forshaw, SMAC, Abercromby, and Hartwell PLC. Rodney was a founding director of Cambria in 2006 and is a former FD of the Group.
William Charnley – Partner King & Spalding & Non-Executive Director at Cambria Automobiles
William has over 20 years' experience in public and private mergers and acquisitions, disposals, flotations, private equity transactions and general corporate and securities advice. William served as a non-executive director at CD Bramall plc for four years prior to it being acquired in 2004, before joining the board of Lookers plc as an alternate non-executive director from 2006 to 2008. William is a fellow of the institute of chartered secretaries and administrators and of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge.
Michael Burt – Managing Partner Promethean & Non-Executive Director at Cambria Automobiles
Michael began his private equity career at Dresdner Kleinwort capital. In 1999 Michael joined Ellerman Investments, the UK investment management company of Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. While at Ellerman, Michael was heavily involved in the acquisition of Littlewoods plc and Gus's home shopping division gaining significant experience in both acquisitions and turnaround ventures. Michael left Ellerman in 2004 and joined Collins Stewart before leaving to become a member of Promethean.