Cincinnati Milacron
1980. My time at Hardy Spicer was drawing to a close. Don’t get me wrong – I very much enjoyed working in Design and was good at my job, trusted, and given quite a lot of responsibility for my age, but having worked on special projects for the Managing Director, I felt underutilised. My spell in Organisation and Methods had given me an insight into the more commercial side of business, rather than the pure Engineering aspects, and, counter to my expectations, I found the commercial stuff interesting. In Design, I’d interacted a little bit with the sales guys and decided that having a crack at a Technical Sales role could be worthwhile – meeting with customers, taking onboard their requirements, and converting those requirements into a technical solution. So, I decided to look around for a technical sales role with a manufaturing company.
A nearby machine tool manufacturer, Cincinnati Milacron, was looking for sales people, so I applied for an interview, sailed through it and was offered a job.
Big mistake.
When I handed in my notice at Hardy’s, there was quite a lot of pressure to reconsider. Jack Field, the Chief Designer, tried hard to persuade me to change my mind and the girls in Personnel (we used to flirt with each other a lot) said I should take my time, give it a few months and only then make a final decision. What I didn’t know was that the company was getting ready for a voluntary redundancy programme, so they were trying to subtly let me know that I’d be in line for a few thousand pounds of compensation and would help them by taking up one of the voluntary redundancy positions. Of course, I was far too stupid to pick up the clear signals they were giving me.
In the event, I missed out on a redundancy package and actually took a drop in wages to join Cincinnati Milacron. What a mug!
On the very first day at Milacron I realised that I was a fish out of water. This really wasn’t my kind of working environment. The people there were snidey and seemed strangely embittered, with strong sense of arrogance and entitlement. I couldn’t believe I’d been so daft; I really should have known better, having been at college with some people who worked there – they were a very odd bunch, didn’t mix much with anyone else and never seemed happy. There was evidently some kind of weird culture in the place and yet, despite having sensed this, I’d impulsively blundered in, ignoring my instincts and making a decision completely absent of any common sense.
As an example of what I mean by a weird culture, I shall recount the exchange when I met with the HR director on that first morning: He needed my bank details for the payroll department. I’ve always banked with the Co-Operative Bank. When he saw this, he said:
“Well, that’ll have to change, won’t it? We don’t have people here who bank with Commies
Orientation
Milacron had a very sensible and pragmatic approach to introducing a new salesman to the company, they encouraged you to actually work alongside the blokes who built the machines, so I was to spend time on the factory floor at the company’s four main sites in Birmingham, Bedford, Biggleswade and Rotterdam. I enjoyed this part of the induction process, these were more my kind of people than the office staff, they were down to earth and generally a pleasure to be working with, although I didn’t really have a lot to do, just watch and learn, so the days did tend to drag a bit.
The lads in the Birmingham factory used to have a routine called a ‘neckbreaker’ – you’d be walking down on of the aisles and someone would call out “Erm, excuse me!”. You’d turn around to find nobody looking at you. You’d just been neckbroken. One of the lads was a living legend for having neckbroken Princess Margaret when she was being escorted on a factory tour. My uncle Ron had worked in the toolroom at Birmingham for several decades and was very well thought-of, so this helped make me acceptable to the workforce, as Ron’s nephew, I couldn’t be all bad, could I?
The Cincinnati Milacron factory in Birmingham (c) lathes.co.uk
Misery in Biggleswade
My time in Biggleswade was utterly wretched. I spent all winter living in the Crown Hotel which, at that time, was a proper dump. The food was inedible, the room was dingy, and the town itself was as dull as hell, with nothing to do. At the time, I was playing competitive darts to quite a high level, so I went down to the pub and had a game with some of the local yokels. I scored 180 and they were astonished – nothing this sensational had ever happened in Biggleswade, it appeared. I found a little wine bar up a back street and used to go there for a drink, the owner was a woman who’d lived in London, her husband worked in the City but had wanted to get away from the rat race, so decided that opening a little wine bar in Biggleswade would be a rather good idea. He’d only been there a couple of months when his former employer had contacted him with a great offer to lure him back at a massively increased salary, an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was now working in London five days a week whilst she was left stranded in Biggleswade, somewhere she’d never wanted to be in the first place, running a failing wine bar that the local yokels wouldn’t utilise and bored out of her mind. Quite often she and I would be the only people in there, sharing a bottle of wine, both as miserable as sin.
