Alan Harris: how cows, cars, curiosity and ambition led to a successful automotive career spanning multiple continents.

Alan has enjoyed an international career with premium automotive brands, holding senior positions spanning 5 continents. Most recently he has embraced his passion of leadership development through his own successful coaching and consulting company.  

In our conversation Alan describes his childhood experiences growing up on a dairy farm where he first came across the machinery that would ignite a curiosity that led to him starting out as an apprentice car mechanic. He reveals how that curiosity combined with ambition eventually saw him agreeing to put down the spanners and embark on a geographical and career journey spanning the globe and leading to senior positions across the spectrum of an OEM's commercial functions. Alan shares with me the thinking behind the moves he made as he navigated his way around the world and through corporate life. 

Alan is a warm and approachable leader with a wealth of experience to offer us and his clients. I'm delighted to be able to introduce him to you in this episode and I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. 

If you enjoy listening to my guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app.  

You can contact Alan via LinkedIn or at Remarkables Coaching. 

Why not follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror where you can see a directory of all our episodes and comment on those you have enjoyed. 

This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by Aquilae.  

Aquilae's mission is to enable Fullfilling Performance in the auto finance and mobility industry, internationally. Adopting our Fulfilling Performance Paradigm helps you identify what steps you need to take to enable Fulfilling Performance for yourself, your team and your business. Contact cvm@aquilae.co.uk for a no obligation conversation about your situation.  

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Episode recorded on 23 June 2022 

Transcript

Alan Harris: 0:00

It's 48 degrees Celsius. And the roof is tin. And you can see these guys were like melting inside their own overalls. He said, Yeah, he said I noticed he said that they're better in the mornings than they are in the afternoons

Andy: 0:20

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, Andy follows Alan Harris listeners, Alan has enjoyed an international career with premium automotive brands holding senior positions spanning five continents. Most recently he's embraced his passion of leadership development through his own successful coaching and consulting company. After a successful early career within the UK retail automotive sector, Alan joined a premium manufacturer and has held successive leadership positions in the disciplines of sales, marketing operations, after sales and customer service, and ultimately as Managing Director and CEO. In addition to a successful track record in the developed markets of Western Europe, Australia and the United States. Alan also experienced business success working in the developing markets of the world. This was achieved from extensive periods in North and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the sub Saharan and Maghreb regions of Africa and Eastern Europe. In 2016, Alan decided to leave the corporate world and focus on his own entrepreneurial skills to develop a speaking consulting and coaching business. The qualities necessary for great leadership have always been a passion, and through his business, Alan devotes time to passing on what he's learned to graduates, managers and senior executives. Although not limited to the automotive industry Alan retains a broad perspective towards an industry which is evolving at a faster rate than ever before. Alan has focused his endeavours on the fields of new technologies and is now affiliated to several other organisations, including a number of startups. In our conversation, Alan describes his childhood experiences growing up on a dairy farm, where he first came across the machinery that would ignite a curiosity that led him to starting out as an apprentice car mechanic. He reveals how that curiosity combined with ambition eventually saw him agreeing to put down the spanners and embark on a geographical and career journey that would span the globe and lead to senior positions across the spectrum of an OEMs commercial functions. Alan shares with me the thinking behind the moves he made as he navigated his way around the world and through corporate life, Alan's a warm and approachable leader with a wealth of experience to offer us and his clients. I'm delighted to be able to introduce him to you in this episode, and I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. If you enjoy listening to my guests career stories, please follow Career-view Mirror in your podcast app.

Aquilae Academy: 3:03

This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by the Aquilae Academy. At the Academy, we turn individual development into a team sport, we bring together small groups of leaders from non competing organisations to form their very own academy team. We build strong connection between team members and create a great environment for sharing and learning. We introduce the team to content that can help them tackle their current challenges. And we hold them accountable to take the actions that they decide are their priorities. We say we hold our team members feet to the fire of their best intentions. We do this internationally with teams across the world. If you'd like to learn more about the academy, go to www.aquilae.co.uk.

Andy: 3:51

Hello, Alan, and welcome. And where are you coming to us from today?

Alan Harris: 3:56

Yeah, hi, Andy, on sitting in Hanover in the north of Germany.

Andy: 4:01

Very good. And thank you very much for joining me. And obviously, I know you reasonably well, if I didn't, I might tell from your accent that you weren't born in Hanover. So where were you born? Where did you grow up?

Alan Harris: 4:14

No, that's true. My My accent is a little mixed up these days. The reason for that will probably become clearer as we move through this discussion. But I was born in Salisbury in the southwest of England,

Andy: 4:26

famous for its cathedral and a fairly recent Russian poisoning attempt

Alan Harris: 4:34

An attempted assassination with some kind of nerve agent. Yes. Thankfully, I wasn't around when that happened.

Andy: 4:43

But a beautiful part of the UK.

Alan Harris: 4:46

And the cathedral is very famous because it's got one of the I think only three remaining examples of the Magna Carta.

Andy: 4:54

Oh, right. I didn't know that

Alan Harris: 4:56

Yeah, one's in the British Museum and I think there's a third one up in York, but it's an original in Salisbury so

Andy: 5:05

I have to go and have a look at that

Alan Harris: 5:06

a little bit of trivia there for you about Salisbury

Andy: 5:09

Thank you. So tell me a little bit about growing up there then what was your family? Tell us a bit about your family?

Alan Harris: 5:15

Well, I was only in Salisbury for like a year. My dad was a farm worker. So he didn't own the farm. But he worked on the farm. He was a dairy farmer. milked cows produce milk all his life as did his father before him. And we moved a few times. So when I was about a year old, we moved further along the south coast towards the east, to the Southampton area. And we were on a farm there, basically overlooking the Solent looking at the Isle of Wight down in the New Forest. And when I was a kid, we could walk across a couple of fields and be on the beach. And I remember standing on a stool in our kitchen window, looking out the window and watching the big cruise ships go up and down Southampton water. So the old Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth when it was the QE2 as it was called then it was when it was launched on it's maiden voyage we stood in the kitchen window and watched this what resembled a skyscraper on its side going down the water.

Andy: 6:32

Sounds pretty idyllic, idyllic place to grow up. Did you have any brothers and sisters?

Alan Harris: 6:38

I had a younger sister who has Downs syndrome. So not able to really look after herself. And my mother actually married twice. So my father was her second husband. And she had three children with her first husband, the youngest of which actually lived with us. He was seven years older than me, but we live together the two the older ones had gone off, you know already for to make our own lives. So there were basically three of us growing up.

Andy: 7:13

Right and tell me about school then. Please, Alan so what was that like?

Alan Harris: 7:19

Well, school. Yeah, obviously school started there, I was only on that farm until about the age of 10. So it was really sort of junior school, getting a bus to school every day, well walking about a mile and a half to the bus stop from the farm first I remember and then taking the bus to school. But when I was about 10, we moved further along the south coast to West Sussex to a farm there, and it's probably there where I have, let's say the strongest memories of that was in and around the South Downs, river Arun running through the farm and so on. So it was it shaped a lot of what we did. And that's where I then I used to take the train to school. In fact, we were on a mainline train from Portsmouth, Chichester through to London, went up through there. And I used to jump on the train and go one stop and get off at the secondary school at the next little town up the road.

Andy: 8:24

And how were you as a student?

