Ciaran Gillen

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Ciaran Gillen is an American entrepreneur. Ciaran started Machinery Partner in 2020.^[1]

Career

Early Career

No early career info added yet...

Machinery Partner

Ciaran started Machinery Partner in 2020. They detail the beginnings of their company in their Starter Story interview: ^[1]

Q: How did you get started on Machinery Partner?

I first got into the heavy equipment industry over 15 years ago during the last recession. I had been working in the hospitality sector but took a leap and ventured into recycling machinery.

I spent my first four to five years as a dealer in England for a German manufacturer. This is where I first started to realize the large service gap between dealers and customers. It was a bit of a drop-and-run scenario, where all of the focus was on the sale and none of it on aftercare.

After this, I transitioned into manufacturing with a company called Anaconda equipment. This allowed me to understand the market from their point of view and opened my eyes to the recruitment and onboarding process for dealers.

I started to see how unsophisticated things were across the whole industry. You would literally have sales guys just driving around looking for a site with machines on it in the hope of catching a lead.

At this point, I really wanted to prove that digitization could affect such a traditional industry. I had the idea that the people using the machines were the key to selling machines, and that we could still reach them as a manufacturer. I started to go after the end-users to recruit more dealers for Anaconda and ended up boosting our revenue by 47% in just 18 months with this tactic.

At this point, we ended up getting acquired by the McLanahan group, and I was offered a $250k salary to lead their digital marketing team, but I said no.

I had it in my head that there was a real opportunity to change how machines were sold.

After doing some more digging, a few very active Facebook groups gave me the confidence that there was an online opportunity for heavy machinery. I decided to leave the comfort of a full-time job and start Machinery Partner. We started to use these groups along with some targeted Facebook advertising to generate leads and sell machines. The rest is history!

I started to see how unsophisticated things were across the whole industry. You would literally have sales guys just driving around looking for a site with machines on it in the hope of catching a lead.

Source ^[1]

References

Contributors

Contributors to this article:

• Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story
• Wiki Updater