40 Years in Business Systems

It was on the 2nd of May 1983, 40 years ago, that I started my career at Kalamazoo Business Systems. I still have my original appointment letter, and in today’s money I would earn $12.55 per month in New Zealand dollars plus commission.

I had left a job working with programmable logic controllers and implementing weighbridges on conveyor belts to start a career selling and implementing business systems. I traded my oscilloscope, welding machine and overalls for a suit and tie, meetings with customers, and the wonderful world of systems and processes.

My significant impact on the fledgling Sales Management Systems (Now called CRM) was featured in a national magazine two years later. The caption placed under my photograph was: Ivor Whibley, taking the hassle out of systems. I still have the magazine.

40 years later, I am still doing this. I now wear glasses. My hair is a different colour. I seldom wear a tie, still have a phone to my ear and am as enthusiastic as ever. I have had a few excursions into other roles over time, senior management, sales management, product development and even took a year off to write a book. Also, during 20 of these years, was a Reserve Force (Territorial) Infantry Army officer. But I’ve always come back to Business Systems, or as they are called today, Business Applications.

Having a few beers the other evening with a customer of mine, the discussion moved around to some of the interesting experiences, technologies, people and general observations I have had over the years. His suggestion was that I should capture some of these experiences for posterity.

There are indeed many interesting stories. For example, the day they shut our company down and we had to lay off all the staff. How the organisation I was working for backed to the wrong horse, selecting Commodore over Microsoft and many more.

I’ve thought that to do justice to these events, writing about them would involve multi page blogs or articles which few people have the time to read, and therefore I have decided that I will try to record several of these stories into a series of podcasts.

This is not something I have done before. However, like with many of my experiences, I’m going to give this a go. I listen to podcasts while on the move, it’s an effective use of my time and maybe some of my experiences could apply to a few people today.

But let me finish by mentioning some of the content from that article of 1985. This was in relation to the Sales Management system we had built at Kalamazoo, which was revolutionary for the time, I was quoted thus:

“The system works like a fighter jet,” says Ivor “it will lock onto a prospect until you’ve either lost it or gained the sale! If the prospect is temporarily unavailable or still deciding whether he wants to buy, the potential sale will appear on the system when the original follow-up date comes around. The system therefore forces the salesperson to carry a transaction through to its logical conclusion and this eliminates the great deal of time-wasting lost potential sales or false entries”.

Sounds a little like Microsoft Dynamics 365 today!! don’t forget they published this in April 1985, long before the term CRM was even a thing.

So watch out for my podcasts in a month or so. I will use this forum to promote them as well.