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Crosshire
Executive Hire News, November 2009 Go to main Crosshire page
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There can be little doubt that, for many businesses, the past 15 months have seen some of the worst moments that most of us have ever experienced. Many painful decisions have been made, but it is heartening that harassed management teams have often been helped by staff anxious to make a positive contribution to their own survival.
I am hearing of cautious recovery in small and medium-sized locations all over the country. As a consequence of limited budgets, it is no surprise to see that some are returning to their roots and concentrating on hiring small tools and non-mechanical equipment supported by high margin consumable sales. Cash customers (remember them?) are being pursued and a lot of you have realised that run-of-the-mill small plant, such as dumpers and rollers, are vulnerable to aggressive pricing from big fleet holders. Moving up in inventory size does not necessarily equate with increased profits.
It has often been said that the defining line between tool and equipment hire and our bigger cousins in plant hire is the ability to transport an item on a non-HGV vehicle. This yardstick is certainly relevant, but, perhaps, the more common items of small plant are better left to the large fleets. Innovative hirers recognise that scarce capital is best spent on specialist equipment that requires the sort of personal support that we offer.
This industry has achieved maturity and is out there in every town and city throughout the UK and Ireland, ready to provide a real service by offering an increasing range of specialist portable equipment as diverse as breathing apparatus, rubble crushers or vegetation shredders!
Tool hire emerged as a separate business sector in the early 1970s and developed through exciting years of growth in the 1980s and 1990s. This magazine, still affectionately known by most as Hire News, has commented and supported you all throughout.
I have had the privilege of writing for this and other journals over that time and now, on your behalf, I will remind our publisher that EHN is the premier and most respected publication for the Tool and Equipment Hire sector. I make this statement because, as you now know, the publishers of EHN have recently acquired Plant Hire Executive. PHE was a good journal; it had a very knowledgeable and respected editor who knew his heavy metal inside out. Unfortunately PHE was a victim of the current emergency.
We all enjoy EHN because our colleagues in the supply chain, the manufacturers and consumable suppliers, believe in the integrity of this magazine and its ability to offer factual comment and opinion rather than the regurgitated press releases proffered elsewhere. I have little doubt that the main benefit from this deal is the attraction of bolting the PHE mailing list to the current EHN circulation, thus giving potential advertisers a bigger window.
There can be nothing wrong with that but, exercising the editorial independence that our publisher has always given me, on your behalf, I would urge great caution in attempting to increase the ‘plant’ content of EHN.
Our roots are tool hire, plain and simple. It represents a very large and growing market sector. I accept that the edges have become blurred, more so now than ever. We need a voice, the same voice that has served us since Bryan Shannon and the late Tom Togher founded this journal in the early 1970s. I urge our publisher to continue to support us. I hope that increased advertising will flow from the acquisition of PHE and new readers will benefit from exposure to the premier magazine for the Tool Hire and Small Equipment Industry. I am sure we all recognise that our partnership with suppliers is entwined with the future of EHN. It is time to keep the faith and that is a two way bargain.
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