"Our expansion strategy was based on the tail-end of the business cycle," admits a chastened Mr Denny, who now only sells cars in the Czech Republic and Slovakia - which the company considers a single market - after retreating from Poland, Romania and Hungary. It is a story repeated around the region as
former high-flying companies, especially retailers, find the environment tougher than they expected.
"Some of these companies expanded too aggressively and when the downturn came they were very exposed," says Lukasz Zalicki, a partner with Ernst & Young's Polish office.
Just a couple of years ago, banks were happy to hand out money on generous terms, seduced by the idea of aggressive companies using their home country experience to establish themselves in other emerging markets of the region.
Sky Europe, a discount airline based in Slovakia and now under protection from creditors, leapt on to the boom in low-cost travel unleashed by the region's entry into the EU in 2004.
But the decision to set up hubs in Budapest and Krakow proved too ambitious, and, hammered by the steep rise in fuel prices in 2007 and 2008, the company has pulled out of both Hungary and Poland to concentrate on the Austrian market, as well as the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
"The lesson we learned is that the expansion should have been done in a more measured way and not so quickly," says Nick Manoudakis, the airline's chief financial officer.
Other companies are pondering what to do with investments that seemed like a good idea until the crisis struck.
Sfinks, a Polish chain of casual dining restaurants, went into debt to grow in Poland as well as in the Czech Republic and Hungary, where it has five locations. But the clampdown on lending that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers left the company exposed and has forced it to slash costs and rethink its business model.
Redan, a Polish clothing company, is closing its five shops in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and concentrating on Poland and Ukraine. "Those markets are smaller and we don't have the resources to grow there," says Krzysztof Marek, the company's director of exports.
"We didn't open enough shops. To survive you have to have a large network, but if you don't have the resources you should pull out."
Lack of scale seems to be a common thread with the companies retreating from their alien beachheads. Opening just a few branches in a foreign market carried much higher costs than management anticipated.
"They didn't have mangers, the financial resources, and underestimated how different those markets are," says Jerzy Kalinowski, a partner with KPMG Poland.
Mr Denny says the model of no-haggle used car sales worked very well in much of the region, but failed in Poland. "For Poles, it turns out that buying a car from a used car retailer instead of buying it from a private seller or going to Germany to get your own is an admission of failure," he says.
In countries such as Hungary, newcomers from other central European countries were faced with high levels of competition from German retailers that dominate the market.
While smaller firms are retreating, larger companies with more resources and larger-scale foreign operations are not pulling back.
CEZ, the Czech energy company, and PKN Orlen, Poland's leading petroleum company, both controlled by their respective governments, are big regional players. Asseco, a Polish software company, still plans to continue expanding throughout Europe.
Once the downturn ends, those companies that survive are likely to eventually raise their heads above the parapet and again think about regional expansion.
"We've all learned a massive lesson and any future expansion will be very careful," says Mr Denny.
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