What I Look for in the First Two Hours Inside a Hire Business

Give me two hours inside a hire business and I’ll usually have a pretty good idea where some of the problems are.

Not because I’ve run a load of reports.

Not because I’ve sat in a meeting room looking at KPIs.

And definitely not because I’ve spent two hours staring at the software.

I watch what actually happens.

Having spent years working with hire businesses of all different sizes, I’ve found that you can learn an enormous amount just by sitting near the hire desk, walking through the yard and workshop, and listening to the conversations happening around you.

The reality of how a business operates is often quite different from the process written down on paper.

I start at the hire desk

The hire desk is probably one of the best places to understand a hire business.

What happens when the phone rings?

Can the person answering it quickly see what’s available? Can they give the customer a price with confidence? Can they see the customer’s history?

Or are they asking the person next to them, checking a spreadsheet, looking out of the window into the yard or calling someone else?

None of those things individually mean there is a problem.

But when every enquiry requires three conversations, two systems and somebody’s memory, you start to see where time is disappearing.

Then I look for the spreadsheets

I have nothing against spreadsheets.

But I’m always interested when I find one being used to manage something the main system should already know about.

Availability.

Transport.

Workshop jobs.

Equipment due back.

Damage.

Customer pricing.

Outstanding quotes.

Spreadsheets often tell a story.

Sometimes they’re genuinely the best tool for the job. Other times they’ve been created because somebody didn’t know the system could do something, didn’t trust it, or found the existing process too difficult.

And occasionally nobody knows who created the spreadsheet in the first place.

It’s just always been there.

That’s usually worth investigating.

I watch what happens when equipment comes back

This is one of my favourites.

A machine arriving back in the yard isn’t necessarily an available machine.

Does someone inspect it?

Is damage recorded?

Does it need cleaning?

Does it need servicing?

Does the system know where it is?

Most importantly, how long does it take before that equipment can earn money again?

I’ve seen equipment physically sitting in a yard while the system says it’s somewhere else. I’ve seen equipment marked as available when everyone in the branch knows it isn’t.

That’s when people stop trusting the system and start relying on what they can physically see.

Once that happens, you have a much bigger problem than a piece of equipment being in the wrong status.

I listen for names

There are certain sentences that always get my attention.

“Ask Dave, he’ll know.”

“Sarah normally does that.”

“Wait until John gets back.”

There’s nothing wrong with having experienced people who know the business inside out. They’re incredibly valuable.

The risk comes when a process only works because one particular person knows how to do it.

What happens when they’re on holiday?

What happens when they’re sick?

What happens when they leave?

If important parts of the business live inside someone’s head rather than inside a repeatable process, that’s something I want to understand.

I look at the workshop

The workshop can sometimes feel like a completely separate company.

The hire desk wants equipment available.

The workshop wants enough time to repair and service it properly.

Transport needs to know when it can move.

The customer wants it tomorrow morning.

And somehow all four need to be looking at the same information.

I want to understand how jobs get into the workshop, how they’re prioritised, how parts are managed and, crucially, how everyone else knows when a machine is ready.

If the answer is someone walking into the workshop and asking, there’s probably an opportunity to improve the process.

I look at the whiteboards

Never ignore the whiteboard.

Some of the most important information in a hire business can be written on one.

Tomorrow’s deliveries.

Equipment waiting for repair.

Customers to call.

Breakdowns.

Long term hires.

Problem jobs.

Again, a whiteboard isn’t automatically a bad thing. They’re visual, quick and incredibly useful.

But I always ask myself one question:

If somebody wiped this board clean tonight, what would the business lose tomorrow morning?

The answer can tell you a lot.

I watch how people use the system

I’m not particularly interested in whether someone clicks the “correct” button.

I’m interested in why they don’t.

If somebody has developed a ten step workaround, there’s normally a reason.

Maybe nobody showed them another way.

Maybe the process was designed years ago and the business has changed.

Maybe the system is configured badly.

Or maybe the software genuinely doesn’t do what the business needs.

You don’t find that out by telling someone they’re doing it wrong.

You find it out by asking:

“Why do you do it that way?”

That question has probably taught me more about hire businesses than any report ever has.

And finally, I watch the people

Processes matter.

Systems matter.

But ultimately, hire is still a people business.

I notice how the hire desk talks to the yard.

How the workshop talks to operations.

How managers react when someone raises a problem.

Whether people share information or protect it.

Whether staff feel comfortable saying, “This doesn’t work.”

Some of the best hire businesses I’ve visited aren’t the ones with the fanciest technology or the most complicated processes.

They’re the ones where people communicate.

Where everyone understands what happens next.

Where information is easy to find.

And where the system supports the business rather than becoming another job that needs managing.

Two hours won’t tell you everything

Of course it won’t.

Understanding a business properly takes time.

But those first couple of hours usually tell me where I want to start asking questions.

Because improving a hire business isn’t always about introducing something new.

Sometimes it’s about watching what’s already happening, understanding why it’s happening and asking a very simple question:

Is there a better way to do this?

That, for me, is where the interesting work starts.