Here we come

My first day of the new job in the former East Germany towns of Halle and Dessau. I had been informed of the job 5 days before on 18th March, when my boss in London called while I was in a Dortmund hotel shower and looking forward to breakfast:

"Get over to Dortmund airport straight away, there is a ticket there waiting for you on the morning flight to Berlin.  You will be collected at the airport."

An ex-Pat, ex-Army consultant in the motor business, living near Düsseldorf who had connections with one of the board members of Inchcape plc had been doing some preliminary work on the "opportunities" for Inchcape in the former DDR, met me at Berlin airport and took me on a 6 hour trip to the area and said I was now in charge of setting up two dealerships in the towns.

 Inchcape which was a major motors importer & dealer in the world (eg Toyota GB was Inchcape for 25 years+), was connected with BMW dealerships in France, West Germany and the UK and wanted to get the big time rights to be sole importer for BMW in breaking up Russia. BMW said "possibly, we will consider it but in the meantime,  show us what you can do with these two sites in East Germany."

BMW was within a year to say no to Inchcape, the Russian market was much too big and there was also a bust-up between the two boards as BMW wanted to have the Inchcape (Mann Egerton) BMW showroom on Park Lane, Mayfair as a factory run business.

So having bought a map of the two towns at the weekend back at home in Munich, I had set off in the morning to find a potential site near Halle which the consultant had seen. This Blip is literally the first time I got out of the car after the horrendous 450km "autobahn" morning trip from Munich. It's just a few 100m off the autobahn exit "Halle/Queis" on the main road towards Queis. The van in the background is at the autobahn exit. A few 100m to my rear was to be the site of our greenfield BMW dealership "Autohaus Queis".

More to follow!