The Crown Hotel, Biggleswade (c)Tripadvisor It’s a Wetherspoons now, so will be far better than it was when I lived there for a while in 1980
Rotterdam
Next stop was Rotterdam. The factory was in an area called Vlaardingen, which was an industrial area close to the docks. Upon arrival I found that Milacron Birmingham had booked me into squalid accommodation that was essentially just a seamans’ mission. My room was absolutely tiny, I could quite literally touch both walls by standing with my arms outstretched, it was nothing more than a cupboard, really. I was supposed to be living here for three months, only coming home every second weekend. I kicked up a hell of a stink and they quite quickly moved me to the Hilton which is in central Rotterdam and close to the railway station so that I could commute to Vlaardingen very easily.
I got on well with the Milacron people at Rotterdam. Dutch people tend to like the British and most can speak at least few words of English. I remember they were very disappointed that I only picked up a smattering of Dutch. I palled up with one of the project engineers, Leo Pieters, and we would go out for a drink together once or twice a week. One one occasion we were entering a small bar – Leo went in first but as I followed, the huge doorman put his arm across the doorframe and stopped me from going in. Leo came back, spoke with the doorman who promptly apologised to me and ushered me in. I asked Leo what it was all about. He answered in a very matter-of-fact manner:
“Oh, nothing, really. He thought you were a German and they don’t serve Germans in here.”
Product training over, I was sent on a brief one-week sales training course. It was rubbish. Not remotely suitable for a Technical Sales role, it would have been OK if you were selling double glazing or timeshare or something, but essentially it was aimed at the cowboy salesman looking for a quick deal, not for someone in a B2B (business to business) environment specifying and negotiating a fairly complex solution sale.
This whole Cincinnati Milacron situation was getting worse and worse.
Dougie’s Domain
They gave me a sales ‘patch’ to work. I was selling just one family of products over a massive area, comprising Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex, London south of the river, and Kent. The salesman before me had been a man called Dougie Brown. Dougie had made a load of money selling machine tools during the 1950s and 1960s when Britain was booming, had bought himself a really lovely large house in Runnymede with lawns sweeping down to the River Thames upon which he had his motor cruiser moored ready to whisk his wife to Windsor when they needed to go shopping. He’d also bought the house next door for his son. Dougie had been lobbying for early retirement for at least five years and, to put it frankly, had stopped even pretending to make any effort. He gave me an open invitation to call in for tea and sandwiches any time I was passing, which invitation I took up on several occasions.
The River Thames at Runnymede, about 100 yards up from Dougie’s house (c)Royal-Windsor.com
Colin the Hopeless Road Warrior
I began to work the ‘patch’ and quickly discovered that most of the customers were astonished to find someone from Cincinnati Milacron knocking on their door – they’d assumed those days were long since gone. I was a hopeless salesman at first, not a clue what I was doing, but nevertheless a grafter, putting in long hours and refreshing Milacron’s customer database with the current names of contacts and trying to establish whether there were any sales prospects out there.
Logistically, it was a bit of nightmare trying to cover such a gigantic area, I was still living in Birmingham, so a typical week would involve driving down to Cornwall or Devon early on Monday morning, making a couple of sales calls in the afternoon, driving to, say, Hampshire in the evening, finding a hotel to sleep in, making some calls in Hampshire and Surrey on Tuesday, driving to Sussex, finding a hotel to sleep in, making a few cold calls in Sussex and Kent on Wednesday, driving to South London, making a few calls there on Thursday, drive to Berkshire, find a hotel, make a few cold calls in Berkshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol on Friday, then battle back up the gridlocked M5 to Birmingham. It was exhausting.
