1.0: Introduction
In 2002 I was working in a nascent industry as a consulting practice leader for a software startup and I faced a problem: our clients knew the software we sold was important to their business — but they didn’t really know how to use that software. The company’s sales people sold the software as “easy to install, easy to use” but everyone knew that wasn’t true. The industry was new, as was the practice of using the software, and so with every new customer came an increasingly long list of perfectly good questions about how they could and should go about using the application to improve their online business. Customers wisely wanted to avoid having to learn on their own, despite this being their first time using this particularly complicated type of software.
Unsurprisingly, when faced with these perfectly good questions, our sales people would say “oh, that is post-sales problem — go ask the consulting group” and so my team would get the same very basic questions from every new customer, repeated over-and-over, to the point where it began to become either maddening or tedious, depending on who you asked. Now, in a normal or at least more mature industry, the obvious solution to the tedious questions would be to point the customer to third-party documentation that would provide a foundation to the reader, answering their most basic questions. The only problem was that no such documentation existed, at least not back in 2002 …
Without any real experience writing a full-length book, without a publisher, and without a marketing plan, I hunkered down in the evenings and on the weekends and poured out pretty much everything I knew about the subject in as organized a manner as I could. I thought about all the questions customers had posed to me — all the things that they wished they had known both before they had decided to buy and install the software and, more importantly, once they were fully committed to using that software to improve their overall business — and addressed each to the best of my ability, based on my real-world experience.
Strangely enough, the book helped.
My ability to hand people a printed document and say “read this first, and then let me know what questions you still have” had a tremendous impact on the work my team did and, anecdotally, the customer’s ability to power past some of the arcane details and move quickly to the benefit of the software solution. More importantly, readers told me that the real value of the book was not the stuff they sort of understood — it was the stuff they had not even thought of. My experience, translated onto paper, allowed readers to avoid many of the mistakes of their predecessors and essentially start their practice from a more advanced point. The result? More happy customers, more advanced practices, and more knowledgeable practice leaders.
Nearly twenty years later I still lead a team of consultants working to help customers make the most of their investment in similar software. The companies we help are bigger, and the stakes are much higher, but we still benefit from the groundwork I laid down back in 2002 through the simple process of documenting the steps people needed to take to be successful, allowing them to avoid having to learn everything the hard way through trial and error.
Why am I telling you this?
Due in part to the success of that first book I wrote a few more, and over time as my career progressed and the industry grew into a multi-billion dollar opportunity for software companies and consulting firms alike, I was able to work a little less and play a little more. Eventually I ended up being able to follow my passion for exotic sports cars, starting slowly as one normally would, buying one car at a time and selling that car to buy another, but ultimately progressing to multi-car ownership. At my peak I had over twenty cars in my collection — several Porsche, a few Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a McLaren, and a host of other makes and models that for one reason or another I decided I needed to own.
At some point it occurred to me that there was actually quite a lot to know about owning a bunch of expensive sports cars beyond just buying them. Buying cars is really easy — all you need is money — but housing, maintaining, enjoying, and ultimately selling a small fleet of vehicles is much more complicated than I imagined it would be. So of course at that point I figured I would just go buy a book or two on the nuances of car collecting and read those, and even if I still didn’t have all the answers I needed, I would at least have a solid basis for collecting …
Except there wasn’t one.
Despite the incredible volume of books written on the subject of cars — from buying to selling to repairing and the nuanced history available on even the most obscure marques — I could not find even the most basic written description of the things an aspiring collector needs to know when getting started. Perhaps it’s because everyone expects it to be “common knowledge”, or maybe because everyone assumes that car collectors will be surrounded by other car collectors who have made all the mistakes before and can serve as learned guides, but I was somewhat shocked that the world appeared to be lacking even the most basic checklist of “things to know before you buy that second sports car” much less a detailed description of the challenges a collector is likely to face over the lifetime of ownership of any high-value vehicle.
And so here we are.
Buoyed by my experience writing my first book nearly twenty years ago, and bolstered by my hunch that car collecting is not a hobby likely to go away anytime soon, I decided to write The Car Collector’s Handbook. My hope was that I would be able to convey some of what I learned personally, combined with the knowledge acquired by several other car collectors I know personally, and create a guide that would both inspire readers to take the chance and buy that car or cars they have always wanted — without having to make some of the mistakes I have made along the way.
I had originally planned on self-publishing The Car Collector’s Handbook since that industry has grown a lot since I published Web Analytics Demystified, but as I got deeper into my research and spent more time writing … I discovered that I had a lot to say. The introduction and first full section of the book on “Buying Cars is Easy. Buying Cars is Fun” ended up being over 150 pages which led me to believe that the entire book would be entirely too long to put to paper. I considered doing a blog, but eventually settled on Medium as a publishing platform because it’s easy to use and allows me to share what I have learned freely and it will allow you, the reader, to provide me feedback along the way.
I hope that works for you.
One warning: because a lot of this book is about my experience and the experiences of other collectors that I know personally there is definitely a bias. My own collection, as I mentioned, is really mostly European sports cars — Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, and a lot of Porsche. Because of that many of my anecdotes and suggestions are based on that type of car and less so on, say, American muscle cars, pre-war collector cars, or oddball European collectables. But please don’t let that dissuade you from continuing to read; as I wrote The Car Collector’s Handbook I tested the idea that my experiences transcend the exact makes and models I owned and were applicable to car collecting broadly and in every instance the information seemed applicable and useful. Hopefully you will find that to be the case.
Next up, an overview of the types of car collectors I have interviewed for this work.
