SWAINSBORO, Ga. -

Kelvin Thompson will have owned Perry’s Auto Auction — the oldest continuously running operation in Georgia — for five years as of August. It’s such an achievement that CNBC sought out Thompson to share his story of diving into a new industry without any previous wholesale experience just before the deepest recession in recent memory.

Auto Remarketing reached out to Thompson Wednesday afternoon, a few hours before he and Perry’s AA were to be featured on CNBC’s news program, Getting Back to Business. Thompson possessed more than 25 years of corporate executive experience in the technology sector before acquiring the auction located about 175 miles southeast of Atlanta.

He acknowledged that switching from processes at his most recent stop with Hewlett-Packard to coordinating efforts to land accounts with corporate fleets and national lenders, as well as cultivate relationships with dealers, wasn’t easy.

“Are there challenges? There certainly are. I wouldn’t say there are any regrets. I think there have been valuable lessons,” Thompson said.

“Probably the biggest one has been that in any business there are lots of things beyond your control. Even with all the due diligence I did, I couldn’t have anticipated what happened with the economy in ’08 and ’09,” he continued. “Between Detroit and Wall Street, the housing crunch, the debt crisis, the credit crisis, for us to be here today and still be able to offer wholesale vehicle auction services, I’m very proud of our staff and the jobs we created in an economically challenged community. We’ve introduced technology and innovation.

"I’m bullish on the future. There are still challenges there every day, but I wake up every day ready to tackle those challenges," Thompson went on to say.

That’s the sentiment he also shared during the CNBC program. Thompson is associated with Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute; a small business enhancement entity he said tipped the network about his venture into the auction world.

Thompson told both the network and Auto Remarketing about how he embraced technology, switching gears from strategy he might have used at places such as Hewlett-Packard to figuring out ways to get vehicles up online. When he acquired the auction in 2007, one of the first steps Thompson took was to install entirely new software system. Now Perry’s AA is associated with OVE.com, SmartAuction and AutoIMS to showcase inventory from outlets such as Enterprise and BB&T.

“As an independent auction, I embraced OVE, SmartAuction, AutoIMS. I embraced a lot of those platforms right off the bat once I saw what the platforms were,” Thompson stated. “I very much understood just from my initial industry education that the industry is changing and evolving from just pure brick and mortar to virtual transactions. Even though we’re primarily wholesale and B-to-B, a lot of the technologies and applications in the B-to-C world are bleeding over to the B-to-B world.”

On a 15-acre site with room for about 800 vehicles, Thompson is eager to experience the next five years overseeing Perry’s AA.

“I’m better than I was a year ago,” Thompson insisted. “I’m really optimistic of the future, but it’s taken a lot of work since I’m new to the industry. I’ve had to build the relationships and establish a footprint with dealers in the local community as well as some of the fleet accounts I might have been pursuing or landed.

“I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel but all of that takes work,” he concluded.