PERSONALITY PROFILE
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three years there he was asked to return to the service
department – this time nationally.
“It was while I was doing that job that I started developing
a training programme for all my service technicians. At
that time there was no training done at Cobra, and when
regional managers saw what I was doing they requested
that their service managers be allowed to sit in. From there
it expanded to training all internal staff and even merchants.
At that point, in 2006, the function had to be split and I took
over just the training.”
By this time, what had started as a ‘just a job’ had become
Gordon’s passion in life. The roots, he explains, had been
evident as far back as his first job in farming but it hadn’t
been allowed to flower until now. “In those early days, I
was interested in knowledge – but I depended on others to
give it to me and wasn’t yet the ‘source’ of it. I now had the
opportunity to become that ‘source’, and I enjoyed that. By
that I mean, I became the place where people would come to
source information.” Practically speaking when, say, a mining
client had a problem, he would come to Gordon to explain
how to put all the products together to develop a solution
that solved his plumbing problem.
“I was privileged to be part of Cobra’s Technical Department,
where I had a like-minded colleague in Martin Coetzee
(today retired, but part of Iopsa’s technical division) and we
had a lot of fun breaking down new prototype products from
R&D to see how they worked.”
Taking training to the country
Gordon ultimately took his passion for training wider than
Cobra, establishing with others a school training programme.
He explains that it isn’t widely known, but plumbing is an
available subject at school – not widely known nor enrolled
in because there was no training material for the subject. “I
was approached by a technical school in the Free State to
give them our training materials, because they’d heard about
August 2019 Volume 25 I Number 6
Lixil and the Dawn Group took over Cobra two years ago,
and Gordon’s position was clarified as Training and Category
Manager, with training consuming 80% of his time and
products the other 20%. “Now I was able to fully focus on
the products.”
Patrick Gordon, together with outgoing General Manager Chris Kyle.
www.plumbingafrica.co.za