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EXECUTIVE REPORT


Smiths has invested significantly in eco-friendly delivery trucks.


Prepared to be different


Smiths Equipment Hire maintains remarkably high standards, having achieved a series of major industry awards. What is behind its success? Alan Guthrie talked to Joint MDs David and Thomas Smith, and Marketing Director David Turner at their Blackpool head office.


exercises. We also ensure our personnel have pleasant working environments to work in, which in turn has made the depots more appealing to customers.


Q. What developments have you made recently? A. We opened our twelfth depot in Leeds last year, which is performing very well, and have invested heavily in powered access with over 500 machines on fleet and growing. We have also taken our recruitment process in-house. We were using agencies who too often suggested wholly inappropriate candidates, so we have our own HR person now and the whole operation is much slicker. We advertise, scour job websites and recruitment listings ourselves and identify better quality people. It’s proving very successful. We are also employing more women at our depots.


From left: Thomas and David Smith, and David Turner at the Blackpool HQ.


Q. This year, you won the HAE SafeHire Plant, Tool & Equipment Hire Company of the Year Award for companies with a turnover of above £10m, having triumphed in the category below £10m in 2018. You also won our inaugural Passionate Hirer Award in 2008, and in 2016 received our Passionate Hirer 10/10 Award in the Multi-Depot Hire Company category, as the outstanding operation re-judged from all the previous Winners. How do you maintain this consistently high performance? A. We simply have a passion for hire, and everything we do aims to improve the customer service experience. When we won the 2008 Passionate Hirer Award, the lead judge, the late John Jennings, visited us and it was clear from his questions that he wanted to see if we had a commitment to hire that was as strong as that of great hiremen like him. We are constantly evolving and we are not afraid to change procedures, adopt new technology and to question the status quo of the organisation to make them even better.


Q. So what drives that passion? A. David and Thomas have both worked at Smiths for more than 30 years, so we can’t really compare ourselves against other hirers. We just do what we think will help the customer, and we still enjoy getting involved in hire transactions. All our staff can engage with us - and they basically know that, before they say no to any customer enquiry, they have to ring us for permission! We have regular ‘testing’ sessions where the Directors challenge the way we do things and see if we can do it better - they definitely aren’t backslapping


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Q. You are committed to new marketing initiatives. Tell us something about those. A. We have wholeheartedly embraced social media like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and we ensure all content is relevant, interesting and engaging. We run blogs that similarly have quality material including the right keywords, and we use SEO (search engine optimisation) and PPC (pay-per-click) techniques to come out on top in web searches. We invite customer feedback online and from within the depot environment, and also employ various more revolutionary marketing techniques to drive hires, but we can’t give too much away about those! We want to make it easy for people to find us and do business with us, and we have built up a strong,


Depots are bright and welcoming.


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