Daksh Gupta: the accidental salesman with a big heart

Daksh Gupta was studying at university and washing cars to make ends meet when he sold a car by accident. He’d found his calling, but the coronavirus crisis has presented new challenges.

Who’d be a business leader right now? One false step in the court of public opinion and you’re liable “to be put in the stocks and pelted”, says The Sunday Times. Still, reputations are being made too. For every corporate “villain”, there’s a hero “going the extra mile to look after their people” and, in Britain’s traditionally sharkish motor trade, Daksh Gupta of Marshall Motor Group is setting the pace.

Arguably one of the sharpest dealer bosses in the business, Gupta, 49, has the salesman’s knack of laying things bluntly on the line. “We are at war,” he told Car Dealer magazine last week, mulling the industry’s “most bizarre week ever”. Gupta reckons the current three-week shutdown could continue for up to 12 weeks – with the industry taking, perhaps, “three years to recover”. But his immediate priority, in the company argot, is to “stay Marshall” (treat everybody well). “We’ll worry about sales on the other side.”

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.