Alan Harris: 8:26

I was pretty good. I wasn't, you know, top of the class always. But I graduated out of high school with with some decent grades O levels and A levels. As I said, the background and with my dad, you know, they never really had a lot of money. He was a farm worker, the house was tied to the job. Right? So lose your job lose your house kind of thing. But it was all he knew. And so money was never too sort of available to us. So growing up, it was always about what are you going to do to go out and earn some money? Yeah. So it was interesting. I never went to university because it just, it just never came up. You know, it just wasn't something that we as a family with our background did.

Andy: 9:16

So it was more of an expectation to leave school and go and start earning some money.

Alan Harris: 9:21

Exactly right. But also knew, you know, because I watched my dad working all the time. And it's a very hard life. I mean, I watched him get up at four in the morning, go out, come back at breakfast time for 8.30 or nine o'clock having already worked for three or four hours on the farm, then he would go out again. And he would never finish before seven at night. And then in those seasons where calves are being born and so on. He'd have to go out again in the evening and sometimes come home at one o'clock in the morning. And then you know four o'clock the next day it all starts again

Andy: 10:00

So I always ask my guests about this because of being curious what roles they had visibility of when they were growing up. It sounds like you had enough visibility of dairy farming to think, right cross that off that list

Alan Harris: 10:14

Exactly right. I knew from a fairly young age, I was not going to follow in my father's footsteps, there has to be something easier out there. But spending so much of my time on the farm, I started to become interested in the mechanical things that were on the farm, so the tractor and combine harvester and all of those kinds of things. And I was somewhat fascinated with how they worked. So when, when I was at school, and I come to the end of school, and you know, had those discussions with careers advisors, there was a I forget who it was, but there was a mention of like, being a motor mechanic or apprentice motor mechanic, I thought, that might be something interesting to do. And that's really how I got into the car business. I was gonna go out and get an apprenticeship.

Andy: 11:09

I'm excited. I'm excited by that. And to hear a little bit more about then how that played out. Because obviously, we know you had a very successful career in automotive still do now but outside of corporate and running your own business. And a number of our guests have started just like that, as apprentice technicians. So tell us there's obviously some fairly significant changes happened along the way to ultimately end up being a CEO, managing various countries. So

Alan Harris: 11:41

exactly right. So yeah, I mean, if I go back to that discussion with the careers advisor, the topic of being an apprentice mechanic, and I use the word mechanic, specifically because back in the what was that, that was mid 70s. They were called mechanics, but the careers advisor said to me, he said he said, your, your grades that you've come out of school with because I was good at science, good at maths, all those kind of things. He said, You shouldn't settle for being a mechanic, you should try to be a technician. And I'm not sure that he actually knew what the difference was. So I said, Okay, all right. I didn't know what the difference was either. But I applied to a couple of garages, and I ended up be lucky enough to get an apprenticeship slot with a Vauxhall dealership, Vauxhall Opel. And it was probably about 10 miles from the farm. So then I had this dilemma of how was I gonna get to work you know, as a, as a 16 year old apprentice, and you were able to ride a moped in the UK at 16. So I saved like for weeks, knowing that the apprenticeship was coming up to start. And my dad, my mom and dad helped me out a little bit and I bought this 50 cc moped and I used to ride it backwards and forwards 20 miles each day,

Andy: 13:14

I can almost hear it Alan, I can almost hear it,

Alan Harris: 13:17

it was Honda SS 50. I remember. I thought it was fantastic. But I couldn't wait to get my car licence. So you

Andy: 13:21

I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah, a bit of an ordeal. know, my 17th birthday whenever it was back then I think it was 17th yeah. Like immediately afterwards, I was learning to drive a car. Because I I just wanted to make that transition 20 miles on a moped when it's pouring with rain in the dead of winter. It's not a lot of fun, especially when it's dark

Alan Harris: 13:52

So yeah, I remember my father having to come to the garage and sign the apprenticeship papers, which they used to have to do in those days. And yeah, I got into the apprenticeship, I actually loved what I was doing. Did all the usual things apprentices have to do, you know, run to the pasture barn for a left handed screwdriver, and all those kinds of things, you know, you go through all that, that never gets old. Basic Training. But already at that point, I had an interest in what was happening at the front of the dealership, right? So I could see the service advisors working with customers and so on, and it just interested me a little bit. And my manager at the time said to me, he said, you know, you're doing your college, you know, we used to have to go once a one day a week to college, or I think it was, might have been two evenings a week now. You should maybe extend those studies so that you could maybe move beyond being a mechanic and at that point in time I Guess it wasn't really an interest because I loved what I was doing with the cars. It was a technical stuff that turned me on. Yeah. So I said, look, okay, if you're willing to pay for it, I'll do it. So the apprenticeship I think, was four years. And then there was another two years back at college learning management, stuff, law, the legal aspects of the automotive business, roughly how accounts work and all that kind of stuff. But this dealership wanted, they said, If we pay for it, you have to take the first available service advisors role. And I thought, actually, I don't really want to do that. I didn't want to do that at the time because I was enjoying working on the cars. And then I saw an advertisement for Porsche Mercedes Benz dealership, which was halfway in between home and where I was working. I used to drive past it twice a day, I knew the dealership very well. So one afternoon, I left early, and I stopped off at the Porsche dealership and said, you know, introduced myself and told them what I was about, and what I'd like to do and so on and so forth. And they gave me the job. And what was the role there? That was, again, a mechanic working on the tools initially, but I was there for nine years. Wow. And I loved Porsches, I became an I started as basically the normal mechanic, then I became senior mechanic. I became a technician. Because Porsche were calling them technicians by them. And I became the workshop foreman. I then became a service advisor, and then ultimately, service manager before I left. And I also was my first contact with Germany, because although I specialised on the Porsche side, there was there was a Mercedes Benz side as well. And I did a lot of Mercedes training, and I won a trip to Germany, was a finalist in their technician of the year competition for the UK. And I won a trip to Turkheim to the Mercedes factory. So that was my first introduction to Germany ironically, it was already like in 1978 79, something like that. So that was good. And by that time, I'd started to develop this process where I was kind of looking at my boss, I was always looking at my boss to see how he went about his job. And like mentally, in my mind, thinking, Could I do that job. And it was kind of, I guess it was ambition, but I didn't realise it was ambition at the time. So if after a few weeks or months, I decided in my mind that I had, I thought I could do that job, there was nothing stopping me from doing that job, then I would always apply if something came up. But once I got to the level of the service manager in this dealership, it was a family owned enterprise. And I came to the realisation that unless I was going to marry the owner's daughter, I wasn't going to go any further. So then I thought, you know, what do I do from here, and I was reading one of the automotive papers one day, and there was a advertisement from BMW GB, they're BMW UK now, but it was BMW GB, advertising for field technical support. So they were they were looking to, in the old days, there was always regional managers for service and regional manager for parts. BMW UK at the time are in this process of transitioning to after sale, what we now know as after sales so a combination of service and parts on the business side. But they wanted to not neglect the support of the dealer network in a technical sense. So they wanted to recruit five engineers, if you like technical support people to cover the entire UK network, five of us. And I discussed it with my mother and my father and said, Look, you know, if I was to get this job, that could mean moving away from home. And although it was something never been sort of contemplated, my mother was always supportive of that kind of thing. And because she was a dominant force in the home, not my father. Her support, gave me the encouragement to apply. And I got I got one of the five jobs. So when I was thinking about what I was gonna say to you, I was thinking about what are the sort of Turning Points because you said to me, I started on a farm, I lived on a farm as a kid. And I ended up as the CEO of a national sales subsidiary. So what were the trigger points in that path? You know, and obviously, deciding I didn't want to be dairy farmer was one step very early. But I think getting the job, that job with BMW, and moving away from the retail world into the wholesale world was a major stepping stone on that path.

