Onsite’s Andrea Pidcock on Finding Ways to do Things Better

In March 2024, Andrea Pidcock was appointed CEO of Onsite Rental Group. She talks to Hire & Rental Magazine about her career, joining the Hire Industry and the growth opportunities ahead.

H&R: Andrea, can you share a little about the career journey you’ve taken so far — including some of the challenges — that’s now led you to Onsite?

I started my career with Rio Tinto, working firstly in R&D developing sorting and sensing equipment, then in Operations Optimisation at Tom Price Iron Ore mine in the Pilbara and at the New Zealand Aluminium Smelter in Invercargill. I found that I really love large scale operating environments and finding ways to do things better — sometimes by applying new technology, sometimes just by doing simple everyday things more effectively and efficiently.

I left Rio Tinto to move back to the city when I got married. Since then, I have mostly worked in building materials production and manufacturing with Boral, Fletcher Building, CSR and Rondo.

At Boral, I went from leading strategy and operations improvement to leading the business in South Australia. I found the move from functional leadership to business leadership exhilarating, as we faced very difficult market conditions and had to take bold and rapid action in response. I have since run businesses that make quarry products, steel products, concrete products, plasterboard and fibre cement, all in ferociously competitive and cyclical markets. I can’t go past a building site without checking whose products are being used across almost every category! And now I also check out whose accommodation and equipment is on site.

H&R: You’ve got great experience, having worked in large industry sectors throughout your career. What attracted you to this position specifically, and more broadly, to join the Hire industry?

Onsite is a terrific business with highly capable people, a great reputation among its customers, and a lot of opportunity to grow in the large business to business equipment rental market. Given my background is in resources, construction and industrial operations, I understand how those industries operate and how Onsite can add value to them. We provide expertise, fleet solutions and fleet management capability that they need to operate safely and efficiently. It’s a worthwhile business to be in. I was particularly attracted to Onsite by the opportunity to create a growth strategy for our next phase under Sime’s ownership, and to work with the people in the business to deliver the strategy.

Onsite CEO, Andrea Pidcock

H&R: What was your biggest challenge coming in as CEO of such a large national corporation?

Starting in a new business and a new industry means there is a lot to learn. Every market we operate in is different, with different customers, different competitors, different challenges and different opportunities. Understanding how the business operates, getting to know our people and our customers, and working out what is working well and what could be better has been a big early focus. Fortunately, I got a lot of support from the previous CEO, Mike Foureur, and the Onsite leadership team is deeply experienced in the business and the industry.

H&R: Onsite has a clear set of core values — how do you, as CEO, work to ensure those values are the fundamental bedrock to everything the company does?

Onsite has very strong values that are deeply ingrained in the way that we operate. We have just updated these to: ‘Act with Integrity’, ‘Care for All’, and ‘Win Together’, which are simple, authentic and underpin our culture and our aspirations. To make sure our values are embedded in the business, I believe that the first and most important thing is that I and the leadership team live and breathe them on a daily basis. We strive to demonstrate the values in all of our dealings, both within and outside the organisation, and whenever we see people in the business behaving in ways that are not in line with our values, we need to call it out and address it.

To introduce the new values, I ran interactive sessions with people across the business to understand and articulate how the values come to life for us, and we have incorporated them into everything we do, into our policies and into how we recruit, manage, recognise and reward our people.

H&R: How would you describe your management style?

As a business leader, I need to operate at both the long-term strategic level — i.e., building a picture of the future for the business and developing a plan to get there — and in the ‘here and now’, making sure we are operating as we should and that we are delivering results.

I would describe my style as quite hands-on and collaborative. My philosophy is that the value in the business is created by the people in our branches, our sales teams, our service teams and our assets team. They are the ones who serve our customers every day, ensuring the right fleet solutions are delivered and maintained and that they perform as required. A big part of my job is to support our team members by ensuring they have what they need to do their work as well as possible.

H&R: Looking back on your time at Onsite, what’s excited you the most?

The thing that excites me the most about Onsite is the growth opportunity that we have ahead of us and the support and enthusiasm that we have from our owners, Sime, and from the Onsite team to make it happen.

H&R: Have you had opportunity to visit Onsite branches and operations around the country as yet? What have you learned from talking to team members and customers?

