Twelve months after HSS moved out of asset ownership and became a technology business, Tom Shorten, CEO of HSS ProService Marketplace talks about what changed on site, what he got wrong, and what it signals for construction supply.

In October 2025 HSS transferred 39 branches and 65 builder merchant outlets out of the group and rebranded as HSS ProService Marketplace: Europe’s largest digital marketplace that owns no equipment at all, connecting contractors to hundreds of independent hire firms and merchants.

Coming up to a year on from the biggest transformation in the company’s history, CEO Tom Shorten takes stock.

This time last year you handed over 39 branches and 65 builder merchant outlets. For a business built on owning tools, plant and equipment since 1957, that might have surprised many people. Why did you do it?

Ultimately, because ownership had stopped being the point. A contractor does not want a lifting hoist; they want the first floor cleared by Thursday. For decades our industry answered that need with depots, fleets and utilisation targets, and the customer inherited the compromises: the equipment you could get was the equipment we happened to hold.

What surprised you most in the first twelve months?

How local construction still is. We assumed the national suppliers would carry the volume. In practice the regional hire firms and independent merchants have been the making of it, because they know their patch: which site entrance floods, which conservation officer wants a quiet compressor, which villages you cannot get a 7.5 tonne lorry into. Scale gave us reach and local suppliers gave us reliability.

Did any challenges surprise you along the way?

We underestimated how much trust resides in the relationships built across the year. A site manager who has used the same depot for fifteen years is not buying a transaction; they are buying the fact that someone answers the phone when it rings. Our first version of the platform was efficient, but we found that many of our customers just weren’t ready yet for a single channel approach, so we still needed to offer several ways to place an order, with the digital marketplace at the heart of it.

Contractors are often conservative buyers. How did they take it?

Better than the industry predicted, and for an unglamorous reason: paperwork. A mid-sized contractor was running twenty supplier accounts, twenty invoice formats and twenty sets of delivery windows. Putting hire and materials through one account was not exciting; it simply removed a job nobody wanted.

Does an asset-light model genuinely make construction more sustainable, or does it just move the assets somewhere else?

The gain from what the marketplace enables is in utilisation, because a piece of plant or equipment sitting idle in a yard has already cost the carbon of making it and when it is sat idle, there is money being left on the table.

When one platform can see demand across hundreds of suppliers, equipment travels to the next job instead of waiting for one, and the fleet the industry needs gets smaller.

By working hand-in-hand with our suppliers, we make sure that emitting products in the marketplace have up-to-date CO2 emissions readings. Then, our system automatically calculates a CO2 equivalent per hour reading based on expected usage and transportation. All of this supports efforts to meet Scope 3 Emissions targets.

What does the past year tell us about the hire and supply industry more widely?

That the depot model is being unbundled rather than destroyed. Somebody still has to own, service and test the equipment, and those businesses are not going anywhere; several are now our largest partners – for example Speedy Hire. What is changing is who holds the customer relationship and who carries the inventory risk.

Does the new marketplace model also cater to the smaller end of the market: the self-employed trades, DIY-ers or homes renovation specialists?

Absolutely and we reach these customers via our .com site. The nature of the beast has traditionally meant that a national contractor already had buying power, whereas a two-van garden and grounds firm did not, and paid for it twice, in price and in wasted days. The same access to machinery, access equipment and materials now sits behind one login for a firm of three as for a firm of three thousand. If the past year has one genuinely levelling result, that is it.

What would you say to another business – or CEO – considering, or going through a major organisational transformation?

You have to be honest about what you are giving up and extremely focused on what you are building. We gave up control of the physical product, and transitioning to a pure marketplace model, you have to accept that you can’t get that back. What you have to build in its place is high standards, with your suppliers (and your teams). The customer ultimately just wants materials, machinery and tools to arrive on time, work as required, and be collected at the end of the hire. It’s our job, working with our suppliers, to make that happen and to make the customer experience as seamless as possible.