When I left Promotor in 1987 I started working as a freelancer for Cintrex doing expos, mostly in Eastern Europe - although I did one Baghdad just before Gulf War I - and by 1988 I had computerised the customs documentation which meant that when lorries arrived at the warehouse to load for an expo instead of 3 of us working through the night with typewriters to produce the necessary pile and piles of paperwork - and making endless mistakes - I could actually complete the paperwork on my own in about 2 hours and the driver hardly had to wait. The computer did all the maths and so my paperwork was 100% correct. No more using carbon paper for 10 pages at a time where the bottom copy was almost blank!
On arrival at Leizpig, Brno, Budapest, Plovdiv etc all the Custom officers were so impressed by my paperwork being the best they had ever seen I was customs cleared days before everyone else. They loved me because normally they had to plough through endless paperwork errors and with mine this was no longer necessary. I was even invited to drink with them as I’d save them so much time.
Naturally this was noticed by the clients and soon I made big inroads into Promotor and Keptowe client bases… Staggie was furious and told his drivers to keep me away from his clients. But it was too late.
Really annoying was the Berlin wall came down in 1989 and the East European shows virtually stopped dead as no one knew who owned what…
So I played my part too in a small way.
I never heard that Staggie was sacked! That amazed me… He was well organised but not very good at being pleasant with the staff.