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Ian Green
• Ian Green, the sales director of Crane Fruehauf Containers Ltd, was born to be a. salesman. In fact, following my meeting with him I came away wondering how many containers I had purchased.
After leaving Clitheroe grammar school Ian spent two years' national service in the Royal Navy after which it took him nine months to find the right career. He spent a little time farming, was for a while in the hotel trade, then became a washing machine engineer.
He joined Lex Tillotson in Burnley and in his early twenties, without having served an apprenticeship, he took his City and Guilds examination in automotive engineering and became a sales engineer; that was his first real step into the sales side of road transport.
That he has been successful there is no doubt because in 1970 he was awarded second place in the Young Exporter of the Year award. It is some measure of his success when you consider that the winner was the man who sold the visors for the astronauts' space helmets.
Ian recalled his early days as a salesman when he said: "It took a board meeting to authorize a transatlantic telephone call." Changed days now. When I interviewed him at Earls Court he was stopping to "pick up fresh laundry" on a journey from Leningrad to New York.
At the risk of sounding monotonous I asked him what he thought of our opportunities in Europe. "We'll murder the Continentals," he said "Oh sure, they're good engineers, they've got the product but they just can't communicate and that's what this business is all about."
Who should know better about communication than Ian Green who spent two years as commercial vehicles sales manager for the British West Africa Corporation. It was that period, which he said, helped him to graduate in his sales career and to stand on his own two feet. "Can you imagine," he asked, "me standing in an African village market place with a megaphone doing a "roll-up roll-up' act to sell lorries? Because that's exactly what happened."
Although they don't know it, Bill Farnorth, the R HA secretary in Manchester, and Eddie Wilkinson, of Wilkinsons Transport, have earned Ian's undying gratitude. It was they who spotted the salesman's job with Trailmobile, which brought Ian back into the trailer business in the UK.
Ian Green is a fast thinker, fast talker and an action man who is prepared to charge off at a moment's notice to the remotest part of the globe on a hunch to sell containers or trailers. His one regret is that he doesn't allow himself sufficient time to enjoy to the full the
company of his wife and two children. 1.5.