With the easyToolhire franchise in place, all Martin Plant Hire depots are now dual branded. EASY DOES IT
Martin Plant Hire doesn't just have seven depots, it is the exclusive provider of easyToolhire services in Scotland. We met with MD Andy Martin to find out more.
A
ndy Martin has enjoyed a diverse career, having worked in a number of
advertising, marketing and medical sales roles before joining the family firm 27 years ago and taking the managerial reins a couple of years later. The company, as it now stands, employs 65 staff across depots in Ayr, Glasgow, Motherwell, Falkirk, Edinburgh, Kircaldy and Perth. It wasn’t always this size and shape, so where did it all start and how has it developed since?
“The company was set up by my father in 1974,” he begins. “He initially set up on the Queen’s Dock, which is now the site of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre. He had ten Stihl saws and too many vans to begin with, but he built it up from there. At one point we had 16 depots, but with the influx of the nationals we gradually cut down to the present size. Right now we have our seven outlets, with welding, lifting and concreting divisions, and we’re still here to fight another day.
“We used to be bigger and 90% of our business used to be collections. It’s the reverse now, and 90% of what we do today involves deliveries, so having lots of outlets
isn’t the way to go. Hire will always be a face-to face sort of business, particularly for trade clients. However, a lot of consumer retail is moving online and I think this will become increasingly important in hire.”
To this end, Andy not only has an attractive and functional website – which he’s still not quite happy with – but online sales already account for 10% of trade, Andy thinks this is just the tip of a lucrative iceberg, though.
“Martin Plant Hire is well known on a B2B basis, but less so by retail customers, and
this is why I started talking to ‘easy’ – everybody has heard of easyJet, so I thought it would be beneficial to have that branding.”
The ‘easy’ relationship means that Andy now presides over both the family-named company and the easyToolhire franchise for the whole of Scotland. As well as associating with a widely recognised brand, this brings benefits such as dynamic pricing, inventory management and the efforts of an undoubtedly huge marketing department. It also means that Andy will soon launch a new easy-designed credit checking facility that promises an end to GDPR issues.
“The technology they’ve developed is fantastic,” he says. “You just can’t photocopy somebody’s driving licence or passport and hold on to that sort of information anymore, so this system is kept in the cloud and we never even have to look at it. They process payments and everything is checked out for us. Basically, it takes human error out of the equation, it makes our jobs so much easier and I’m absolutely delighted with it.”
The man himself - Andy Martin Since easyToolhire is perhaps more suited to
10 Executive Hire News - June/July 2021
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