Being the new kid on the block, they’d given me a series of former pool cars rather than my own company car. On one occasion, I was driving up the A34 somewhere by Oxford in a 2.3 litre Ford Cortina when the traffic in front of me stopped suddenly. I braked, only to find the brakes had locked and I smashed into the car in front. Shamefacedly, I took the car back to base in Birmingham, where they blithely informed me that this had happened a couple of times before – the thing was a fucking death trap and I was having to drive several hundred miles a week in it.
This company was cheap, cheap, cheap.
Although I was still living in Birmingham, the requirement was to move somewhere down South. When working in London, I’d sometimes stay at a hotel in Bayswater and quite fancied the idea of buying a place in Notting Hill, which at the time (1981) was a pretty run-down area, but I liked it. The problem was that getting out of Notting Hill in the morning was always a bit of a struggle and I calculated that it would add a couple of hours’ travel time onto every working day. I decided to look further West and settled on the Twickenham area as a good place to base myself. Had I bought a place in Notting Hill, the kind of quite modest place I could afford at the time would have become worth a couple of million pounds when the area unexpectedly became trendy and desirable.
Then; me and Janice split up.
With my being away all week, living out of a suitcase, doing a job I hated, not really knowing how to do the job properly and then getting home at the weekends exhausted and subdued, I’d become no fun to live with. I’m quite a gregarious person by nature, but the dull, boring, unhappy and confused Colin that was coming home at weekends was no longer the lively and comical Colin that Jan had fallen in love with. I was quiet, demoralised and, frankly, struggling to cope. Jan was at home on her own all week, lonely and bored. She fell in love with someone else, who she eventually married and, as far as I’m aware, has now been with for over 40 years. Although this was by far the lowest point in my life, I still loved her. I wish her well.
Selling our house and dividing the proceeds between us forced a change in my plans. Rather than buy a house in Twickenham, I would have to buy a flat or maisonette. Eventually, I found a place to live and had a good time in Twickenham and Richmond, which I will cover in a separate piece.
Gradually, by dint of trial and error, I began to get the hang of this selling game. I pulled in a couple of large, prestigious orders, one was for Europe’s first-ever robotic flexible manufacturing system, for Rolls Royce aero engines in Bristol, the other was for a complete production line of machines for Hunting Precision Components in Tonbridge.
Rolls Royce Bristol (c) Bristol Live
Nigel Purslow
I reported to a sales manager called Nigel Purslow. He was a proper character and we got along very well. He had the bearing of a former military man, although I know nothing about his actual background. Rather than the usual business suit, Nigel would wear a double breasted blazer with a silk handkerchief arranged in the breast pocket, and neatly pressed slacks. He had a bushy moustache. If you can picture some kind of hybrid of Jimmy Edwards and Terry Thomas, you get the idea of what Nigel looked like and how he carried himself:
I was living in London by now, and would pop back to Birmingham quite often at the weekend to visit my mom and catch up with old mates. Nigel’s daughter was a student nurse at one of the London teaching hospitals, so a couple times when I was driving home on a Sunday evening, if she’d been home for the weekend, he’d have me call into his cottage in Lowsonford near Warwick and give her a lift back to the Smoke, rather than have her travel alone on the late train. She’d always apologise for not being able to invite me into the nurses home for a coffee (the rules didn’t allow male guests after a certain time), but to be honest I think she was glad to see the back of me.
Nigel was very ‘proper’ and gentlemanly, so it came as a bit of a surprise when on one occasion he reacted the way he did:
I’d been selling a very cheap bottom-of-the-range machine tool to a company in Portsmouth. The purchasing manager was trying to get a discount, but this thing was so cheap there was precious little wiggle room for negotiation, just a few percent. I offered what I could, but he wasn’t happy and demanded to see my manager. Nigel drove all the way down from Birmingham, haggled with the guy for a while and ended up offering exactly the same measly discount I’d already offered. We got back into my car at which point Nigel expounded:
“I say, that fellow back there…”
“What about him, Nigel?”
“Well, the man’s a complete cunt, isn’t he? Do they actually waste good money paying him? Anyway, old chap, the sun appears to be over the yard arm, so what say you we find ourselves a cosy little hostelry and have a quick snifter or two?”
