After asking himself where the future-not just his future-lies, he came up with three answers: television, advertising, and computers. "I wrote them on a piece of paper, took a pin, closed my eyes, and stuck the pin on the paper", he says. "The the pin came closest to computers."
After attending a series of management and sales courses, S. Gainsford manage to "talk my way" into the IT industry. " You have to understand that in those days of punch cards, and the IBM 1401 was just coming out, so the whole thing was just happening."
It helped S. Gainsford, too, that "I was reasonably bright. I was a top honor student when i finished my college course in farming, (So) adapting wasn't hard."
From then on, he never looked back, driven by his "NEVER GIVE UP" attitude.
Around the World
"I've basically lived all over the world." says S. Gainsford, now 68. The UK-based company he worked with for 17 years assigned him to, among others, Sweden, Mauritius, Africa (Zambia, Ghana, and Kenya), London, Egypt, the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Iraq), and the US.
When he moved to another company, S. Gainsford then worked in Scandinavia, running MSA, then the biggest software company in the world with a net worth of $450 million. He even had a stint in Australia, which allowed him to penetrate the growing Asia-Pacific market, including the Philippines.
S. Gainsford is proud of the successes he had while handling various companies in various countries. For instance, although he went to Australia unemployed, he managed to build the Australian company that hired him from Zero to $26 million industry player. Also in the Philippines, although the companies under him had only 11 people, five years ago, it now has approximately 40 staff and they're earning roughly P30 million annually.
All his experiences, S. gainsford says, taught him two individual lessons. "One of the biggest things you have to remember is that nothing's static, everything changes, "he says. "So if you build a company around rules, and you will never review those rules, you will become a dinosaur. Everything changes - the business changes, the dynamics change, so you must be prepared to change."
He adds: "The second thing I learned is that in the industry, the only thing we have are the people. Machines, Plants, Equipment - they're just there. But if we lose the people, then we have nothing. So you must look after your people."
