Speedy Hire Brand Guidelines: A 1977 Wigan Branch, Allen Group & the ProService Deal

A finance director’s side venture that took over its parent.

Speedy Hire began with a single hire branch in Wigan in 1977. TheBusinessDesk reported in February 2009 that John Brown set up that first branch while he was finance director of its parent company, the Allen Group, and that he later became chief executive of the group, which listed on the stock market and rebranded under the Speedy Hire name. That year he received a lifetime achievement award at the North West Finance Director of the Year Awards, the same report said.

English Wikipedia describes the business as founded by Brown as a division of Allen Group plc and dates its first listing on the London Stock Exchange to October 1993. The company still gives 1977 as its founding year in the notes to its results statements.

From that start in Lancashire the company grew into a tool and equipment hire network across the United Kingdom and Ireland. Its audited results statement of June 2026 says the group operates from 128 service centres and on-site locations across the two countries, and through a joint venture in Kazakhstan. The registered office named in that statement is at Newton-le-Willows, in Merseyside.

Speedy also worked further afield for a time. International Rental News reported in March 2021 that the company had worked with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company since 2012, and that it was leaving the Middle East by selling its fleet there to ADNOC Logistics and Services, with up to 600 staff transferring to ADNOC. The same report said the Kazakhstan joint venture would carry on, and the 2026 results statement still lists it.

What the company hires out is broad. Speedy says it carries over 2,200 product lines covering tools, access, power and battery storage, lifting, survey, welding and plant, and it adds testing, inspection and certification through its Lloyds British business, along with accredited training courses.

Velocity, a new website and 25,000 Hilti tools.

The company’s current plan has a name: Velocity. In its June 2026 results Speedy describes Velocity as a growth strategy in two phases running to March 2028 — an “Enable” phase, which it says it completed in the year to March 2026, and a “Deliver” phase that follows. During the first phase, the company says, it rolled out customer relationship management, customer service workflows, transport and logistics planning, new telephony and engineering platforms, and a new trading website.

The same statement records the less visible side of that work. It describes depot closures and management restructuring, including the closure of eight depots, and the sale in August 2025 of the manufacturing division of Lloyds British. The testing, inspection and certification side of Lloyds British stayed in the group and was restructured under new management, the company says.

Fleet is the other half of any hire brand, and Speedy’s recent fleet news has been about one supplier. In September 2026 The Construction Index reported that Speedy had agreed to buy 25,000 Hilti assets under a rolling five-year agreement, calling it one of the company’s largest investments in tools. The deal covers more than 60 Hilti product lines, including the Nuron cordless battery platform, with repairs handled at Hilti’s repair centre in Glasgow, the paper said; a Hilti sales director called it “a landmark agreement.” The agreement also gives Speedy’s customers access to Hilti’s fleet management programme, the paper added.

Speedy’s own pages describe the culture it wants its people to show: bravery, room for ideas, belonging, shared responsibility, a sense of family and doing the right thing. Those are the company’s words rather than an outside assessment, but they show the tone it sets for staff and customers alike.

How hire companies present themselves.

Equipment rental and hire companies sell access rather than ownership, so their public identity is spread across depots, machines, vans and screens. This guide looks at the places where those identities appear as the companies publish them: photographs of depots and fleets, livery colours on machines and vans, online hire catalogues and apps, and the corporate pages that describe branches, listings and owners. No product or mark of any company is reproduced.

Much of the business has moved online. Sunbelt Rentals launched a mobile app in March 2022 that lets customers find, reserve and manage equipment and view invoices, the company said at the time. United Rentals added Equipment Fit, an augmented-reality feature for placing 3D models of machines on a jobsite, in August 2025, and an AI-based Equipment Agent for choosing equipment in March 2026, according to its own announcements. Sunbelt Rentals’ own website lists more than 14,000 product types, sorted into groups such as aerial work platforms, compaction and concrete equipment.

Corporate pages tell a different story: depots, listings and owners. Branch counts are a common headline figure, and they change with each takeover, so this guide gives them only as dated sources state them. Ownership changes are frequent too. In February 2025, Transport Topics reported that Herc Rentals had outbid United Rentals for H&E Equipment Services, and in March 2026 Sunbelt Rentals moved its primary listing from London to the New York Stock Exchange, the company said.

Each guide that follows sets out who founded the company, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Rental prices, fleet values and revenue are left out throughout.

From rival to supplier.

The biggest recent change came through a former rival. On 6 October 2025, The Construction Index reported, HSS Hire Group signed a five-year commercial supply agreement under which Speedy would replace HSS’s own hire business as the equipment supplier for customers of HSS ProService, the online marketplace HSS had built. Speedy also agreed to buy HSS hire assets, including equipment and depot leases, and to take a 9.99% stake in ProService; around 100 employees were to move from Speedy to ProService and 300 from HSS’s hire business to Speedy. HSS’s branch network went separately to the private equity firm Endless.

The Competition and Markets Authority cleared the arrangement in November 2025, Construction Wave reported, and the agreement started on 18 November. Speedy’s June 2026 results announced the completion of what it calls the ProService Transaction, which gives it a right of first refusal to supply ProService with core hire equipment and, through Lloyds British, testing, inspection and certification services. The two companies, long rivals in UK tool hire, now work as supplier and marketplace.

For a design guide, Speedy Hire shows how a hire brand rests on a plain name, a branch network and a long catalogue — and how it can also live inside another company’s digital storefront. Compare HSS Hire, its partner in the ProService deal, and Sunbelt Rentals, the name that replaced A-Plant in Britain in 2020, according to The Construction Index. For this guide we use an ink blue, graphite and a signal yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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