by kenadventure | Sep 16, 2024 | Book 2
The rollout of EQUIP® to the John Deere equipment dealers in the US was proceeding at an exhilarating pace. In 2004, we attended the annual John Deere User Group conference in Saint Louis, Missouri, (below) and were impressed by the sophistication of the displays and...
by Ken Fife | Aug 19, 2024 | Book 2
Financially, the heat was off. Our home territory was divided into three business units. The largest was the Melbourne head office, responsible for companywide administration and the development, sales, and support of the new-generation UNITS® and EQUIP® suite of...
by Ken Fife | May 10, 2024 | Book 2
“Nothing is more certain than change”, I wrote in our client newsletter as I announced the launch of Auto-IT in early 2000. Our merged enterprise was the second largest Dealer Management System supplier by market share in Australasia. We now had offices in Sydney,...
by Ken Fife | Nov 20, 2023 | Book 2
By the close of the 1990s, our nervously executed decision to launch a new DMS (Dealer Management System) had been vindicated. Our client base had grown in eight years from 20 to 200-plus dealerships and we were no longer the smallest DSP (Dealer System Provider) in...
by Ken Fife | Oct 26, 2023 | Book 2
I’d worked for three companies since my arrival in Australia in 1983, and they’d all become insolvent. Was I a manifestation of the albatross in Coleridge’s Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner? I’d noticed a few raised eyebrows among contacts in my business network and...
by Ken Fife | Aug 7, 2023 | Book 2
My employment as a salesperson for ORAD computers lasted only ten months but it was an excellent introduction to working and surviving in an urban environment, and I wasn’t unhappy that fate had tipped me into computer sales. I’d learned that in the pre-sale cycle,...
