Big Mike OUR MAN ON THE INSIDE SHARES HIS THOUGHTS ON THE CAR BUSINESS
Who is Big Mike? Well, that would be telling. What we can say is he’s had more than 40 years in the car trade so has probably forgotten more about it than we’re likely to know. 18 | CarDealerMag.co.uk
COMMENT
To be perfectly Frank... And that’s not my only big work mistake
B
ack in the days before our lives were dictated to by mobile phones and touchscreens everywhere we looked, those moments where you wish the ground would open up and swallow you were always pretty analogue experiences. For example, back in my earlier years I worked for a fairly well-known dealer group in the West Midlands, and it was on a training event for one of our brands, at some awful hotel designed specifically with corporate training events in mind (right down to its multiple-choice condom machine) where I made the first of many faux pas that made me realise I was ultimately destined to be my own boss. That way, nobody would have either the ignominy or responsibility of having to employ me. A colleague and I had arrived at the training centre fairly early in order to make sure that we could properly prepare for the following day’s manufacturer-hosted product ‘deep dive’. Sadly, this didn’t involve oxygen tanks and scuba masks, but instead saw tedious grey men in tedious grey suits telling us stuff that we already knew via the medium of overhead projector. If you don’t know what one of those is, ask somebody over the age of 40, who will invariably have been taught by teachers with blue or green fingers earned as a result of operating one. Anyway, I digress. At said manufacturer conference, my colleague Stella and I (Stella was a bloke – the nickname came from his fondness for Belgium’s finest fighting juice) decided to spend a bit of time together in the hotel bar preparing for the following day’s presentation. After all, we were both bright young things and our ability to instinctively know the difference between a GL and a GLS could well unlock the door to future promotions. Well, that’s what we each told our franchise managers, whereas in reality we wanted to get there early so we could get truly rat-arsed. This was all well and good, but I had made a schoolboy error. In the excitement surrounding the prospect of a company-funded night on the lash, I hadn’t bothered to ask around and find out if anybody else from our dealership was attending the same event. Imagine my horror, then, when I stumbled upon our dealer principal while not exactly sober. He, too, was at the bar of the hotel, and the situation could have been manageable were it not for the fact that we first became aware of each other’s presence while I was doing a fairly convincing impression of him, complete with a sofa cushion stuffed inside my shirt to make myself look fatter – itself, quite an achievement. The killer moment, though, was my beautifully honed Geordie accent (quite a challenge for a born-and-bred Brummie) and the fact that I struggled up to the bar, left arm draped over Stella’s shoulder, shouting ‘My name is Frank and I’m a right ****.’ Strangely enough, my career with that dealer group didn’t last too much longer afterwards, although it wasn’t my last encounter with Frank. A few years later, I’d somehow managed to move on from the career-limiting behaviour of my youth and was working in a sales manager’s role at a Fiat main dealership, which brought me a reasonable amount of success and income right up until the point that I and two other sales managers at different sites became answerable to a new regional franchise manager. Yes, it was Frank. And it was also the end of my career selling new Fiats, although longterm readers of this column may well recall that I left that particular role in a blaze of glory, having ordered nine identical solid beige base-model Fiat Cromas as new car stock the day before I handed in my notice. They were still using them as courtesy cars at least two years later, as I found out to my
I left that particular role in a blaze of glory, having ordered nine identical solid beige base-model Fiat Cromas.
