Richard Blagden

Mitsubishi Forklift Truck Dealer After working for Welfaux for over 25 years, Andy Welsher MD offered me a Directorship, a position I couldn't say no to and one I take pride in.

Mitsubishi Dealer As the company grew, the need to manage the service department and improve our health and safety became apparent. Managing a service controller, parts controller, field and workshop engineers and still managing to sell over 40 new Mitsubishi forklifts to a very large American (taken over by German) freight forwarder was quite some task. This role enhanced my sales and operational skills and has enabled me to learn a lot about running and organising a business.

Still Dealer to 2001 & Mitsubishi thereafter. As my career progressed the obvious next position was management and I was promoted to Sales Manager. Managing a small team of salesmen helping them to close deals and enhancing their product knowledge and sales techniques.

Still Dealer After being a Senior Engineer I transfered my product knowledge to a totally different role-selling forklifts rather than repairing them. A tough decision but the right one and a very successful one for me. Running a territory and having to start the hard way by good old fashioned door knocking worked very well and enabled me to sell a good number of new and refurbished trucks over 6 years. Sales taught me not only selling techniques but how to relate to people, a key skill in any job.

Still Dealer As I progressed through Welfaux and the company became larger, I was promoted to Senior engineer. This was a good position for me as my knowledge and confidence grew and grew as I was trained and came across ever more complex electrical and mechanical problems to fix.

I joined Welfaux, then a Still Distributor, when it was a very small company with 2 engineers. We worked in the workshop refurbishing Still forklifts and also in the field carrying out servicing and attending breakdowns. I learnt a lot about in depth fault finding and electrical diagnosis plus enhancing my knowledge by attending training courses held by Still GB.

Moving on from spraying my goal was to change career path into the engineering side of forklifts at Crown. Working on modifications and attachments to begin with and progressing into the nuts and bolts of the trucks including wiring, motors and controllers.

Crown Lift Trucks UK Totally self taught in the preperation and spraying of refurbished and modified Crown materials handling equipment.

This was a bit of a stop gap job as I really wanted to work on mechanical equipment and was waiting for the opportunity to move into this field. What better to start on than tractors and farm equipment, this helped me get my next job at Crown, not to mention having a future father in law that was the transport manager there may have been a bit of help!

Leaving school in 1981 during a recession I took the first job that I stumbled across. I progressed from farm hand to learning to drive tractors and becoming second in charge to the farm manager. The farm was taken over and after a year it was time for me to move on.