Dragging David into the Dealership Madness #

Things were happening and we were selling Nissans, but the problem with a car that is as well built as a Nissan is that our service department was not getting the work from those sales. You need more work beyond oil changes and other maintenance work. Our tractor repairs was the only real work that was keeping our service department busy. Somewhere along the way we decided to expand into Whitecourt, which is probably about 100 mile north west of us. We had a Sales Shack built and we needed someone we could trust to run it. This is where I convinced David to move there to manage this expansion.

David was great, in holding it all together. We had great trouble trying to keep the telephone operational as the lot where we had this shack, the telephone was suspended in the air, but these big trucks would sometimes use our lot as a shortcut and break the line. I remember it was also winter, and the guys were cold even though we did have a heater in the shack. I remember going out to Whitecourt one weekend staying at David’s apartment. Eventually we closed down our Whitecourt expansion as I don’t think we ever sold anything directly from that operation. After we shut down Whitecourt, David moved to Barrhead and continued on as a salesman in the dealership.

We had some pretty good months selling cars, fixing tractors and so on. One year we sold enough cars that my Mom and Dad qualified for an all expense paid trip to Japan and I think Hong Kong. While in Japan they experienced one of Japan’s regular occurring earthquakes. They were in a high floor of a hotel and the building started to roll back and forth as they are design to do that to flow with the earthquake and eliminate any damage that would otherwise occur.

While we were working at Schulz Nissian in 1990, David and I went to the UK and then France to hang out at the Medem Convention which is where all the music publishers from around the world gather and make their deals and network together. The trip was put together by Holger Peterson’s brother as Holger goes every year as well. He is the owner and founder of Stony Plain Records, they did mostly Folk and maybe some Country music on their label. While we were there I ran into the manager of the Parachute Club, which was a pretty hot band in Toronto. I had met him before at the Juno’s and he even remembered me. He offered us a distribution deal as he had a deal with Warner Brothers. We didn’t have anything to distribute at the time, but it was cool that we had an offer.

I was at Schulz Nisan for a total of five years, so much for the one year to help them out. In the last year we were starting to have money problems. The problem was that there was never enough capital from the start to get a new car dealership up and running in the 80’s. I think they would have needed almost five times the amount that they started with. The other problem that I had was that I was putting in such long hours at the dealership, crossing into weekends and never taking any vacation. The problem as I saw it was that I was duplicating all the work that everyone else was doing but if I could capture that work when the transaction took place that could save me a lot of time.

I could not find any software that would work the way I envisioned it, but I did find some source code written in dBase III that was supposed to be Clipper ready. Clipper was a program that would take the dBase III code and compile it into an executable so that you would not need the dBase III runtime and run it in that environment. You would just start the program and it ran. However, the source code that I got would not compile. So equipped with a Compuserve account I found a Clipper User Group and started asking questions about the errors that I had and they were very friendly and answered my questions and each day I would get a little bit closer to getting this source code to compile. It did take a total of about two months before I had a working program.

I got some really cheap computers and set them up in all the areas that we do business, Parts, Service, Sales, and I had one in my office as well. Then I networked them all together using Lantastic which I had learned about and discovered at CompuServe and they had the smallest footprint for a network of anyone else out there which was perfect as these cheap computers only had 640K of memory. Long story short here I was able to do all my work in just ten days. I would start to work on the month end stuff five days before the end of the month and be done by five days after the month. Then I would go on vacation for three weeks and do it again. After about three months, my Father laid me off because they really did not need me anymore. This suited me just fine as I found more enjoyment in learning about programing then working in accounting.

David had gone back to Edmonton by this time as I am sure we could not keep paying him and the car sales really tapered off for us. We never really ever worked together after that. David got a pretty good job doing something with the oil fields until he got hurt and spent over a year in physical therapy to get his hand working properly again. He also got married in Las Vegas, and for some reason we were not talking to each other either. He did have some friends of his from Australia come up for the wedding but I was never invited.

Anyway, this setup with the computers allowed me to collect the data where it happened. when we sold parts they were sold on the computer that printed out an invoice, reduced the parts inventory and did all the accounting. Same with service and sales, now I no longer needed to duplicate the work that everyone else was doing. I could now do all my work in a total of 10 days. I would start working 5 days before the month end, get all the reports together for all the interested parties, the bank, Nissan, Schulz Investments etc and be done 5 days after the month end. I would then go on vacation for 3 weeks. I was going to Reino, Nevada as I had a friend (Amber) who just got out of jail and hung out with her and her son. After 3 months of this, my Dad fired me from Schulz Nissan. It was more of a lay off as they didn’t need me anymore, but I like to use the word fired as it sounds so much more dynamic.

I got to stay home for a while and collect unemployment and continue to study programing and building programs that could be used in both the Nissan Dealership and for my cousin in the Ford Dealership. In around the middle February of the next year we had company from Germany stay with us. A very young widow and her young son. Dad was delighted to take them around and show them various things that you would want to see in Canada. On March 1st, my Dad reached over to turn off my Mom’s alarm and had a blood clot move, hit his brain and he was out. My mother ran all the way down all those stairs as I was sleeping in the lowest floor of the house. Ambulance was called, Paramedics arrived, tried to revive him with the paddles that they carry with no luck. They got him to the hospital and the emergency team tried to revive him but he was not coming out of this one and he died.