Andy: 20:37

And you were there. So if I can just jump in now and I'm thinking you would have got that job at the time because of the very relevant experience that you had.

Alan Harris: 20:47

Yeah, so I had hands on experience I had How long did you do that for current experience albeit with another brand, but German brands, Porsche and Mercedes were not dissimilar to to BMW at that point in terms of technology. I had the experience of dealing with customers. So after what I thought was quite an arduous process of interviews, I went for three. I eventually got the job. And I had to move to Swindon, because they gave me a territory which stretched from the M 25. Where the M 25. Circles London, if you were to draw a line to the south coast, say to Brighton, everything west of the that, but South of the M4 so I had all of my old stomping ground all the way down to Cornwall, I had South Wales places I'd never heard of like Haverfordwest, but everything up as far as, like Slough and Maidenhead. And everything along the coast. Southampton, Portsmouth, Chichester all the way along. I had 36 or 37, dealers to call on and Swindon was kind of strategically placed sitting on the M4, you get the A34 down to the coast, you could head M4, M5 down to the west country, and so on. So it was pretty good place to be. I was already married at that stage. So that was 87. My wife also had my, which is my first wife, not my current one also had a job, where she would travel the country as well. So we, it was quite a good situation to be in. And I loved it. Basically, the job was visiting the dealers, helping them to fix cars that they couldn't fix. But using those opportunities for training, training other people, you know, imparting knowledge, I would never fix a car myself, I'd always say to one of their mechanics and say, okay, so what are we going to do? There's a problem with this customer's car, let's fix it together. So that was also, for me, a point in time where I started, not just thinking about myself, but thinking about other people, and how you develop other people. But I also began to realise that because you were kind of isolated those field jobs, you're very isolated. And back in those days, there was no mobile phones. So if you wanted to call the office, the headquarter office, then you had to stop and use a phone box on the side of the road. So that obviously didn't happen that frequently. And more importantly, they couldn't call you either. So unless you were in a phone box, you were really on your own. So it taught me a lot about self sufficiency, where my reserves of knowledge and energy and so forth coming from and and how can I impart that onto other people so that this situation I'm facing right now is not going to be repeated. So if this problem comes up again, then the dealerships able to fix it for themselves, rather than me have to do it. But it was, it was fun. I enjoyed it. about two and a half years, I guess. And then, then I was asked to move into the BMW UK headquarters in Bracknell at the time and move into the technical office there, which was probably the point in time where I then really got into contact with Germany a lot, because then we were dealing with technical support for the entire country of the UK, and very often needed support. So it wasn't a travelling job. It was an office job that needed support of the technical guys in Munich in a lot of cases.

Andy: 24:48

So I'm just thinking when you were offered that first service advisor role or told if we do this, you're going to need to take the first service advisor role that comes up and you thought no I want to stay more hands on, you're gradually moving away from being hands on, you still had the opportunity when you were visiting your dealers to help coach someone to do the task, and you'd have been involved, by the time you get into the headquarters, BMW GB that would have been getting further and further away from hands on, was it?

Alan Harris: 25:21

Yeah, and as I said earlier, I think that thing was inside me about looking at my boss, you know, it was ambition. Now I look back on it was my ambition to earn more money, have more responsibility, all of those kinds of things, but I didn't know it at the time. And of course, it dawned on me that the further up the tree, I was going to go, the further away from the tools, I was going to be myself.

Andy: 25:45

You'd also discovered, though, in maturing a new interest perhaps in developing people, and, and that side

Alan Harris: 25:54

That's exactly right. Yeah, I started to realise that, you know, I couldn't do everything myself, unless I was going to just stay a mechanic or be a mechanic for the rest of my life, then I could do that. But as I said that that ambition inside of me, told me otherwise. And then I realised as I was growing that to be able to be effective, at a higher level, you need the support of others, you can't do it all yourself. And so how do you then motivate? And motivation at that point in time was through training, and showing them support and not, you know, hitting them around the ears? Because they couldn't fix the car? But actually, yeah, this is a difficult problem. Let's put our heads together and see if we can fix it together.

Andy: 26:41

I'm wondering, and you don't need to answer this but I'm curious how much of that ambition which you later identified as ambition, how much of it you were born with, any of us are born with and how much of it in your case might have been from having a modest childhood with a father who worked incredibly hard and very antisocial hours? You know, I wonder what percentage of the ambition came from thinking, right, I want different from this. I want more money and less hard work?

Alan Harris: 27:13

I think that's there's absolutely something to that. I mean, I didn't know it at the time, of course. But I think now looking with hindsight, I was always frustrated as a kid because there was a limitation to what you could do. You couldn't go places. I mean, my mother and father never went overseas, for example. You know, a holiday was a week in a caravan down in Cornwall somewhere. So I think the limitations that family life gave us as kids, not just me but my brother and sister as well sparked something in me at that early age that I could do better than this. And it may be it's about earning money at that point in time. Being able to provide, you know, a higher standard of living, for your own family as you grow and get older. I didn't know it at the time, but there's definitely something in in that.

Andy: 28:11

Yeah. And your parents encouraged. It sounds like your mom certainly didn't hold you back.

Alan Harris: 28:19

No, she was, as I said, she was the dominant force in our family. I mean, neither my mother or my father were particularly well educated or, you know, they never went to university or anything like that either of them. But my mother was sort of very wise. Looking back on it. And don't forget, my younger sister, I said at the beginning was down syndrome. So she has limitation to what her life was going to be like. And my older brother, my stepbrother, half brother had already decided to go down the farming route. He was seven years older than me. And he wasn't actually in dairy farming, but he was in agriculture. He was in into game keeping and those kinds of things. So animal Conservancy and so on, which, again, is very laudable activity, but has its limitations in terms of, you know, income and those kinds of things, it's still not very well paid, anything like that. So, my mother saw that. If there's anyone in the family that's going to do better for themselves. It's going to be me. So she was never she was never going to stand in my way. No. And there's another point further on where that repeated itself, and it's another one of those markers.

Andy: 29:41

Yeah, we'll look forward to that. So I'm thinking you've now arrived at BMW headquarters in Bracknell, and there would have been people there very well educated people I imagine in that building and you've come in there on merits because of your Very practical experience, first of all, in the garage, and then in the regional role, you'd obviously proven yourself there for them to bring you into the headquarters. How was that? For the farm boy, if you like, how was that going into BMW Bracknell? Did you notice? You know, all the suits and everything like that

Alan Harris: 30:20

Yes and no. I mean, we were encouraged to wear a suit when we were in the field role anyway, so I'd already made that kind of transition. But yeah, so I mean, it to some extent it's a little bit intimidating, because suddenly you're in this big office environment with lots of people, you know, and finance teams, and marketing teams, and all those kinds of things that you hadn't really, I wouldn't say you haven't come across them before, but you had no real sort of hands on experience of before. So mixing with those kinds of people, but I always knew that whoever those people were, they didn't know, my area of expertise as well as I do. Right. So they can, you know, can be the most educated marketing executive there is, but, you know, lift the lid on the car and ask him, you know, what's going on here, they won't be able to tell you. So there's a lot of, you know, levelling going on in that respect. So yeah, if there was any intimidation on my part, at the beginning, it didn't last for long. And particularly, as I said, you know, starting to get involved with the guys in Germany as well gives you like the international aspect and not everybody in that building had an international connection, or international aspect.

