The Auctioneer

Turgeon says that auctions are useful to find out what's going on in the market.

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Spectacular. It’s the only word that can sum up the scene as the unitiated walks into the auction hall.

Bidders sit in rows and the callers stand on stage rattling numbers off as digital counters tick upwards. Behind them there’s a massive open vista to hundreds of machines all neatly fixed into rows that trail to the horizon.

When the time is right giant excavators and cranes roll from stage-right to left like elephants in a Cecile B De Mille epic. Part cackling cattle market, part golden age cinema; the noise in the hall is deafening, the view mind boggling and in technicolour.

The greatest show on earth needs a ring master and today it’s Guylain Turgeon, the managing director of Ritchie Bros. for the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) region. However the star of the show doesn’t seem to have made his curtain call when PMV arrives on the scene. That is until there’s a tug on the shirt.

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“I think that’s the guy you’re here to interview,” someone says pointing to the stage. Of the four callers standing up front, one is spitting numbers like a tommy gun. “That’s your guy.”

Within minutes of the bid session ending, Turgeon is sitting in an office up in the rafters overlooking the auction hall. Despite what seemed like a frantic start to his afternoon he sits looking relaxed.

Thankfully, his speech is considerably many times slower than the moments before.

“I was scheduled for four shifts today and I’ve done three already,” he says and then looks down onto the hall below, “but it looks like I won’t have to do the last one.”

It’s quickly apparent that Turgeon has an enduring and almost lifelong love of the auction business.

“I’ve been in this business since a very young age,” he explains. “My father used to bring me to auctions when I six or seven years old. Today I saw a boy walking around. It reminded me of when my father used to drag me around sites like this. It used to be me as a young boy jumping all over the machines. You can say auctions are in my blood.”

Despite his early exposure to the industry, he didn’t go straight into the auction business.