My First Business Computer was a BYOD

My Colleagues at Tait Electronics Thought I was Nuts

I’m going to start with a song from my In My Life Top #500 Songs, the soundtrack to my Substack because it is quite fitting. This story is about my first computer and how it facilitated a highly successful career in sales and sales management and made millions of dollars for my employers, repeating a simple and successful methodology. In the near future, it would be called CRM. The principles haven’t changed, just the technology. Later I would lecture on its use and wrote several books on how to work smarter rather than harder, with new technology. I started my sales training in 1981.

Split Enz was a Kiwi band. No apologies to the Aussies who tried to claim so many Kiwi innovations and innovators like Split Enz, Ray Columbus, who I mentioned in my last post, racehorse Phar Lap, and Pavlova. They also claimed many other things that originated in New Zealand.

Split Enz was an odd-looking group, with unusual clothes, unusual hair cuts, a new sound Some say they were New Zealand’s most important group in our music history. So they sang History Never Repeats, but as we know it does. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example. A leader hungry for power, who manages to conquer countries while powerful leaders in other countries are afraid to intervene directly. Sound familiar. It does to me. My great-grandmother took a shower in Sobibor if you know what I mean.

In 1982 I went back to Jack Pearce, the Colonel and told him that I had almost completed the first year of my Sales and Marketing course and asked what else I needed to do to get a chance to become a salesman at Taits. He was very good to me and sat down with Steve Pethers, the Sales Manager to come up with a plan. They agreed to make me a Sales Cadet.

The idea was that I would get some front line experience and would be a gofer for the salespeople. When they got sales, they would send me out to do the paperwork, get finance documents signed and train customers on how to use their RTs. It was great fun but I was itching to get my own territory.

Finally, the day came. I think the Sales Manager at that time was Paul Monk, who was a great mentor to me. There was a restructure as people were moved around to what they thought were the better sales territories. When everyone got what they want, the only territory left was West Auckland, which they considered the worst area you could have. I can’t remember the rep’s name who had it before me, but I remember he really struggled to get business.

So I cut all my hair off, bought myself a suit, and off I went. I did OK. I worked hard and loved my company Holden Torana, a hand-me-down, that I was allowed to take home! Nobody wanted it, but I thought it was cool. It was a step up from my Honda CB360.

I was to develop a rinse and repeat methodology for myself at Tait Electronics and become the second to top salesperson in Tait Electronics nationally. At the top was a guy, I think his name was Chris Chow. In Christchurch, Taits employed over 700 people. Everyone knew someone who worked for Angus and competitors like Pye and Plessey didn’t have a chance. So he was always going to sell more than anyone else.

Do you remember your first computer? Most people will be able to tell you it was a 286 running MSDOS, or maybe a Pentium. It didn’t come out until the following year, 1982.

Sales records in those days were stored in tickler boxes, with thin cardboard cards.

I had them stored alphabetically, one for existing customers, one for prospects and one for customers who had a lease that was expiring. I kept notes on them, I had blank ones that I took out with me in the car, but once in a while, one would fall out of my leather briefcase or my triple carboned order book. That was a major.

At home, I had splashed out and upgraded my Sinclair ZX81 with its 64k RAM chip and bought myself a Sinclair Spectrum. I discovered an app called Vu Calc, which was a sort of relational database. Very simple, but I worked out that I could digitise all the information in my ticker cards and load them into the database.

I was telling a customer about it, who had an appliance rental business. He was entrepreneurial and liked the way I was thinking. I said I would need a black and white TV to sit on my desk at work, and asked if he could sell me one. He told me he had plenty of those, as nobody used them, went out the back and gave me one on the spot.

Now to go back to work. Everyone looked at me like I was nuts when I walked up the stairs and put a TV on my desk. I had to tell Paul and the team that I was going to need a bit more desk space to accommodate a TV, a dot matrix printer, the cassette player and the device itself.

This will sound foreign to most of you, but with the Spectrum, every day I had to install the program from a cassette tape, then upload the database from a separate cassette, before I could start working. At the end of each day, I had to save and store all my data onto a cassette and back it up onto another one to play it safe.

A rigmarole for sure. I also had to deal with the laughter and mockery from my colleagues, who thought it was a great joke. Fortunately, I was made of stern stuff and I was going to show them. It took me probably a full week to upload everything into the database, and then I printed a hard copy on the dot matrix as well, which I could take out with me into the field.

Now I would never miss a sales call, and I stored everything. People’s names, their hobbies, things about sport, things they told me about their families, birthdays. Some people thought their job was to sell RT’s. I understood that my role was to solve companies problems. The radio was just the vehicle. I will share some stories about this in the future. For now, suffice it to say that I brought in more business from the territory nobody wanted, than the cream territories with lots of existing customers.

I looked sharp in my grey and blue business suits and shiny shoes and learned that sometimes I needed to swap them for jeans, a swandrai and steel-capped boots. I battled my fear of cold calling and hooked into my mentors, who at the time included Richard Gee, and the late Ray Mills, who taught me so much about business in their own unique ways.