Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark wins 2020 Autocar Awards Editor's Award

“Then we hadn’t adequately planned for the WLTP regulations,” he adds. “While we had done all the work on the engines and efficiencies, it all needed to be tested. We got caught up in the queue to do testing as we hadn’t booked the slots. We had the cars but no engines to put in them. It was truly, operationally… challenging. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was a self-made recession.”

Hallmark put Bentley into “keeping the lights on” mode while trying to improve production efficiency, the results six months later a staggering 23-24% improvement in both production lines and the paint and trim shops. Running alongside this was a cost control programme designed to cut overheads by 30%. It ran so deep as to save £1.2 million a year simply by reducing the number of disposable gloves used by production line workers and a further £1.8m in cleaning contracts by getting workers to clean their own stations at the end of the day.

Hallmark didn’t hold back in laying bare Bentley’s problems to its workforce. He addressed all staff no fewer than five times in 2018 to discuss the company’s predicament, but also to state how each employee could contribute to the cause, something each and every one bought into. “Nothing got out into the press,” says Hallmark. “I told them if they let it out of the company, it could be damaging, but I told them as I needed their help to fix it.”

And fix it they did: “Improving efficiency by 24% needs hearts and minds to agree to change everything they do in the factory. At the same time, 30% was being cut around them, without any trade union issues or employee relation issues, just total commitment to get it done. I’ve never seen a team pull together in unison the way this team did. It was truly inspirational and quite humbling.”

The effects were felt fast. In Bentley’s results from 2018 to 2019, there was a £300m swing from the red to the black and this was followed by a record first-quarter £54m profit in 2020 before the pandemic ground the business to a halt, more on which shortly.

While Bentley’s problems and potential did not come as a surprise to Hallmark on his return there (he was sales and marketing director at the company in the early 2000s when it launched the Continental GT), the extent of them soon did.

“Day one wasn’t so bad. It was about day 30 or 60 when the reality dawned,” Hallmark says. “Yet there was nothing I found when I came in that I didn’t expect, other than the scale and depth.

“I’d looked at the company from the outside. I’d been here before and it was close to my heart. We took the growth from 800 units to 10,000 and redefined the sector. Then they never did more than 11,000, even with an SUV. I couldn’t believe the relative under-performance of the brand. The Bentley Bentayga only really filled the gap of loss of the other models. So I was ambitious to see what Bentley could do. With a new product range, I knew there’d be stress but never thought there’d be so much to do at a basic level with the cars integrating into the production system.

“Apart from that, I was positively surprised by the massive leap in technology taken and the other changes around the company. The brand is in much better shape. The factory has had successive investment phases and there are some really fantastic facilities here.”

With the Continental GT and the GTC successfully launched, and the Flying Spur imminent, Hallmark addressed his 4200 employees in March this year to discuss the next phase for the company after its turnaround.

“We’d gone from the biggest loss in company history to best Q1 and were set up for a benchmark 2020,” he said. “All products new, quality best it’s ever been; an order bank of 8000 and we’ve only ever sold 11,000; productivity improved; costs under control for size of business planned. I said to the staff these next three years were a golden period for traditional business as we move to an electrified business… only an asteroid hit can stop us. How prophetic was that? And then an asteroid hit with Covid…”