Well, this bit is always the hardest to write. What to say about an animal loving, adventurist that just so happened to forge a career in all things digital by accident….
You see I started my career in the Automotive industry at 19 because being as tight as I am with money, I thought I could buy my dream car cheap if I could just work for the company that sold it… It worked!! My Mazda Protege was just amazing. After achieving my goal of owning my Mazda, and being someone that doesn’t sit still or stay quiet for long, I started to wonder about this industry I had found my self working in.
Back then it was all fold out paper contracts and manually filled in sales tracker logs, but it didn’t take long for everything to begin to change. About 5 years into my sales career I was presented an opportunity to work for a relatively new marketing platform called carsales.com.au, my old boss was now the Manager there. I was to be the first full time salesperson in NSW and since I didn’t know how to use a computer back then and it looked like I would need that skill in the future I thought I’d better give it a shot. This is the first thing you’ll realise about me, I’m a planner, a big planner. There isn’t much I do that isn’t calculated out to tell me what my next step should be.
So there I was at Carsales, selling a solution that seemed to be working well for the dealers, but not progressing in my career quickly enough. Here came the study, To help get me ahead I decided to complete my Masters in business Management to prove to would be employers in this male dominated space that I was serious about breaking the mould. Bingo, it worked. I found my self working for News Digital, Carsguide, and progressing into State Management.
Funnily enough my big break came when Drive and Carsguide started to merge and I was made redundant. At the time I was talking to an up and coming company who would eventually take a punt on an unknown and employ me as a National Sales Manager. Now all this was a great learning curve, but I was finding a lot of my technical knowledge wasn’t up to speed. All I was doing was co-ordinating sales and Sales teams, but not continuing my learning.
I needed a plan…where could I go to learn the technical land of online Automotive…..Dealer Solutions. These guys were the biggest provider of technical solutions and data services. 3 years in and managing 3 states week in week out took its toll. I trained with Google, learnt all I could then took the next step, Internet Director for a major dealer group.
Here I could learn about different web platforms, CMS, SEO and Social Media. I could immerse myself in making the processes smooth and easy for all staff to utilise, and most importantly I could close the loop on my learning. Being a statistics junky I also had the ability to measure the ROI all this technology could achieve and prove to myself once and for all that it was financially beneficial for businesses to invest in digital. Wakeling Automotive gave me the knowledge, space and tools I needed to come full circle and I will always be grateful for them for that. Now I was ready.
So here I am, out on my own causing havoc with a different view on many things digital. I feel there is old school, traditional and Digital and unless you continue to plan, learn and evolve you will be left behind.
Welcome to my world….