Happy new year and welcome to the first edition of Service Dealer Weekly Update of 2019.

It's a pleasure to be back with you today, bringing you all the latest news and developments of interest to the UK independent dealer trade every Friday lunchtime. 

The more eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that we've continued a bit of a tradition with this first edition of the new year. For a few years now we've devoted a feature in January's inaugural Weekly Update to looking back to see what stories have garnered the most attention during the past year.

As you would imagine it's the more unusual stories which tend to stick out. Unusual in the sense that the news has either come as a big surprise, is particularly joyful, or in some cases can't be described as anything other than downright awful.

If you haven't had a look through yet, I won't spoil anything, suffice it to say, the mixture of subject matter is repeated once again. See if you can guess what story interested you, our readers, the most during 2018?

Moving on to the present, after what I hope was a relaxing break for others too, it's a shame that we have to begin the year today with two stories which can only be described as awfully sad. Firstly, all at Service Dealer would like to pass our sympathies on to the family, friends and colleagues of Clive Pinnock. And secondly, as you may have already read, over the festive period Penn Lawn Mowers fell victim once again to some determined thieves. 

Following being broken into twice and suffering multiple card frauds in 2017, the Ringwood dealership was faced with smashed walls and stolen machinery when they popped into work over the Christmas break.

Penn's Dawn Smith asks today, "What more can we do to stop this happening when someone goes to these lengths?"

And what more can they do? They installed CCTV and put in new fences after the previous attacks.

Sadly it's a story which seems all too common. There's no doubt about it, dealerships are targets for criminals. Especially it seems, for handheld machinery which can be easily chucked into the back of a waiting van.

Dawn wanted us to publicise what had happened to them in this Update, in the hope that it may put other dealers on guard. I'm sure you all have your security procedures in place, but it never harms just having a think about these things again - making sure you have the most up-to-date and effective methods at your disposal in use.

In fact if any dealers have any security methods which they are particularly impressed with which they'd like to pass on to others, please feel free to comment under this article.

Hopefully this year, stories such as this won't be as rife in these pages. I much prefer posting positive news and seeing those articles crop up again in our end of year lists.

Who knows, maybe this time next year, we'll all be reading a Top Ten made up of success after success story?!