Thirty Years in the Computer Trade

How It Started

Between 1983 and 1986, David took a management course and became close to its director, Bill Agnew. Having gained a marketing qualification — and finding himself the only person in his employer with one — he quickly discovered that being visibly more qualified than your colleagues is not always the route to the job you want. The marketing role went elsewhere.

He asked Bill what he should do to make use of what he had learned. Bill's answer was straightforward: start your own business. David did exactly that. On 1 December 1986, Computer Maintenance Management was born. It turned out to be good advice. The business ran for thirty-two years.

Computer Maintenance Management

On 1 December 1986, David Partridge started a sole trader business called Computer Maintenance Management — CMM. The intention was computer maintenance, but the market had other ideas. It became a brokerage: buying and selling second-hand computer equipment, at a time when the second-hand computer market was substantial, serious, and largely invisible to the public.

Over more than three decades, CMM operated first as a sole trader and later through CMM Brokers International Limited (incorporated November 2005, dissolved June 2023). The business took David across the country — to data centres, government disposal sales, corporate clearances — wherever equipment of value was moving on.

The Trade

Second-hand computer equipment in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s was a different world from today's commodity hardware market. Mainframes, servers, and specialist equipment retained real value and moved through brokers who knew what they were looking at. David was one of those brokers.

Among the more memorable acquisitions: half of HM Revenue and Customs' VAT processing machine from Shoeburyness — the kind of deal that required knowing what you were buying, where it had come from, and what it was worth to someone who needed it.

The business was essentially a one-man operation for its entire life. No large team, no outside investment — daily self-motivation for over thirty years, which David regards as good training for everything that came after.

Diversification into Property

Alongside the brokerage, David began acquiring and developing property in Bridport. The two activities ran in parallel for many years before property became the primary focus.

A Reed Bending in the Water

Some people will tell you to have an idea and stick to it. That was not the approach here. The practice was to do whatever it took, whenever it took it — which meant buying equipment nobody else was buying and making a market for it rather than following one that already existed.

At one stage the business was doing more turnover with the United States than with the UK. That was not a plan. It was the result of going where the opportunity was, without insisting that the opportunity conform to expectations.

A reed bending in the water is a suitable metaphor. Flexibility is not weakness — it is how you stay upright when the current changes. It is also, David would say, what ADHD looks like when it is working in your favour rather than against you.

Why It Ended

By September 2018 the brokerage had run its course. The market had changed fundamentally. Online platforms had commoditised the trade, removing the expertise premium that had made it viable. GDPR introduced compliance burdens that made handling data-bearing equipment more onerous. And the travelling — which had always been part of the work — stopped producing results worth the effort.

Thirty-two years is a good run for any business. The brokerage paid for itself, funded property acquisitions, and taught David that the best businesses are ones where you know something other people don't. That lesson transferred directly to property — and to everything else that followed.