By now, I’d worked my way through half a dozen rubbish pool cars and been lumbered with a 2.0 litre Austin Princess which was spectacularly unreliable. One night, Nigel and I were driving down the M5 in the snow when the windscreen wipers decided to stop working, so we had to drive along, whilst reaching out of the side windows and wiping the windscreen with bits of rag. The sales office got used to the Princess breaking down somewhere and me ringing in from a phone box and asking them to call my customers and tell them I wouldn’t be turning up for my appointment. On one such occasion, the girls in the office told me Nigel wanted a word:
“Whereabouts are you, Colin?”
“Just outside Maidenhead”
“Are you anywhere near a river or canal?”
“Erm, I think so. Why?”
“Then push the damned thing in. This is absolutely bloody ridiculous. I’m going to get you a new car”
He got me one of the new Vauxhall Cavaliers, which was great.
The Mary Rose
One of my customers was the Royal Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth. They were a pretty good customer because, like so many government organisations, they’d often find themselves with spare money at the end of the Financial Year, and rather than lose the budget for the next year, they’d buy something, whether they needed it or not. I was there once, over-specifying a stupidly expensive milling machine, when they asked if I’d like to see the Mary Rose, which had only recently been lifted off the sea bed.
They took me to a specially-built warehouse where I was given some waterproof clothing and ushered inside. The old ship was being sprayed with a fine mist of water and silicon to stop the timbers from rotting, This was several years before it was opened to the public. I regard this as a real privilege.
The wreck of the Mary Rose
Poor Quality
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Cincinnati had deservedly established a reputation for making very high quality and reliable milling machines, albeit at a premium price, unfortunately, by the ‘80s, this reputation was fading, although a lot of people who weren’t at the sharp end, as it were, out in the field and talking to users, still clung to the the mistaken belief that the products they were building back in the factories were top-notch. They weren’t – an influx of Japanese machine tool builders such as Yamazaki Mazak, Mori Seiki, Okuma, Makino, and Hitachi Seiki were selling better quality machine tools at a lower price point. Cincinnati Milacron had taken their eye off the ball and were out of step with industry trends.
I fell victim to the decline in product quality on a couple of occasions in my early days at Milacron when I innocently called in to visit a couple of companies that had spent tens of thousands of pounds on machines that turned out to be faulty – Fairey Aerospace in Hayes had Security escort me off the premises because of their previous bad experiences with a Cincinnati machine and the works director at Edwards High Vacuum in Shoreham-on-Sea took grim pleasure in showing me their Cincinnati lathe that had irretrievably broken down and was now a dismantled heap of scrap on the floor, surrounded by Japanese machines that were working perfectly.
Lack of vision
Milacron’s CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machines were equipped with the company’s own Acramatic CNC control computers which were very good, but, as the Japanese influx took hold, were non-standard. The majority of Japanese manufacturers were using Fanuc controllers, so I’d often visit a machine shop where they’d point-blank refuse to contemplate buying a Milacron machine because they’d moved from line production to cell production, with their machinists frequently switching between cells as various works orders came in. To enable their machinists to move seamlessly between cells. all of their machines were standardised on the same control – Fanuc, so they couldn’t see any advantage whatsoever in having some machinists retrained on using the Acramatic – it just made no operational sense. I suggested to the factory that we could offer Fanuc as an option, but that suggestion went down like a fart in an elevator and made me very unpopular. I was seen as ‘siding with the enemy’ and being disloyal to the Milacron brand. In reality, of course, all I was trying to do was listen to the voice of the customer and give them what they needed, not what we arrogantly thought they should have.
A similar lack of vision in the business came when I had the opportunity to sell a huge moving gantry CNC machine to British Aerospace in Filton, Bristol....
A Gantry CNC machine (c) Heidenhain
BAe needed one for machining the internal structure of aeroplane wings that were largely machined out of one huge solid block of aluminium alloy. These machines could easily cost a couple of million pounds and Cincinnati Milacron were one of a handful of companies that knew how to build one – the Japanese weren’t interested in this niche. We’d have to build it in the USA and ship it over, but that wasn’t such a big deal for a project of this size.