Andy: 31:39

And also, BMW as a company is an engineering company where it's very much respect it so the knowledge that you had and the experience you had would have been valued, I can imagine.

Alan Harris: 31:53

Very much so. And one, one thing that always sticks in my mind I'm quite proud of is we realised, not just me, but there were three or four of us doing this particular department, we realised that there were quite a lot of problems on cars in that era, that were right hand drive problems, and didn't occur on left hand drive cars. And we figured out the reason for that is that back then, we're talking about late 80s, all of the BMWs were engineered left hand drive to the point of completion, and then they were converted to right hand drive, I mean, properly converted, converted in a engineering sense, wasn't just an after market conversion. But there were some things that didn't work quite as they would do on a left hand drive car. So for example, with the brakes, right, so the brake booster is situated on the left hand side of the car. And in a left hand drive car, your brake pedal operates directly on that booster, and in a right hand drive car, they move the pedals to the other side, but the booster is still on the left. So then there's this long linkage between the pedal and the boost, just one example of how it could cause problems. So the reason I'm telling this story is that because of our, let's say, becoming aware of those issues, I negotiated with the guys in Germany to start a right hand drive prototype test programme. So we set up an office in Bracknell, for a couple of German engineers, who came across and worked with us on these specific right hand drive problems. And the upshot of that was that five years down the line, they stopped doing it that way and actually engineered the right hand drive cars properly from the beginning.

Andy: 33:51

Fascinating. Yeah. And then also your genuine interest in that, driving that so we're not talking about ambition there so much. We're talking about, okay, wanting to change things wanting to innovate, because you're genuinely interested in what's going on and how we how could we do this better?

Alan Harris: 34:10

Yeah, I mean, it's looking at the problems that exist in the marketplace, the the issues that customers have, and, and figuring out a way to solve those things at source. How do you prevent them from happening? It's like preventative medicine, don't take the take the blood pressure pills, get more exercise

Andy: 34:32

If you've been on the road, visiting the dealers for some time trying to fix help them fix problems, then the motivation to address them at the source and stop prevent them happening is high, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So I was quite proud of that. And then I guess a couple of years after having done that job. There was another major trigger point I think, the UK at that time, late. 80s started to go into a severe economic recession. And my wife, my first wife, she gave birth to our eldest daughter in 1990. And the UK was heading into this recession. The same time I moved to Bracknell, which is a much more expensive part of the world than Swindon, where we were when I was in the field. So paid a lot more for a house, lost her income, and then the recession hit. And by 1991, my mortgage rate was 17%. It was a tough time, financially, a really tough time. And then in early 1992, my boss at the time, called myself and another guy at his office one day and said, he said, Alan, have you ever thought about working overseas? And I said, Well, no, not really. But you know, where do I sign? And he said, No, no, no, he says, You should take some time to think about it. But what do you have in mind, and he said, BMW has an office in Southeast Asia, in Singapore, that looks after importer markets, it's a very small office there's less than 10 people and at the moment is staffed with Germans. And he said, they've got some issues in communication with the local people, especially like on the service level, and so on. Because the Germans are obviously speaking English as a second language. And very often, the guys, definitely the guys in the workshop are either not speaking English at all, or they're speaking English as a second language. And it's not working as well as we should. And one of the senior guys in Munich, at the time who was global head of service, I think it was at the time, had the idea that maybe somebody who spoke English as a first language, might have more success. So he's asked me, this is my boss speaking, he's asked me to see if there's anybody here that might be up to the task. And he said, I can only think of two. One is you. And the other is the other guy he called in. Richard was my, one of my colleagues. And I talked it over with my wife, we, I mean, we really didn't talk about it for long. But we knew nothing about Southeast Asia. I mean, absolutely nothing at all. We'd been overseas, obviously, we used to go skiing holidays in Austria, and, you know, as Brits tend to do, but Asia was like, the furthest thing from my mind. But I thought, you know, there's two things here, one, it will get us out of our financial difficulties, but b, what an adventure that might turn into so we contacted the Singapore Embassy in London. And I called someone up there and said, Look, we're thinking of doing this, have you got any information, and she sent me this whole pack, of what it's like to be an expat in Singapore, this was 1992. And we went through and of course, you know, there was a video cassette and it portrayed Singapore as this like, wonderful place. So I went back in and, and said, Yeah, I'm up for it. If you are, well, I've lived in Bracknell and Singapore, and I can understand, I can understand your decision.

Alan Harris: 38:40

They don't really compare do they

Andy: 38:43

both wonderful places, but very different.

Alan Harris: 38:47

So in the middle of 92, and Singapore is a I've been back to Singapore many times since and it's massively massively different today to what it was in 1992, the population is double now what it was then. But I went out, like in the middle of 92, then the reality kind of hit, because I got to the office. And I realised there were two of us to do after sales. And it wasn't just technical. It was after sales so service and parts, two of us, me and another German guy. And we had we had 26 countries.

Andy: 39:29

Almost as many as you had dealers before.

Alan Harris: 39:33

And it stretched from China, because China wasn't a subsidiary then we had three importers in China, from China to Indonesia in the south, and from India in the West to Tahiti. When you look at a world map, it was like a third of the world, we had to cover the two of us

Andy: 39:52

you were complaining about Cornwall to Maidenhead.

Alan Harris: 39:57

So we so we literally and I remember it like it was yesterday, he and I sat together with a map, and all the countries listed out. And we, we literally went, because our boss said, Look, I don't want to know about after sales, he only had like eight people. I don't want to do after sales you sort it out between you. So we literally said, Well, you do this, and I'll do that you do this. So. So we had this game of like compensation, you know, because obviously, each country has a reputation, even though I later found out that it wasn't always true. But if I'm doing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, you know, I'd like to have Tahiti and Fiji to kind of balance things in terms of destination. And then I spent the next five years I spent three weeks in every month travelling, we had a wonderful apartment, we lived in a great spot. My eldest daughter was lucky, she was two when we moved out. My youngest daughter, Abby was born in Singapore. She was a year old when we eventually left. And I loved it. I mean, I think it was, it was hard to begin with, because you thought, Where the hell am I going? What am I doing? I'd never been to any of these countries before. And there was nobody there to go with you and show you what to do. You literally had to book a flight. Call the importer on the other end of the line who you knew you'd never spoken to before. And say I'm coming, pick me up from the airport, and just with blind faith, get on the plane and go. But that period, I think is another one of those turning points that I was talking about before, because I think it's probably the one point in my career where I learned the most about myself. Because remember what I said earlier about when I was visiting dealers across the country, you had to be sort of self sufficient, because there were no mobile phones. In that situation you were totally I mean, it was the same situation. But on steroids. I mean, you were just my boss was sitting in Munich. I mean, he was six hours time difference away, there was no support network. I used to bounce ideas off my colleague and he would as well, but you know, very often if I was in India, he was in Indonesia or Malaysia or somewhere. So not always that contactable. So again, you learn a lot about yourself, and how, through yourself, you can motivate others. So by setting an example to others, you can motivate them. I don't believe that motivation just comes through, you know, money and things like that. There's an underlying thing to it, which is difficult to explain. And to that end, I've always like even today, I always in my coaching business, when I'm coaching other people, I always tell them, you have to learn to lead yourself before you can learn to lead other people. And I think for me, that's the one common thread throughout my whole career was learning more about myself at each step with each different new experience, then how do I harness that? And how do I use that to motivate other people?

