That is me doing hands-on traing... there are hundreds of pictures like that on the MOL forum.
I actually pushed Meguiar's management for almost 2 years to bring up a forum and it started with explaining to management what a forum was. I even made a power point presentation to explain the difference between a discussion forum and a chat room as they kept calling a forum a chat room.
It was Atticus Firey that finally gave me permission to spend the money to purchase a vBulletin License for Meguiar's Online because he noticed I was posting all my detailing work to ShowCarGarage.com He asked me one day,
Why are you always posting your detail work to your "website" and not Meguiar's?
I explained the website I was posting to was a "Discussion Forum", the thing I've been trying to get you and the rest of management to understand.
He said, this is what a forum is?
He was pointing to a color print out of a 1954 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 that I buffed out and posted to ShowCarGarage and then printed out and placed into his in-box.
I said, yes
And then he said, make it happen
And MOL went live on Jan 24th, 2004, 12:34 PM as that's the time stamp on the first thread on the forum. That would be thread #5 because I deleted threads #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5 as they all said, "test" as I was testing out the functionality of the forum after created the forum groups.
I wrote the concept paper for NXT Tech Wax and only Atticus and two other people at Meguiar's ever gave me credit for the idea. #### Koeth is one of the guys and I'm sad to say he passed away recently. #### Koeth was a professional copywriter and when I was the "Corporate Writer" for Meguiar's he taught me a lot about writing and always helped me to improve my style.
NXT whether you like it or not was introduced in January of 2004 and by August of 2004, that's 8 months it went from a brand new car wax on the market to the number one selling car wax in America. No car wax had ever seen that kind of success in the history of new product introductions.
It was to compete against Zaino and through it Sal Zaino and I became very good friends.
I also started their classes coordinated via discussion forums with the first class taught on July 31st in 2002 coordinated via the Mercedesshop.com discussion forum.
Then started the TNOGs which actually started out on Wednesday nights and then I moved them to Thursday nights.
I also started their Extreme Makeover classes and the Roadshow classes.
When I left I presented Barry Meguiar with a list of 12 of my best contributions to Meguiar's in the 11 years I worked for them and the Meguiar's Online Discussion Forum and the Classes coordinated via the forum were what I think were some of my best contributions to Meguiar's continued success.
They are a great company and have done a lot for the car hobby in general and the detailing industry in specific and like Autogeek they hire best-in-class people to run their business.
Just a little behind the scenes history...
