Grant Our CEO,
Started his working life at age 11 working after school for a local green grocer. In Upper Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand. Cleaning spuds in a old bath tub with a hard broom and delivering vegetables all around the Upper Hutt valley and surrounding areas. On a Friday afternoon and Saturday morning you would see Jim Joe's old ford truck with Jim driving and two or three young boys delivering large orders of produce. (Jim was a refugee from China who had lost his whole family when they fled the Communist invasion / take over of China).
For Grant a 5th generation New Zealander who came from a well off middle class family it was an introduction into a whole new way of life.
So started his life long love of South East Asia
At 14 yrs old Grant and his friend Ken Gee brought an old 1938 Morris 8 with no motor. They push biked around all the local back yard mechanics until they found one and proceeded to rebuild the Morris.
On his 15th birthday Grant sat his driving licence using his fathers 1955 FJ Holden, which he passed with flying colours. On arriving at work he found Jim taking out the back bench seats of his 1947 Ford V8 Sedan (car). He then proceeded to load up the V8 with banana boxes full of vegetables. Grant said hey what are you doing Jimmy. Jim threw Grant the keys and said you know where they go by now, deliver them. Grant was speechless. Grabbing a pillow to sit on he took off in the V8 and delivered them.
It must have been funny to watch as having just turned 15 that day without the pillow he could not see out the driver’s window. Over the next 5 months every Friday afternoon and Saturday Grant drove all over The Upper Hutt and Whiteman’s valleys delivering green groceries.
At the end of the school year Grant started a Motor Mechanics apprenticeship at the local Morris agency. Five years or 10,000 hours. Which ever came first.
Three nights a week he drove down to Petone technical collage for further schooling.
At age 17 his Mom and Dad sold the business and moved back to Tauranga, Bay of Plenty NZ. Grant transferred his apprenticeship to a firm in Tauranga and went with them. His Brother was still doing his Doctorate at Victoria University but was based at Havelock North doing research on crop damage by minor birds for the DSIR (Department of scientific and industrial research New Zealand government) He got his Doctorate with 1st class Honners for his Thesis on that work. Grants sister had started her life time love of Horses and was working on there cousin’s dairy farm north of Toupo.
On finishing his apprenticeship as a fully qualified Motor Mechanic it was off to Sydney Australia for 3 years. Grant got a job with British Leyland and within weeks was in charge of the newly formed automatic department servicing Mini and 1300 automatic gearboxes. The Mini Cooper S was at that time dominating the car racing world. Taking out large Chrysler, Ford and Chevy V8's.
While with Leyland he finished his Trade Cert and A Grade exams and ended up earning good money.
His first introduction to the love of his life computers was in 1969 while working in Wellington for a GM Vauxhall dealership with a Tune scope and dyno that used a floppy type disk specific to the make and model of the GM car.
Then back to Sydney and British Leyland.
In 1970 or 71 back in New Zealand the Mercedes dealership that Grant was working for sent him on a course on the Bosh Computer unit that had just come out in the Mercs.
After that he never looked back. By 1973 he had his own free hold (no bank loan) 3/4 acre House & property right next to the Water in Tauranga.
By the early 1980's he had a purpose build workshop on his property full of networked computers. By 1982-3 he was logging into data bases and bulletin boards world wide using New Zealand’s Packet switching service.
He was using Prestol in Great Briton (same as telly text but works both ways) and using a USA text only service owned by Readers Digest.
This was many years before the so called Internet or WWW. People who tell you that it all started in the early 1990.s just don’t know what they are talking about.
His first Hard drive came in a computer from an English company that used a Sinclair QL main board, with a 32 bit chip running it, multi tasking, built in network ports, EPROM ports, rs232 ports, printer well the list goes on, heaps of memory (1MB) HA This was at a time when IBM had just releases there 1st 8 bit PC and were using dos & 5in floppies. The Hard drive had a massive 20MB's of memory.
In 1992-3 he traveled back to Thailand, met a Thai Girl, Brought a Guest House in Chiang Mai and had 6 trekking guides working for him, thus his great understanding of the Thai / Asian way of life and the North of Thailand.
He has seven Children, 4 Girls and three Boys. The two youngest are Thai-European.
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