Andy: 43:20

Yeah, so each time you got into a new situation, and you had to deal with it, and you found you had dealt with it, then your comfort zone just grows and grows, the things you're, you know, that you're capable of just expands over

Alan Harris: 43:38

And a good example of that was, you know, later in that time. your career, you always get these people that will say to you, well you've never had any, you've never had experience of leading a team, which on a organisation chart for me was actually true. Because I was alone in the field in the UK, I was alone in the technical office, I was alone with 26 countries in Asia, on an organisation chart, but to me, all of those countries and all those importers were part of my team. And so it was like this massive, multicultural, multilingual, multi religion team that I had to work with and try and motivate. It used to make my blood boil when later on in my career. Some manager who never left the four cylinder in Munich would say you don't have experience of leading a team, felt like smacking them

Andy: 44:45

Yeah, I can understand that. So you've been leading really without without the authority of an organisation chart, just through persuasion and through modelling the behaviours that you wanted them to take on

Alan Harris: 44:59

I mean, there are so many stories from that period when I look back, you know, for example, you know, I walk into the importer in India in New Delhi, and talking to the general manager, and he's sitting in his little office with his air conditioner running. And he says, these mechanics, these mechanics in the workshop, he said, they just don't work hard enough. He said, I just can't get enough out of them. So I thought, Okay, well, let's go and talk to them then. Well, they won't be able to talk to you. They don't speak English. And I said, Well, let's go and talk to them anyway. And you walk out the back into the workshop, it's 48 degrees Celsius. And the roof is tin. And you can see these guys were like, melting inside their own overalls. And I said to him, Can we stand here and watch them for a bit? He said, No, no, I want to go back to my office. And I said, yeah but you make these I said wonder why that is? Dehydration has set in at guys work out here all day. How do you expect them to be productive in your sense of the word. He said Yeah, he said, I noticed he said that they're better in the mornings than they are in the afternoons lunchtime.

Andy: 46:15

Yeah, they're almost cooked by one.

Alan Harris: 46:19

There are a lot of funny stories like that. I learned an awful lot. In that period of time. I learned so much about, you know, when you think about all the problems in the world, and how one religion doesn't get on with another and all of these kinds of things. And all that time, I was learning about why people think the way they do. And there's nothing to say that the way we think as a Western Caucasian person is the right way. So I, I learned a lot about tolerance and why people are motivated by different things in different situations, and because of their beliefs, and their values and their morals, you know. And through taking all of that on board at that point in time, that became very useful for me later, in my career, in different situations.

Andy: 47:10

So did you find that you could, obviously, you found you could deal with all the different countries, 26 different countries, 26 different cultures? Were you having to change who you were for each one, or was your approach such that it didn't really matter, people, you know, regardless of their nationality, and culture could still respond to you.

Alan Harris: 47:37

I don't think I could change. I couldn't change my approach from one country to another. But I think it was about having the awareness that some people react in a way to, to one thing, and another nationality will react to the same thing in a different way. So having that awareness, I think, was invaluable. And obviously Andy you don't get that the first time you walk into into a country that takes some time to get to know the people, for me, like a very good example is I looked after India and those kinds of countries, as I just described, but also looked after Korea, and Taiwan and those countries up there. And the difference between Indian people and Korean people is like chalk and cheese. The Indian people are soft, in a way and very struggling to find the right word, but they're very sort of culturally aware. They're very family oriented. And you feel that when you're when you're with them, as a Westerner, you feel that when you're working in those countries, whereas in northern Asian countries, they're very much more, or at least at the time, I thought very much more businesslike, hard nosed, very difficult to get past that outer exterior, especially with the Koreans. And again, later on, I became more aware of the nuances between even within a region. You know, the difference between Koreans and Japanese, for example, even though they're almost neighbours, or are neighbours, is very, very different.

Andy: 49:23

So you were I'm also hearing that you were empathetic to like the workshop story in India. And I think empathy is obviously a really important leadership trait. Do you think that was a natural empathy? Or did that come from having been on the tools yourself and come up through that environment?

Alan Harris: 49:47

I think combination of both? I think there was always a certain amount of empathy that I carried with me from the days on the farm. I was very empathetic to my to watching my dad, you know, working every hour, God made to earn a crust, you know? So I always had a lot of empathy for people that put in a shift. But in terms of the workshop situation, then yes, definitely having been there myself I know what it means to strip an engine apart and rebuild it. And to do that, in those conditions, brings out a lot more empathy. You know, it's a direct empathy because you know exactly what they're going through.

Andy: 50:33

So amazing. You, I mean, wonderful that you went out there. And you had all that experience and personal growth that came from dealing with it, just you and your one colleague, and, you know, travelling to all those countries and getting the respect of all those different importers that you are working with. So what was the next step? After that?

Alan Harris: 50:55

I did that for five years. And when I started to talk about what was next, because the company only liked you to be in one place for three to five years. So that, you know, the only thing that was on the table was to go back to the UK. So I wasn't a BMW AG employee, I was an expatriate from the UK, because it was a special consideration, something they didn't normally do. So they were talking about going back to the UK. And to be honest, I didn't want to go back even though my family were there. Oh and there's actually one point I missed with my mother. Remember I said my mother was very strong. So when I left the UK to go to Singapore, it was a similar situation. You know, she knew I wasn't just going to Swindon we were going to the other side of the world. And I remember it to this day, she stood there with a tear in her eye and said, Yes, you should do it. You should do it. Right. So unfortunately, she passed away while we were in Singapore, which was unfortunate. But yeah, she was a bit of a rock for me.

Andy: 52:07

Yeah. So you are definitely there with her blessing.

Alan Harris: 52:10

But to go back to where we were, I just didn't want to lose that thought. I was we had travelled from Singapore on vacation holiday a couple of times to Australia. And we just loved the country. We'd been to Sydney, we'd been to Brisbane, been to the Gold Coast, down into Melbourne. We just loved it. Loved the environment. It was like, it was like being in England without the rain, you know, I guess there was a lot of familiarity about it. But it was, I dunno, it had a different atmosphere to it and some of that could have been the fact we were on holiday, right. But we loved it anyway. And I knew one or two of the people at BMW Australia at the time. And I was in Munich on a conference. And I was sitting having a drink one night with the guy who was the after sales director in Australia. We were just talking about what was going on. And he said, I'm in the process of restructuring, because I've got a guy who does engineering and homologation and all these kinds of things, who's retiring, and I need to restructure things. And I just like, off the top of my head said, well make me an offer John and I'll come and do it. And he and we just sort of laughed it off. It was a bit of a joke at the time. But I was back in Singapore back at work. And four or five weeks later, the phone rang and he called me and he said, Did you mean what you said? And I said, Absolutely. I don't say things that I mean. He said you'll be coming on a local contract, it won't be an expat job, it'll be a local contract. I said I don't care. I'm coming. So we packed up the kids and we went to Melbourne in January of 97. And the role I had was engineering, they call it engineering, but it was it was homologation, you know what homologation is?

Andy: 54:15

So explain it for a vague idea.