As part of winning the contract, BAe would have to produce some test pieces for Airbus. We had a couple of gantry milling machines in Birmingham for machining large machine beds, so I suggested to the factory that we could have them produce the test pieces on our own machines, get their operators trained up on the Acramatic control and, effectively lock BAe into buying a Cincinnati Gantry Mill. My suggestion was rejected out of hand:
“We’re not a subcontract manufacturer, we’re a machine tool builder. Just focus on the job we pay you to do and sell some of the machines we build in this factory, not stuff from the USA”,
I've found this old video of a Cincinnati Milacron Gantry Milling Machine, capable of machining airplane wings up to 60 feet long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbq-Hi9wcU4
I don't think YouTube will let me download it, but if you're interested, you can click on the link or cut and paste it (I hope!)
A port-side fixed trailing edge for an A380 wing being assembled at Airbus (BAe), Filton
The End
The end for me came when the company appointed a new sales director. I won’t name him – that wouldn’t be fair – but he was, in my opinion, a snake. He was double-jointed in that he could smile in your face whilst simultaneously stabbing you in the back. He had his favourites and I most certainly wasn’t one of them. Also, my perceived disloyalty with the Fanuc suggestion and delusions of grandeur with the sub-contract idea had targeted me as not being the ‘right kind’ for the Milacron ethos. I’d never really fitted in and had made things worse for myself.
Although my sales figures had been OK, they were nothing special. I’d sold a couple of very big deals, as mentioned above, but wasn’t bringing in the regular, smaller orders that the factories needed to keep ticking over. I’d built a very good funnel of prospective deals but wasn’t closing them quickly enough for his taste, so he put me on a written warning, at which point I promptly left the company and got myself a much better job with Hewlett-Packard. Moving into computers was something I’d been considering for a while – I would spend my days at Milacron visiting industrial estates and business parks all over the South of England, I would have one or two customers on the site, but there would be dozens of other companies that didn’t use machine tools, so I reasoned “What do they ALL need? Computers, that’s what”
He replaced me with one of his favourites who, over the next couple of years drove around effectively just order-taking, picking up all the deals that I’d put into the funnel. I stayed in touch with some of the guys who noted that once my funnel of deals had been emptied, the business on my ‘patch’ pretty much dried up again, as it had when good old Dougie Brown was angling for retirement and sitting in his lovely garden by the Thames.
So, despite having realised on Day One that Cincinnati Milacron was completely the wrong place for me, I’d eventually stuck it out and stayed for four years. I left in 1984. The company was in decline, had a brief revival from 1988 with a new range of smaller, more modular CNC machines largely for the export market, but eventually closed the UK operations down in 2008, mirroring the decline in British Manufacturing as a whole. The Japanese had wiped the floor with them.
I sometimes wonder why and how I managed to work there for so long, but then something Jan had said to me comes back: We were in the process of splitting up and went for a drink together to work out how we’d divide the house sale proceeds and our belongings between us. It was all very amicable, we were still fond of one another. I was in a very bad place, full of doubt, my self-confidence shot to ribbons. I confided in Jan that I was out of my depth and felt that I just wasn’t cut out to be a good salesman. Jan launched into a little pep talk:
“That’s nonsense. You’re hard working, well organised, trustworthy and, most of all, likeable. Everyone likes you – you wouldn’t believe some of the shit I’m getting from our friends who’re angry with me for what I’ve done; a lot of them have stopped talking to me and never want to see me again. They’re all being really loyal to you. Customers want to buy from people they like and can trust; people just like you. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be fine. I’ve got faith in you”.
Although I appreciated what she’d said and her kindness, especially under the circumstances, I nevertheless thought she was completely wrong, however once I got away from the rather toxic environment at Cincinnati and joined a more positive and healthy one at Hewlett-Packard, I discovered she was right, I was to go on to have a pretty decent sales career and win several awards for exceptional sales performance. I’ll cover those in a future piece.
I hope this little piece wasn't TOO depressing! You can stay safe in the knowledge that you only had to spend a few minutes reading about it, whereas I had to spend four years living it! Surely that level of endurance deserves a cup of coffee? :)
