5 memorable business trips (3)

This the third in a series of posts about memorable business trips. It relates to time some 10 years after the first two and although email was already a part of business life the concept of accessing your email when travelling hadn’t yet caught on. Give the dreadful position that Donald Trump has taken with respect to Canada some of my comments might be timely.

3 Crossing Canada

I had moved on from working for giant companies which measured their sales in billions and had become Sales & Marketing Director of Linx Printing Technologies, a £20 million turnover company which built and sold continuous inkjet printers worldwide.

Linx worked through distributors and already had a pretty comprehensive global network but Canada was a notable gap and in the late 90s I spent a week in the country evaluating a number of candidates.

I flew out on a Thursday with a first destination being Edmonton, Alberta and although I had been to Canada before those visits were just short hops over the land border to Dow’s offices and production facility in Sarnia. This would be my first contact with ‘Canada proper’.

Customs on arrival didn’t exactly give me a hard time but the officer did subject me to searching questions. The surprise though was that he seemed most concerned that I might be carrying sales literature. Guns and crack cocaine didn’t seem to be on his agenda.

It was the next morning at breakfast that I realised that despite the similarities from a distance Canada is distinctly different from the USA. I picked up a newspaper and expected the usual US treatment of local news and some national news but nothing else. On the back page of the Canadian newspaper were the reports of European Cup matches played the previous evening.

Business during the day was pretty standard but then at lunch it was significant difference number two: Canadians drink beer at lunchtime. Why not after all it was Friday!

Canada is of course nothing if not ice hockey country and as luck would have it the Edmonton Oilers were playing at home that Friday night.

I spent the weekend in Toronto where, inter alia, I wrote up my report on Friday’s meeting and faxed it back to the UK, attended a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game (indoors) and went to the top of the CN Tower where I had the unnerving experience of walking on a glass floor.

I had two calls in Toronto and at one I had my first encounter with a company using a form of zero hours contracts for sales people. However these were much fairer than those prevalent in the casual employment sector in the UK. These sales employees, including the Sales Director, were fully employed with pensions, holidays and the like but no salary. They lived off their sales commissions and bonuses. It seemed to work because the company was prospering.

I continued east to Montreal where the company I visited was owned by a guy who told me he’d recently sacked his brother. Seemed pretty brutal to me.

And that was it: four companies in three cities in three provinces in three working days. I faxed reports back as I was travelling but amazingly don’t seem to have taken any photographs even though I always travelled with a camera. The photo above is indeed me in Canada but in Vancouver on a later visit.