Alan Harris: 54:19

homologation is, so car is engineered in Germany, or wherever. But each country has specific requirements in terms of, you know, like, the French need yellow headlamps, and, you know, the Americans used to need the big bumpers, and everybody has different standards, and Australia is no different. So there's a role there that sits between the authorities and the engineering teams in Munich, to make sure that whatever car comes into the country complies with the local regulations, right. So it was that plus a few other things, technical support and so on which was in some ways for me a little bit of a downward step in terms of responsibility because I'd been responsible for more, I think. But I knew that it was a chance to get onto a different road. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd agreed to come back to the UK at that point. And that was proven out because I was in that role for no more than three months. And I was sitting at the table one day, and the managing director called me and said, Can you come across to my office? And my immediate thought was, what have I done wrong? One of those calls

Andy: 55:41

We all do that

Alan Harris: 55:44

It made it worse, because I walked into the door, and my boss was sitting there, and the HR director was sitting there. And I thought, Oh, God, this looks serious. And the MD said, he said, John Young his name was, my boss, he said, the guy who runs BMW, Sydney, because we had two wholly owned retail outlets, has resigned has left the company. And I've asked John Young, your boss to take that role. And we think you should take over from John as the after sales director. So my immediate reaction was, well, why me, I've been here for five minutes, and there are guys in the team with a lot more experience. And his reaction was, we don't think they do have more experience. They've only ever known Australia. You have so much experience from different countries, overseas, and so on. We think you're the right person. So within a matter of months, I was Aftersales Director,

Andy: 56:50

this is definitely a recurring theme. It's the stuff that happens that you couldn't possibly have foreseen. So when you accept something that may on the face of it seem to be a sideways or slightly down or sometimes we call them in these conversations, investment moves, if you know it's going to, you know, it's an investment for the future. But I do love the recurrence of this where you you had no idea that this was going to happen. But because you took that move, all of a sudden this door opens.

Alan Harris: 57:22

Yeah, and I'm a firm believer in that things happen for a reason. And when I look back, the fact that they would only offer me a return to the UK. Whilst at that point in time, I thought that was terrible. Because I thought with all of this experience, that you've invested in BMW AG, you've invested in bringing me to Singapore. And I've got all of this experience for five years, and you're going to send me back to the UK where I won't be able to use any of it. That doesn't make any sense to me. But it was the only thing on the on the agenda. So. So later, then when you look back on that you think, well, maybe that that happened for a reason? Because it was it was the spur that started me looking elsewhere, myself, rather than relying on, you know, an HR director, sitting a world away.

Andy: 58:17

So you took charge of your own journey, then you you deliberately made decisions to keep going.

Alan Harris: 58:25

Yeah, absolutely.

Andy: 58:27

And how was it being the Aftersales Director? How did that work out?

Alan Harris: 58:32

Yeah, very well. I mean, there were there were, obviously I was mentioned earlier about leading a team. And how I thought I had led the team, even though they weren't really my team on paper. This was probably the first time where I had a team on paper. So there were some things that you had to learn, like, you know, disciplinary things, and evaluating people. There were there were quite a few things that were new to me. But I always relied back on what I learned, especially in the Asia role about everybody has a value, everybody has their abilities. And it's about assessing whether those abilities fit to the responsibilities that they've been given. Very often you can see, through no fault of their own, you've got someone who's a round peg sitting in a square hole or vice versa. And I saw my job to work with that to make sure that you've got the right people with the right skills in the right places with the right responsibilities. And then you can give them the space to do what they know best. And I knew for a very long time before that I didn't know everything you can never possibly know everything. And as we said before, the further up the chain you go and the further you get away from the tools, metaphorically speaking, the more you need to recognise the value of the people who are going to do that job for you, and make sure that you can give them the motivation. And as I also said, motivation is not just about money and material things, it's about being given the space and the authority and the encouragement and trust, trust is a huge one. And the ability to have a voice be heard, you know, the old saying, of the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts, when it comes to a team. It's absolutely true. And if you can get round pegs in round holes, and they start to work together, you get an awful lot more out of it. So in that phase, I started to learn more about that aspect of it. I think, you know, understanding people and understanding individuals, I already had a good grounding in that, because all of that experience from Asia taught me that, but then applying that in a way, where they really are your team, and making sure that people are in the right jobs, was something I had to learn.

Andy: 1:01:11

There were no regrets about having carried on travelling and going over to Australia.

Alan Harris: 1:01:16

No, I mean, we loved the country. Absolutely loved it. There was a point in time where neither of us believed we'd ever leave. But we really love the country so much. And I love the people, and still do that we decided that we would become permanent residents initially and then citizens. And part of that was that I wanted to be able to give my girls the choice, you know, they they have British passports by birth right. But by having Australian passports as well, they could choose whether they wanted to stay in Australia forever, or not. And without taking that step to citizenship, you are then tied to the job. You know, if you're there on a working visa, and I lose my job with BMW, we all had to leave, it's not just me, everybody has the family has to leave. So we took that step.

Andy: 1:02:18

A bit like your father being tied to the farm, as you said earlier, no job, no house

Alan Harris: 1:02:23

Exactly. Yeah, I've been through that a couple of times. And I don't like being tied like that. It's a precarious position to be. I mean, Singapore, was also like that. But I think in Singapore, you always had the mentality that you weren't going to be in Singapore forever. Singapore was always going to be a temporary thing, whether it was three years, five years or 10 years, where you knew it was always going to be temporary. So it wasn't such a big deal there. But in Australia, we could see that, that was somewhere, you could spend the rest of your life and therefore, being tied to a work visa was not an ideal situation.

Andy: 1:03:05

The thing I'd like to pick up on that Alan is you said that there was a time when both you and your wife thought you'd never leave Australia. And that idea that there are times when we have thoughts like that, and, and you at the time, that is what you believe the you just cannot imagine leaving somewhere or going somewhere or whatever it is. And then things change. And so what happened for you to leave,

Alan Harris: 1:03:38

there was something else I learned gradually, in a transitional way through all of these years. And that was that in the earlier years, my ability to grow and improve and go places was based on what I knew. It was based on my skills, and so on. And over a time, that transitioned into a thought that it was more about who I knew, and less about what I knew. And I mean, that in a negative way and in a positive way. Because as I just explained about motivating the team, that's also about who I know. So if I know you as my team member, the more I know about you and the more I understand everything about you, the better I'm formed and the better I can make decisions to help get more out of you and have more motivation. So in that way, that's a positive way of knowing somebody. But in a negative sense, I also very strongly realised that to have even more progression, you had to know people. And that was a skill that I learned very slowly. I was never really and this might sound odd given what everything I've said so far, but I was never really an extroverted kind of guy. I didn't always find it that easy to talk to people. But I realised that I needed to talk to people when I was particularly senior people in, in Germany. So you needed a network of support, even though they might not be active, but you needed a network of support, people who thought he's a good guy, you know. So I actively worked on how to do that. And whenever I was in Germany, I would always knock on the doors of three or four of the senior guys and say, Can we chat, you know, just to put your face in their face and get them to know you to build a relationship so that they know what you've done? And where you've been? And where your experiences and all that kind of stuff because you never know? It might? Might help one day might not but it might help one day? And what would the would you have a formal approach to those meetings? How would you manage those meetings, I wouldn't say I'd have a formal approach. If it was somebody who I'd never met before, I would obviously make an appointment through their support team, and then just walk in and say, We've never met, I'd just, you know, like to get to know you, you to know me, and explain a bit about my background. The good thing at BMW is that those senior people are actually expecting that. I mean, it's a, it's a formal way of the company working. And to come back to what we were talking about before, because it's relevant to this is what happened next, after Australia was, I'd actually made a conscious decision to move out of the after sales department, because I thought there wasn't much more I could do in terms of after sales. So I decided, I'd try to move into sales and marketing, even though it was out of my comfort zone. I knew that if I was going to progress even more then I needed to do that. And the opportunity came up in BMW, Australia, because there was a transition at the managing director level. And the sales and marketing manager at the time, he was a German thought that he would have gotten that role, and actually didn't happen that way. So we had a new MD, and no sales and marketing manager. So in my wisdom, one day, I got off my chair and walked across to his office and I said, Hey, you know, introduced myself. And I say, I said, basically, you know, you're new at the market, you don't know the dealers, you now have no sales and marketing manager, you can bring in also somebody from overseas, and he'll be in the same boat as you. Or you could consider me, I haven't done sales and marketing before. But I do know that dealers, I have a very good relationship with the dealers. We do do sales and marketing in after sales, believe it or not. So it's not completely new to me. So the upshot of that was that the new MD had a chat in Munich, with the senior people who I had had meetings with and and word came down yes, let's do it. So I moved up to doing the after sales role for about five years, I moved across to do sales and marketing.

