Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin H
The author says "Bristol's attitude to customers was sometimes amusingly anachronistic in Tony Crook's era", as though this was a positive trait. In my opinion if probably contributed to their demise.
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Kevin,
While I acknowledge your views on Bristol in an attempt to point out over the years that the King has no clothes, I would say it was mortality not attitude that got Bristol to where it is today... which BTW is technically not in demise, but transition.
Mr. Crook realised his daughter had no interest in taking over the company, thus he needed a succession plan. If Mr. Crook had been immortal, I believe he could and would have kept the company running with the minimum and least expensive variations required to keep the doors open. While the 1950's style showroom was eccentric, it also was cheap. It did not cost much since all the furnishings had been amortised back when we were in primary school. When he was forced to create a web site, it looks like he hired a college student and paid chips for it. It took the company years even to accept credit cards. As long as customers bought parts, needed service and a very few of them kept buying new cars (perhaps as few as one or two a month), he was able to keep his low-budget business operating. Far from the typical service centre of a Mercedes dealership, his shop looked like a dark and dusty grease-monkey shop, but the staff kept the cars running and their knowledge-base (as opposed to a computer database) in their heads was huge. Compared to the competition, the prices of parts was fair and they stock them far longer than the statutory 10 years.
Bristol's attitude toward customers worked because Bristol was a custom-build shop - they did not need to be nice to customers because they never built to sell, rather they sold prior to build. Mr. Crook had the luxury of being brusque because his business plan did not include "the customer is always right" or "the customer is number one". Rather in his world, the car was number one, and it did not have to be a car that competed with other cars (which is why he also did not need car magazine journalists). Number one did not mean what it does to you, but what it meant to those few, exclusive people who parted with six figure cheques in his shabby showroom. Even the Richard Levine comment makes sense in the context of that business plan. I would love to have taken a Bristol for a test drive when I visited Mr. Crook, but I would not have been a serious prospect as a buyer. Crook did not include a demonstrator in his portfolio; that too was part of his business plan. Obviously, enough new car customers were willing to accept this or Mr. Crook had sufficient discernment to know when to offer a drive in whatever was his company car for the moment. While Mr. Crook's business seemed to be contracting every year, I tend to suspect it avoided debt. If sales became sparse, it simply did not matter, except that the resale value of the company kept getting smaller. Because the car was number one, not the brand, Crook probably turned down brand-offers that would have made him and his daughter comfortable. He was Bristol and Bristol was him. In this world of everything monetised, frankly I admired that. It's just this inconvenient mortality that gets in the way. Imagine what would have happened if the CEO and chief salesman appears before that nice young judge who takes his driver license away because he is deemed to old and frail to drive any more. Age caught up with him as it does to all mortals who live a full life.
When Mr. Silverton came in, it seems to me, if we judge it on the face, he failed to understand that Mr. Crook actually had a sound business plan; thus Mr. Silverton sought to turn BCL into a more conventional car business. That proved fatal. He used debt. That suggests he used projections of ROI on a spreadsheet. He spent more money making the web site look good, hiring
PR types and that not insignificant new capital investment of designing a whole new super-car from scratch. Of course, alternatively, it could be that Mr. Silverton had a sound business plan that included forced administration, where the investors would take a haircut if the sales did not hit the spreadsheet projections. The only fly in that plan, if it existed, would be that it did not count on a competitive bid trumping him.
In any case, the company is not in nor ever has been demise (even if it did come close), Mr. Crook is now in retirement, and it is beginning to sound like Mr. Silverton may stay on for a while. If funds allow it, I would love to have my 411 converted to electric motors, especially if I can sell my freshly rebuilt 400 w 383 heads for a pretty penny.
Claude