From rural Victoria to Bosch globetrotter
Growing up on a farm near Warracknabeal in rural Victoria, Geoff Liersch could never have dreamed up the exciting future that lay ahead. Little did he know that one day he would have a career spanning two decades with Bosch, and that he would live and work in four different countries abroad.
As a little boy, Geoff was always interested in building things. He would tinker with mechanical projects like go-karts in the shed, and as the years passed, his interests turned to electronics. “I enjoyed pulling things apart and trying to figure out how they worked,” he recalls.
After school, Geoff did a double degree in Computer Science (Honours) and Electronic Engineering. He worked in the automotive industry for 10 years, before joining Bosch in 2005.
After a couple of years working in the Body Electronics Group in Clayton as a commercial manager and a project manager, Geoff was offered a manufacturing coordination role in Leonburg, Germany, at the Body Electronics headquarters. He leapt at the chance and relocated with his wife and four children (who were all aged 6 years and under at the time) to Europe.
While there, an opportunity arose to start up a new Body Electronics Group in the Bosch UAES joint venture in China. Geoff stepped up, moved to China with his family and spearheaded the project, building it up from a single-person gig to an engineering and manufacturing team of more than 200 employees.
“It’s not often you get to start with nothing and choose the people, the technology and build up the Group,” he says. “That was one of my career highlights.”
From there, Geoff came back to Australia in 2012 and was appointed Vice President of Automotive Electronics, responsible for the Body Electronics Development Group in Australia and for diode manufacturing. In late 2013, a serendipitous encounter with a Bosch Human Resources Manager in Germany again changed the course of his career.
“As I was leaving their office, they said, ‘what do you do for fun’?” says Geoff. “My response was, ‘I like riding motorcycles in Australia’. I started riding motorcycles when I was about five years old, simply because you had to get from one end of our 3000 acre farm to the other and I’ve ridden all my life. It just so happened that he was the guy who was tasked with finding a person to start up the Two-wheeler and Powersports division within Bosch.”
Just like that, Geoff was chosen for the job and was off again on another adventure, this time to Yokohama, Japan. Again, he had to start from scratch, building up the Two-wheeler and Powersports Group on a global scale. It ended up being a huge success – one with a €600 million turnover per year (that’s on track to become €1 billion in 2026-27).
“To have the opportunity to mix something I enjoy doing privately – riding motorcycles – together with the technology side, which I obviously like, in a start-up situation, was one area that I really enjoyed and still enjoy today,” Geoff says.
Last year, after almost 10 years in Japan, Geoff and his family relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As the President of the Two-wheeler and Powersports unit and head of Engineering globally, Geoff is still as passionate about his work as when he first started out.
“It’s still a really, really interesting business playing with all of the technology that Bosch has to offer,” he says. “I love taking technology and solving problems which are useful for the end consumer.”
Reflecting on his illustrious career with Bosch, which is coming up to 20 years in 2025, Geoff says he never really planned any of it, he just seized opportunities along the way. His advice to others was to do the same.
“The opportunities will come. You need to prepare yourself with the capability. Be interested in stuff. Fix things that are broken. And when the opportunity comes, grab hold of it,” he says.
“People believe careers are something that someone else should do for them. For me, careers are something that you should do for yourself. Part of that is sometimes jumping out of the comfort zone, going overseas or taking a different position that is not where your comfort lies.”