Andy: 1:08:19

I think that there's two great lessons come out of there. One is that you had a lot to bring the sales and marketing role. So it was an opportunity for you to get something new and to grow your experience and get out of your comfort zone as you put it. But you weren't coming with nothing. You had relationships, healthy relationships with the dealer network that were obviously going to transfer well into that new position. And the other little nugget, I think that, you know, be helpful for people is that even the MD in the country? can't just say yes, sometimes people think that they assume that if you're the CEO in the market, then presumably you make decisions, you know, but these decisions have to be taken somewhere else

Alan Harris: 1:09:11

some decisions you can make, but very often, especially when it's managerial first line positions they have to be supported by the headquarter. And there's then another very good example of how that process played out because I had been doing the sales and marketing role for about two years. Very settled, was enjoying it. And I came into the office in the morning, one morning and my assistant said, I've had a call from a Mr von Freiant and he wants to speak to you urgently. And I knew who he was. He was the Global Head of parts in Munich. And he didn't call me every day when I was doing aftersales so why does he want to Call me now. Right? So, and the torment was that because of the time difference. I had to wait till like five in the afternoon to call him. So I called him and he said, he said, Alan, do you remember the conversation we had in my office about two years ago? And I went, Ah, no, what did we talk about. And I actually did remember it, but I wanted him to tell me. And basically, the conversation went something along the lines of so what are you going to do with your career? He said to me, at this time, two years before, what are you going to do with yourself. And I said, Well, I said, look all of my experience is in aftersales, if I'm going to grow in aftersales, I need a bigger market. And obviously, that needs to be an English speaking market, because I don't have any language skills. And I said that that really is only the US. There is nothing bigger. I said, I don't want to go back to the UK. So it's either the UK or the US. So really, only the US and both of people in those roles are entrenched. I said, so my other option is to go to Sales and Marketing and try and grow through the other side of the business. And he said, Okay, fine, no problem. So in this phone call, he said, you remember the conversation two years before? And I said, I said, No, but I really did. And he said, you talked about potentially doing after sales in the US? And I said, Well, yeah, but that was that's not really an option is. And he said, Well, Mr Dunsall who was the incumbent is retiring. And he said, several people, including myself, think you should put your hat in the ring. And I said, Yeah, but that means moving back to aftersales. And he said yes, I realised that but he said, It's the biggest aftersales role in the world. Why would you not put your hat in the ring? I said, Okay, put it like that. I guess I should. And what I was vaguely aware of, but I didn't I hadn't really thought about it at that point in time was that the CEO of BMW in the States, was Tom Purvis. And he was the guy who I took my third interview with when I joined BMW GB, back in the 80s.

Andy: 1:12:24

Our wow, if we had commercials, and we would cut to an ad break now. That is just fantastic. So he knew you, would he have remembered that, no disrespect to your interviewing

Alan Harris: 1:12:44

He definitely remembered me Because what skills. happened, what I found out later was that there was a little bit of a fight going on. And I don't want this to sound. This sounds like I was like, an afterthought, which I wasn't. But the guy who I was replacing was a German and been in the role for a long, long time. And there was a desire from Tom not to have another German in the role. And at that same point in time, the people in Munich didn't really like any of the first line Americans. So they were looking for an alternative. So Von Freian when he called me, and he said, you should put your hand ring, he said, You should call Tom Purvis, like within the next 48 hours. So I literally I called Tom. And he said, When can you come? It was as simple as that. And they confirmed it would be OFK, which won't mean anything to anybody outside of BMW, but, you know, the most senior level of management in the company. So for me, it was a case of, yes, going back to after sales, which I was very comfortable with anyway, I mean, there was nothing I didn't know about aftersales, but a much bigger role, much more important role, much greater exposure to the management company. And I also knew that it was the biggest after sales role in the world. So therefore, if I did that for four or five years, then they have to give me something outside of after sales, right. So by that time I was learning even started to think one step ahead.

Andy: 1:14:31

Very good. So that took you then to the US,

Alan Harris: 1:14:36

That took me to the US for six years. I was Aftersales Director, biggest team I'd ever seen. But the policies and you know, my way of working that I'd learned before, applied there as well. And somebody told me once, who will remain nameless senior guy because he said, How are you getting on the job? And I said, the only thing is some of the numbers scare me. Because, you know, some big numbers with lots of zeros. And he told me, you have to remember that the bigger the numbers are bigger the mistakes you can make. Okay, I never thought about it. But yeah, so it was a fun time. And I think one of the highlights of my career with the company. After five years of that, I was asked to come to Munich, because as I quite rightly predicted, there was nothing else in aftersales, rather than a central role, which they knew I wasn't really suited to, because not being able to speak German very well. But they knew I had experience of working with importers from the Asia days. And I was offered to run an importer office that was based in Munich, in Germany, but looked after all of the importers in Africa, Eastern Europe, Caribbean. So there was 40, I think, 45 countries, with a team, one team working in French, one team working in Russian, and two other teams working in English, supporting these these markets.

Andy: 1:16:31

And this was now overall responsibility for seeing overall responsibility

Alan Harris: 1:16:34

This was seeing overall responsibility for the whole for the whole business.

Andy: 1:16:39

My mind just goes back to the young Alan on the spanners in the Vauxall Opel garage, and I just love these stories and you make it sound I wouldn't say effortless Alan. But there's obviously this thread of realising. Okay, so for a while it was about what you knew. And then it was about working with other people. And there was only so much you could do yourself. And once that Penny had dropped, then how can I get the most out of people and being empathetic with them. And yeah, having to learn some of the disciplinary stuff and those things, but effectively getting the right people in the right position, giving them the support they need, helping develop their capability. And then it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, being open to moves, recognising that you probably need to move out of after sales, go into sales and marketing in order to be able to move up the organisation and weighing all these things up and doing the networking in in the headquarters going and knocking on the doors making sure that the right people know who you are. So when the conversations happen about we've got this guy, Alan Harris, we're thinking of putting him in that role. They say, Oh, yeah, I know him. Yeah,

Alan Harris: 1:17:53

Exactly. That's all you need, and you're right. When that's okay. I was sort of thinking about what I was going to talk to you about that transition of what you know, to who, you know, when we talk about that, sometimes we tend to think of it in a negative sense, but because it means that it doesn't matter what you know, you know, as long as you know, the right people at work, but that's not that's not the whole story, it's that transition to being more of a people oriented role and pulling the levers that you know, will make a difference, it has a similarity to be in the workshop floor, you know, when you pull the levers, you know, what's going to happen there, here it's about recognising which are the right levers to pull, what will motivate people in the right way, and getting your satisfaction from different things. So for example, if I go back to those days, when I was on the tools, especially with Porsche, I mean, I used to I was the engine specialist, I could pull apart a 911 engine, rebuild it, and away it would go and you get an immense satisfaction out of that. But later on, it's about a seeing results, putting numbers on the table profitability, all of those kinds of things. But also, and probably more importantly, is seeing, those people that are in your charge actually grow into senior managers themselves, I can count at least four or five people who used to work for me on quite a junior level that are now in the upper echelon rank of the company. So you got to take a lot of satisfaction, pride from those kinds of things.

