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Frank Best

9th November 1962
Page 53
Page 53, 9th November 1962 — Frank Best
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OF some members of a rapidly disappearing generationof master mariners it is sometimes said, in a reverential tone: "He served his apprenticeship in sail," In the commercial motor sphere, more recently developed, of course, than that of commercial shipping, it can be said of a few: "He served his apprenticeship in steam."

Frank Best is one of them. He started with Sentinel and remained with them for 10 years, from 1928 to 1938, first of all learning his job as an engineer and then initiating himself into the art of selling.

After that spell he joined Tilling-Stevens and Vulcan. That was in 1938, an ominous period for a salesman, and Frank was to become general sales manager of the company. But though from •the sales point of view the next seven years were to prove somewhat dull (if excessively lively in other respects) a new era, par excellence a salesman's era, dawned toward the end of 1945.

Now began Frank Best's tour of the world. At the beginning of 1946 the hotels of Buenos Aires, Montevideo and, to a rather less degree, Rio and Sao Paulo, began to fill up with peripatetic salesmen from the United Kingdom. Sterling had poured into Argentina and Uruguay by the million during the war years and the British economy now needed some of it to be repatriated.

Like many another first time visitor to South America Frank Best was at his happiest in Uruguay, that Switzerland of the south Atlantic, not so much because of the volume of business to be booked there—though in those days it was far from inconsiderable—but because of the manifest friendliness of the Uruguayans to the British whom they remembered as their preservers more than a century before.

From South America his next field was Australia, entirely different in atmosphere and maybe somewhat more difficult psychologically than the Latin countries south of the Rio Grande 16 years ago. And from Australia to the east his wanderings took him until, in 1952, under the TillingStevents-Rootes banner, be remained awhile in Britain as production manager of Commer and Karrier.

This phase of his career he counts as highly important to his subsequent work in sales. In vehicle construction, more perhaps than in most other industrial fields, the right type of product must appear at the right time; and if your sales director is not completely au fait with what can be done on the production lines—and by the same token if your production manager is unaware of what the sales director is up to—chaos must ensue. . So that when in December, 1952, Frank Best was posted to Canada, one of the Rootes Group's important markets, he was well equipped for his new job as general manager and director, concerned with cars as well as trucks.

When he talks about his experiences in Canada his eyes light up. It i evident that he thoroughly enjoyed every moment of his seven years on the other side of the Atlantic, and not only on account of his success in converting Canadian users to the Rootes point of view. "I motored an average of 30,000 miles a year," he recalls with relish. "The Rockies and the great Prairies gave me a new angle on road travel: certainly I used to drive over areas which made one keep an anxious eye on the petrol gauge."

Rootes vehicles were soon to be found in very unusual places. Gully emptiers, for example, were working inside the Arctic Circle, flown in from Montreal. They could be seen as far from Devonshire House as Frobisher, in the frozen north. And all the time Frank was calling on dealers, creating new outlets for Rootes vehicles and confirming old ones.

Success in this difficult market led to further promotion. In May, 1959, he was recalled to Luton to take up his present job as sales director of Commer and Karrier, 'and it was there I met him.

Frank Best is a quiet man. Not once during our talk did he show any of those tricks of personality, popularly supposed to be the marks of a high-powered salesman. Nor did he turn out to be a fast-talking advertising man. Yet his grasp of the underlying principles of publicity is as firm and unchallengeable as his knowledge and experience of selling commercial vehicles. In his view, advertising and publicity are a function of sales, at all-events in the commercial motor industry. He is in charge of both aspects.

Curiously enough, the Commer premises are difficult to find. To reach them the stranger invariably makes many a false turn in Luton. The reason is that the company has expanded so rapidly that it continually outstrips its space. However, advertising man as well as salesman, Frank Best was quick to assure me that the next time I visited those parts brilliant neon signs would be glowing to assist uncertain navigators. This will involve some uprooting of trees and replanting of shrubs—but then Rootes in general and Commer in particular have been responsible for a good many changes for the better in our island scene.

H.C.

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