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Personality Hon. Bria of the Week
Page 60
Page 61
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iordon Rootes
HERE is the portrait of a salesman--a salesman born and bred. Remembering, as I do, Lord Rootes'
impact on Press conferences at home and overseas —persuasive, aggressive, bonhomous—I had no difficulty at all in recognizing his son. The physical appearance is there, and the personality, too.
Well, what makes a salesman? So far as commercial vehicles are concerned, knowledge of the 'road transport industry. and what makes a truck work—that certainly; a sound command of languages when overseas markets are to be persuaded; a tough physique; an ingenious mind, quick to think up gimmicks and stratagems; and, of course, an attractive personality and a natural gaiety, without which. senior British salesmen representing their firms in foreign parts may be, and often are, regarded as stuffed shirts, as stiff-upper-lipped gentlemen whose minds forever brood on the British empire of yesterday—that Empire on which the sun never sets.
At 42 Brian Rootes, who possesses each of these qualifications, has been a salesman for 26 years. When he left Harrow at 17 he was literally chucked right into the heart of the riper foreign field to develop his inherited flair and find out what it was like to try to project his company's image to people who had no particular enthusiasm for, though probably no special dislike of, the Rootes name. His prentice hand, that is to say, was tried in South America, in Argentina and Uruguay where Britain's prewar reputation stood pretty high, and in Brazil, where, in certain influential circles, Germany was taken as the Grand Exemplar.
"Grew Up" I do not doubt that this experience hastened his cosmopolitanism to a degree and with a rapidity much greater than travels in Europe could have done. When Europeans cross the South Atlantic they seem to undergo a mystical change. In that exotic atmosphere the strong plant of oldworld sophistication is apt to flourish mightily and blossom lushly.
Abandoning temporarily the delights of Rio. Montevideo and Buenos Aires, young Brian returned to treadanother hard, but essential mill. Donning overalls at the SunbeamTalbot factory. in London's North Kensington he set about the job of learning the technical side of the industry— experience part of his war service helped him to expand, for he was to become a cavalry major working on testing and research connected with fighting vehicles.
Into the Fray
Looking around British overseas markets today, one is irresistibly reminded of 1946 and 1947, Government then, as now, exhorting us to export or die and telling us what fun it all was. Rootes senior leapt into the fray with a keen appetite for it. The country needed dollars? So did he— so did every major manufacturer in the land. With an inspiring vigour he set about selling British cars in the United States at a time when many Americans were surprised to hear that the British had .advanced so far as to make internal combustion engines at all. To Brian fell the role of general in the field His was the task of building up a sales and service organization to.cover the entire North American continent.
So it was that in 1948 he came upon the American scene to pit his skill and wits against people who had persuaded the world of their pre-eminence in manufacture, publicity and salesmanship. His H.Q. was an unpretentious office
from which he untiringly forayed over the length and breadth of the land. Days and nights were spent in cars, aircraft and railway trains. Surprised dealers were treated to visits from this ex-cavalry major whose line of talk matched that of top salesmen from Detroit.
During his first five years he flew half a million nVes and the Rootes dollar take grew apace. By 1953 he had created an organization of 800 dealers with parts depots at principal strategic points and elegant headquarters in New York. Now the Group was exporting 75 per cent. of its production
.and, of that, one-quarter was being absorbed in United States markets.
But Central America was a dollar area, too. So from Mexico to Panama, from Venezuela to Cuba, Haiti and Puerto Rico flew Brian Rootes again and yet again. Each country presented peculiar problems, some of them entirely different from those encountered up north. Mexico, for instance, clapped a complete embargo on imports of British 'cars. Not one vehicle was permitted to cross the border commercially and the Rootes Group's plan to assemble their products with local labour seemed doomed to frustration,
Mexican authorities were, therefore, surprised to see him arrive among them in a Hillman—surpriSed and impressed. For jumping into a Minx in New York he drove the 3,000 miles to Mexico in five days and crossed the border as a tourist. The journey was worth while—the authorities were persuaded to consider the Rootes scheme and ultimately the assembly plant became a going concern.
On another occasion, discovering that a pippin-red shade of lipstick, was a firm favourite among colour-conscious American women, he suggested that Rootes cars for America should be exported in the same shade. Pippin-red cars became best sellers in dollar countries!
_He emphasized to me the importance he attaches to technically qualified commercial-vehicle salesmen. "You've got to convince potential buyers that your trucks will do the job better than any others, so you must know the vehicle inside out and appreciate fundamentally the problems the prospective user has to solve. Slick talking is of no avail against hard economic realities."
He is sure his linguistic attainments are an enormous help, too. They will prove to be even more so in the future, for he has his eye firmly fixed on Europe and remains undaunted by the tough competition that Rootes must face in the Common Market (which he regards as an inevitable development).
listed a tough physique as among the leading desiderata for overseas salesmen of commercial vehicles. Who can doubt that he enjoys just that? He denies that travel in modern jets is 'fatiguing. It depend, I say. You have to be fit to keep at it, and the nearer 'you are to 44 the better. He is fit and 44 and his 100,000 miles or so of air travel each year leave no mark upon him. 1-1.C.