Big shot of the week
BARELY a year ago, Phil Bentley was roasting his tootsies in the Florida sunshine. As boss of Caribbean-focused telecoms firm Cable & Wireless, life wasn’t half bad. Head office in Miami. A bit of midweek island-hopping around Barbados, St Lucia and the Bahamas.
Not many out there would willingly swap it for an insalubrious business park just outside Bristol to work for unloved mop-’n’-bucket outsourcers Mitie.
Bentley took the chief executive job at Christmas, succeeding Baroness McGregor- Smith, the redoubtable, though – shall we say – testy, mother of two whose relationship with the City earned her the sobriquet ‘The Prickly Peer’.
While yet to acquire such labels, Bentley’s manner is no less forthright. Brash and cocksure with a toothy grin, residents of his native Bradford would describe him as a type not to ‘soofer’ fools.
He certainly doesn’t like us hacks much. His tetchiness was forged from a lively stint as managing director of British Gas, a role which cast him as the poster boy for everything that was wrong with our much-loathed energy sector.
RISING energy prices against bumper profits made him an habitue of front-page newspaper splashes, none of them complimentary. His endless tours of news studios to face down brickbats were legendary, even once agreeing to be mauled by Newsnight rottweiler Jeremy Paxman.
The man has submitted himself to more voluntary beatings than Max Mosley.
But then our Phil is not lacking in the self- confidence department. After taking up the cudgels at Mitie, he backed himself to the tune of £3.6m, acquiring 1.9m shares. The gamble has paid off.
Shares in the company leapt 13pc this week, despite announcing losses of £43m last year – and earning him more than £600,000.
Mind you, the Bentley finances were already in pretty rude health.
He earned £10.2m when Cable & Wireless was sold to US media tycoon John Malone last May. When he walked away from British Gas, he reportedly pocketed £13m, though he dismisses the figure.
And while his deal at Mitie remains undisclosed, it’s hard to imagine it would be any less than the £2.5m a year his predecessor trousered. Quite an improvement on his first job at BP, for which he was paid just £5,000 a year after joining its graduate recruitment scheme in 1982.
Fifteen subsequent years foraging for oil and gas took him around the world, living in China and Egypt and the US, before he departed for Diageo to become group treasurer.
After three years at the drinks giant, he accepted an opportunity to become group finance director of British Gas’s parent company Centrica, before being appointed managing director of British Gas in 2006.
HIS seven years there were not uneventful. Turnover increased by £ 3.9bn, but even he admits the job could be hellish at times.
As well as anger over price rises, the firm was rocked by customer services issues.
He hankered after the chief executive role at Centrica, but when chairman Sir Mike Rake let it be known he wasn’t going to get it, he headed for the Caribbean in 2013.
The idyllic set-up out there at Cable & Wireless wasn’t entirely straightforward. Wife Mhairi, whom he met in 1988 on the Brighton to London cycle ride, stayed at home in Teddington.
She has her own successful multinational marketing company, Brand Learning, plus their two children were starting university.
By the time the Mitie job came up he was not only ready for a new challenge but one which would keep him on these shores.
He’s an Englishman at heart, anyway. A big rugger fan, he cites former England captain Martin Johnson as one of the people he most admires – and maintains a season ticket to Harlequins.
He appears delighted to be back at the helm of a FTSE 250 firm, predicting this week, with trademark self-assurance, that it will return to a ‘modest growth’ in profits this year.
That’d give the old grafter an excuse to crack open the premier cru. Just don’t expect him to be pouring members of Her Majesty’s Press a glass.