Andy: 1:19:35

Yeah. And I can see in your face when you hit upon that recollection, that that is an incredibly rewarding part of the role. So the other thing I'm noticing, which is I think it's absolutely wonderful is the sort of similarity and yet significant difference between being given responsibility for 36 dealers in the south of the UK below the M4 motorway and then having the, you know, 40 countries that you're responsible for or 26 When you were in Singapore, and it's all that's happened the geography's exploded, the distance has exploded the complexity of all the different cultures. But fundamentally, there's a common thread there of, you know, being responsible for different locations and trying to make them all work. And it just gets gradually harder, they ramp up the difficulty level.

Alan Harris: 1:20:31

Absolutely. And I often I used to think of, you know, my mother, as I said she was a bit of a rock for, for me back in the day. And she was, she was immensely proud of the day that I got the job with the Porsche dealership. Because she knew it was a prestige brand, and so on, she was immensely proud. And I remember when I was in the States, I had been in the States for like, a month, and we had a national after sales conference for the dealer network. And I walked up, I walked out onto a stage in Las Vegas with 1500 people in the audience. And I thought, I wonder what my mom would have thought of this, so it gave me quite a bit of satisfaction as well. Gotta have some fun along the way. And that the story is obviously not over. Because after doing the important markets there for about four years, they came knocking on my door, again, to head up the subsidiary in Japan. Some of that was people related. Because the people who ran who were the senior directors, responsible for Japan knew my background, knew me knew I had a strong connection with Asia, knew I was very empathetic to different cultures. And there's no culture that's different than Japan.

Andy: 1:22:00

Yeah. So you were responsible for the subsidiary in Japan. And that wasn't your last move, you had another move after that didn't you.

Alan Harris: 1:22:09

I had one more move. That was back to Southeast Asia to Malaysia. And one of the reasons for that was along the way, I had experience of CKD, which stands for completely knocked down. And that means that in some countries, we ship cars in kit form, countries with high import duties. And if we build an if we create an assembly plant, employ local people, then we get reductions off of those duties. And you can sell the car at a lower price and therefore a higher volume. And I had some experience of how that works from other countries, a from my early days in Asia, but also those North African countries, Egypt is also a CKD market. And we had some issues in Malaysia, particularly with the transition towards modern cars like hybrids, and so on. So I moved then from Japan, to Malaysia, knowing that that was likely to be my, my last stop, because at that point, Nina and I had gotten married, and she was in New Zealand. And I was in Japan, which kind of worked similar timezone. Still a long way.

Andy: 1:23:30

I'm sure a lot of couples do that Alan.

Alan Harris: 1:23:32

It's a long flight. But at least you could speak to each other. But then Nina got her job back in the States with financial services. And that meant she was literally on the other side of the world. So I agreed to the move to Malaysia. On the precondition that it would be for a limited period of time, and then I would transition out of the out of the company. But it was fun. I spent most of that year and a half, again, on a different level, mainly negotiating with the Malaysian government, because we wanted to build hybrids and introduce hybrids into the market, but to produce CKD versions of the hybrid model is very expensive. And therefore we needed to be sure that whatever duty conditions we could achieve in the country would make a positive business case for those

Andy: 1:24:33

There's always interesting new developments with each role, models. isn't there, new facets to it.

Alan Harris: 1:24:38

absolutely.

Andy: 1:24:39

And since then Alan, since you left BMW Group, tell us a little bit about that and what you're doing now.

Alan Harris: 1:24:46

So yeah, end of 2015 I was almost 30 years with the group. I left the group went back to the States, played golf for a few months and then decided, you know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life and I thought everything I've learned in the last 30 years in terms of leadership, you know those things about developing people and helping people to grow in their own roles and move perhaps in a way that I did. Obviously, all of that travel is not for everyone, but everyone's got their own path that they want to follow. And I believed that everything I'd learned over those years could be useful to a lot of people at various stages in their career. So I decided to get a formal coaching qualification, which I did, I took a six month training and education course in the US to get a certification for coaching. I set up my own company. And I've been doing that kind of leadership coaching since then, with various different people, which is really rewarding when you see the, you know, sometimes those light bulb moments, which is really cool. And alongside of that, I've had a number of startup companies in the US that have asked for my advice and guidance at a board level strategic level. Also, buying my experience, basically, and I think those two things give me quite a nice balance. The people aspect and seeing people grow, seeing people achieve things, is really rewarding. And there aren't many, I won't say any, but there are many problems or issues or blockages in people's careers or company situations that I haven't seen at some point along the road and you can

Andy: 1:26:40

Yep. See, you're able to leverage that material. Yeah. help them work through it

Alan Harris: 1:26:41

No, I don't think so. Andy? No, I was keen to get Yeah, marvellous. Well, thank you very much, Alan, is there anything I haven't asked you that I should have done? Have I missed out on any particular nuggets that you were thinking you'd share? across the major transition points in the journey, but also the learnings.

Andy: 1:27:11

And yeah, and you did, thank you. And I just think there's so much of this is transferable. That's why I love having these conversations that and I say, you know, to my listeners, they're unique, different things will resonate, depending on what's particularly relevant to them. Right now, they might listen again in a couple of years time and something else would stand out. But thank you for sharing so openly the journey that you've been on, and we'll put some contact details in our show notes. So if people want to reach out to you, they can and we'll put the link to your website as well as to the to you on LinkedIn. So thanks again for joining me. Thank you. You've been listening to Career-view Mirror with me, Andy follows, I hope you found some helpful points to reflect on in Alan's story that can help you with your own career journey, or that of those who lead, parent or mentor. You are unique. And during my conversation with Alan, you'll have picked up on topics that resonate with you. A few things I noticed were his happy but modest background where he witnessed his father working very hard as a dairy farmer, and living with the insecurity of his house being tied to his job. The fact that he started out as an apprentice on the tools, and that he turned down the first opportunity to step away from being a mechanic choosing instead to move to the Porsche garage where he spent a few more years working on 911's and thee like, his natural tendency to watch what his boss was doing and ask himself could I do that, which, with hindsight, he put down to ambition, the idea that some of that ambition could have been innate, and, and that it was most likely also fueled by recognising some of the financial restrictions of his childhood. How later in his career, he became just as passionate about developing people, as he had been about fixing engines. He recognises that there were some key trigger points when opportunities arose and decisions were taken that would ultimately have the most significant impact on his career and life. He was open to opportunities, even if it meant travelling to unknown territory. And on several occasions, he found himself in roles that were isolated, and in which he had to rely on his own wits and resilience. He employed some strategic career thinking about moving out of after sales into sales and marketing, and then going back to after sales in the US, which he realised would ultimately lead to something bigger, outside of after sales. And how once again, as Steve Jobs pointed out, it all makes sense when we look back and join the dots in this way. You can contact Alan via LinkedIn, and we'll put links in the show notes to this episode. We publish these episodes to celebrate my guests careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. I'm genuinely interested in what resonated with you. Thank you to all of you for Sharing your feedback. Thanks also to Hannah and Julia, who was part of the Career-view Mirror team here at Aquilae. work so hard to deliver these episodes to you. And remember folks, if you know people who would benefit from hearing these stories, please show them how to find us. Thanks for listening