EXECUTIVE REPORT
The company has nine depots throughout North East England.
Lord looks forward
Alan Guthrie fires off a series of questions to Carl Bartlett, General Manager of Newcastle-based Lord Hire Centres, the Winner of the 2018 Executive Hire Show Passionate Hirer Award (Multi-Depot Hire Centre category), about the company’s latest developments and wider industry issues.
Q. What did it mean to win the Passionate Hirer Award? A. It gave us a tremendous sense of achievement. The Awards ceremony during the Executive Hire Show Party at the Ricoh Arena is a prestigious event where you feel the whole industry is watching you. I think the Award raised our profile amongst our peers, and suppliers certainly recognise us more. I have to say it is the efforts of both our long-serving Hire Centre Managers and their teams for maintaining the highest industry standards and customer service levels which contributed to achieving such an accolade. We are proud to display copies of the Award on the walls within our Hire Centres, and we have made a lot of our success on social media. Overall it has created a great deal of interest.
“We are prepared to walk away from a deal if necessary”
Q. How are you continuing to develop the Lord operation? A. We were delighted to gain accreditation earlier this year to the revised ISO 9001:2015 quality standard, which places additional emphasis on risk management - everything from potential supply chain disruption to the impact of political events. We have compiled an extensive manual of procedures for each of our depots to consult, and it ensures operational consistency even if personnel move between locations. Having this accreditation makes it easier to complete tenders, streamlining much of the application process.
Q. Tell us about your commitment to staff training. A. Last year we achieved two staff training days each week, doubling our training target for the year with over 120 training days achieved by our 58 employees. That ranges from specific product training to general fire safety and first aid courses. We also have team members who are trained as banksmen - we receive regular deliveries of equipment by articulated lorry, which have to be supervised as they reverse safely into some of our yards. Overall, we have very little staff turnover, and several of us have 30 years’ service or more.
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Q. You’re also building a new website. Why’s that, when your previous one was already impressive? A. It’s not that we weren’t happy with the former version. The old one was good, but we are making it even better. This year we re-designed our printed catalogue with a fresher, modern look and the new website (
www.lordhire.co.uk) reflects that. Wherever practicable we have always aimed to include pictures of the real equipment in our fleet with our livery or decals, not just generic images, and the contents page even has emojis to quickly identify different product categories, which we have designed in-house. Pricing structures are laid out in a grid style that is easier to follow and, more importantly, the new site is built on an entirely different platform which enables us to add facilities for frequently asked questions, specialist information, product videos including working equipment demonstrations, safety advice and news bulletins, as well improving search engine optimisation and the overall user experience. Unfortunately we couldn’t achieve all of this with the old framework. We’re also about to start working on an improved version of our separate tool sales operation (
www.lordtools.co.uk).
Award Winners: Carl Bartlett, second from right with, from left, Lord’s Michael Baird, Ian Richardson and Malcolm Morris.
Q. What have you added to the hire fleet recently? A. We have just taken delivery of a considerable amount of Hilti equipment across many product categories, from cutting and drilling tools with dust extraction, to breakers and nail guns. We have also added Hilti’s rotating lasers, including models with green-beam for internal use, and others with red-beam for outdoor applications.
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