Job ahead: Robert McEniry with the 2006 US Galant. Digital image: Chris Harris. Below: Mr McEniry, former marketing director for Holden, with (from left) Barina, Nova, the then-secret Apollo, Commodore and Statesman in February 1993.
Robert McEniry is the right man to run Australia’s most vulnerable car-maker
By JOHN MELLOR 14 September 2005
A MAN who was being groomed for the top job at Holden has wound up running Mitsubishi Motors Australia after an international career at General Motors – fixing problems.
Robert McEniry has a history of rebuilding companies or parts of companies. In the past, he would have been referred to as a company doctor but in modern idiom his field is known as "executive interim management".
In fact, in his last assignment, which he is still completing, he had the choice of closing the company down or rebuilding it. He chose to rebuild.
He moves to take the helm at Mitsubishi Motors Australia at a time when the corporate ship has been righted and set on a course by incumbent CEO Tom Phillips.
Mr McEniry, who specialises in creating business platforms on which companies can recover and then grow, now has the task of making the Australian-made 380 large sedan a success in local and export markets and then secure a new product line to build in Adelaide.
His background would appear to have been preparing him for this key role in which many, especially in Adelaide, have a stake in his abilities.
Born in Bendigo, Mr McEniry was an avid car enthusiast by age 12 and a systems analyst in the very early days of computers. He has an MBA from the University of Melbourne and has studied business management in the United States and Switzerland.
He began his career at Holden in the mid-1970s as a zone manager for dealer business management and went on to run Holden’s then $40 million advertising and mechandising programs.
The then managing director, Chuck Chapman, who had made it his business to fix Holden’s legacy of woes, then threw Mr McEniry at the job of reorganising national parts distribution.
Holden had tried twice to streamline the excessive number of tiers within the operation and had failed.
Within 18 months, state parts distributors lost their monopoly on Holden parts.
Holden appointed around five wholesaling dealers in each capital city (including the former distributors) who distributed to smaller Holden dealers and the trade.
Mr McEniry said at the time that the key was to show the distributors that because of the privileged position they held they had allowed a huge amount of unnecessary cost to build up in their parts businesses.
They showed that under the new system, where they became one of about five in their city, they could achieve the same bottom line by becoming more efficient even though they were losing their effective monopoly.
Since the distributors were taking less fat out of the process, the dealers as a group were able to make more on their parts sales as well. Hand-in-hand with this change a new parts computer ordering system was installed.
Around that time he was called in as one of the key players in the team that was planning the financial restructuring of Holden.
The company was making massive losses from sales that were not able to sustain debt commitments largely from the lease of Holden’s Family II engine plant.
At that time it was decided that his sales and marketing and business background would be an important influence on the development of the VN Commodore, which was going to be a crucial car in Holden’s recovery.
He was appointed VL Commodore program manager to deal with all the departments involved in design and building the car with a specific charter to make sure the VN was something the dealers could sell.
By 1987 he took on the role of director of marketing – a title that took in the sales role as well.
Mr McEniry was passionate then, and still is, that channel policy and distribution are a part of marketing – not separate activities. He was keen to impress on all at Holden that within the business strategy of marketing you have to look at all the elements of the total activity from the factory door to the customer.
His view is that sales cannot be allowed to flog cars separately from the overall strategy for the brand. Sales must work in with brand image, dealer profitability, distribution profitability and resale value at the end for the buyers.
He therefore chose to drop sales from the title to make the point.
In that role he was instrumental in the creation of Holden Special Vehicles. He and Tom Walkinshaw signed the deal. He later did a similar deal with Walkinshaw at Saab.
To get the HSV budget approved at a time when Holden was on its uppers was a huge internal coup, but Chuck Chapman could see the huge marketing bonus it would bring and backed the deal.
Mr McEniry also ran the exorcising of Peter Brock from the Holden brand because of Brock’s insistence of selling the so-called polariser in Brock Commodores.
This box was supposed to capture unseen earth forces and improve performance and handling in the car.
Holden, for reasons of reputation and of trade practices, had to separate itself from the snake oil and Brock would not back down. The divorce was ugly.
Then came the UAAI (United Australian Automotive Industries) joint venture between Holden and Toyota in which both companies equally owned their Australian manufacturing facilities and shared the cars made in them.
Along with Bill Hamel (then Holden MD), Mr McEniry was one of two GM voting members on the UAAI board.
Ironically, Holden went into the UAAI as the weak partner. But strategies put in place by Holden teams directed by Chuck Chapman and Bill Hamel, in which Mr McEniry participated, saw Holden become the dominant partner and eventually call for the end of the arrangement.
Mr McEniry decided to expand his global experience. In 1993 he went to Saab, in which GM had just invested, as vice-president – commercial and marketing.
He instituted an arrangement where the development and manufacturing of each Saab platform was formed into a business unit with each business unit reporting to him.
This was a tough role because even though GM had management control it only had half a say in capital spending for increasing the product line.
He also found that Swedish management was very stubborn and simply wanted to keep doing more of the same.
There were significant disputes over the model range and especially a desire on the engineering side to cling to the formula of hatchback and sedan only. He managed to get them to build a wagon.
Mr McEniry was a key driver in the move away from the 900 and 500 model names and pushed for the 9-3 and 9-5 nomenclature to allow for an increase in the range.
He also found that many of Saab’s independent distributors around the world were running their own shows with their own agendas and that there was a lack of global focus on the brand. While the largest markets were already direct, they decided to go direct in most other significant markets.
He then moved to Detroit where the GM board was asking questions about why management did not know how much money they were making out of each model line. At the time, the money for all the models built at GM came out of the one bucket.
So GM decided to borrow from Toyota where Corolla, for example, was a business unit with its own design and management team that run the vehicle from start to finish. In this way they wanted to get more idea of which model lines were the most profitable.
This process led to the creation of vehicle line managers for each platform.
Mr McEniry was made the international vehicle line executive for large cars and luxury cars (rear-wheel drive) and worked on the process where the knowledge of various architectures used in GM large cars was made more accessible globally.
The various regions were more able to integrate the global architecture into future designs.
The forthcoming VE Commodore shares heavily in that international architecture that had its beginnings in that vehicle line executive initiative.
In 2000, Mr McEniry returned to Australia to enable his children to attend Australian schools and he was headhunted by Pacific Dunlop. GM was talking about sending him back overseas and the local job won out.
The idea was to create an automotive group with Repco, South Pacific Tyres and some other opportunities, but South Pacific turned out to be in such a bad state that it had to be restructured first.
As an example of the structural costs SPT was carrying at the time, it had five plants making a combined six million tyres a year. It now has two modernised plants making a combined 5.5 million tyres a year.
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