I have spent my entire professional career figuring out how to sell auto parts without paper catalogs, microfiche, and expensive salespeople.

My career in the parts business began over 20 years ago. After attending William Paterson University in New Jersey (1988), my first job was at Prestige Volvo as an 'intern' in their parts department. I was not a car guy, and certainly not a parts geek. If I remember correctly, I was the the only person at the dealership with a college education- and yet on my first day of training I was so naive I didn't even know what an oil filter was. But I worked hard and two months later I was promoted to Parts Manager, and six months later the Star Ledger of Newark, NJ wrote up an article about me.

What was all the excitement about?

I created a computerized special order-management system with this thing called a personal computer. At the time PC’s were barely existent, never mind the Internet or online computing. I think the dealership paid about $8,000 for the IBM XT computer: it had a 10 megabyte hard drive, and of course there was no software for it apart from the BASIC programming language. I taught myself how to write code, and that was the first day of the rest of my life.

A few days after the article was published I received a phone call from a dealer principal who was impressed by the article. He offered me a job to manage his six dealerships and doubled my salary. Life was good at the ripe old age of 23.

A year later, I was introduced to the Aftermarket when someone from a company called World Wide Trading cold-called my Saab dealership and told me I could get OE parts cheaper than I could buy them from Saab. Who knew that the same company would become WorldPac and be responsible for making what I do today possible (a big Thank-You to Tom Ohare)?

Shortly after receiving the call, I decided to take a job with an aftermarket distributor in South Plainfield, New Jersey. Mario Recchia (currently with Worldpac) hired me as the Swedish Product Manager for Metrix Group, Inc. I created a 100+ page training manual for the sales people at Metrix so that they could sell Swedish Parts. At the time, all we had available were paper catalogs and microfiche. After a year of trying to get the 100+ salesforce selling Swedish parts we were not successful, because the culture of the company was fixated on German parts.

It was at this time when I realized the only way we would be able to bring new product lines to market was with an electronic catalog for all the products we carried. There were no electronic catalogs at that time, only microfiche and paper catalogs. PC’s were too expensive to purchase for each salesperson and networking did not exist for anything but mainframes.

After hundreds of hours of research I developed a system to collect parts data from OE microfiche and a relationsal database so that a standard year/make/model lookup could be created on a PC. The sales and IT departments insisted that it was impossible to automate data collection methods from microfiche and paper catalogs and that I was wasting my time.

More