I spend as much time as possible visiting branches and meeting with customers.

The main insight that I have received from customers is their increasing focus on sustainability and decarbonising their operations. We really need OEMs to accelerate their work to provide reliable and cost-effective alternatives, and increasingly we will see new OEMs bringing different options to the market. It has also been gratifying to hear how much customers value our branch teams.

In the past few months, I have visited almost all our branch teams to run sessions getting their input into our strategy. From our branch teams, what really struck me was the high level of passion and commitment to our customers and the business, and the initiative that they show every day to get the best outcome for both. There were also lots of specific ideas on what we can do differently.

H&R: Given Onsite’s strong reputation for partnering with customers, what’s been your focus for building on/maintaining that reputation?

To me, the essence of partnering is working together to support each other’s aspirations, and this means investing time and effort to understand each other, looking for ways to create value and save costs, and working together to resolve issues if things go wrong. The feedback I have had from customers is that Onsite does this really well. It’s part of our DNA, supported by our Connect platform that gives powerful fleet management insights. As we grow and evolve, a key part of our strategy is to understand our customers’ goals and experience with us, and to identify things that we can do to further streamline and enhance our services.

H&R: Coming from outside the industry, what observations have you made about the hire industry that makes it different to other sectors?

The hire industry is very broad and diverse, with a small number of large competitors and a lot of smaller privately owned businesses, many with specialised fleet and capability. That speaks to both strong entrepreneurial spirit and deep expertise. It is also an industry where there is a lot of cross hire, so competitors are often also customers of each other. It is great to see that the industry recognises that working together in areas like safety and talent development gets better results for everyone.

H&R: On a professional level, where do you go for inspiration?

I love hearing about different ideas and people’s experiences, and I read a lot and listen to podcasts on everything from history to future technologies. I also have a lot of former colleagues who are doing really interesting things in different fields; they are great to bounce ideas off.

H&R: What do you see as the main headwind facing the Hire industry in the short to medium term?

In the immediate term, market conditions in many sectors and geographies are softening, and after a long ‘bull run’, we have to respond to these tougher conditions and focus on costs, credit risk and the like. In the medium term, I think the biggest challenges for the industry will be adapting to the transition from fossil fuels to electric and non-carbon energy sources and having the skilled workforce to manage new technologies. A lot of decarbonised solutions are yet to be developed, and new OEMs are coming up with new options, so in an industry where we acquire our equipment for an expected life of around 10 years, there is increasing risk of not being able to keep up with the pace of change and being left with obsolete fleet. Making sure that we have the skills to support these different technologies, and to capture benefits from artificial intelligence will also be a challenge.

H&R: What do you think members of the HRIA could do better to represent the hire proposition among our customer groups?

I think the HRIA does a great job in representing the hire industry and articulating the value proposition of rental. Members can include the materials the HRIA has developed into our customer communications, and I think there is an opportunity to engage more with customer industry associations and the like so that we are not just preaching to the converted.

H&R: How would you rate the Hire industry’s efforts on the topic of workforce diversity?

One of my favourite events at the 2024 HRIA conference was the Women in Hire function. This is a great program to promote gender diversity and the women who participated in it found that it really helped them navigate their career and manage the particular challenges that women can face in a traditional male industrial environment. Within Onsite, we have a relatively high proportion of women, including in line leadership roles as branch managers and operations managers. We also have employees from many different nationalities, sexual orientations, religions and cultural backgrounds. Overall, I think we genuinely focus on skills and abilities, which goes a reasonable way, but I believe we could do more to ensure we have more diversity in the technical roles through things like apprenticeship programs.

H&R: What surprises you most about the Hire Industry?

The hire industry has more complexity than I had appreciated from the outside. We have to make sure that the equipment we provide is safe, efficient and suited to the task it will be used for — and there is a lot of regulatory compliance that goes along with that. Our technicians have to be able to service and maintain a wide range of equipment brands and types, and they have to be authorised to enter many different operating and construction sites.

It is also a larger and more dynamic industry than I was expecting. Onsite is a substantial player in the industry, however, it still has a relatively modest share of the overall market.

H&R: In what areas do you see the biggest opportunity for the Hire industry moving forward?

It’s a bit early for me to have a view on the biggest opportunity for the industry, but I think that being able to better harness the potential from emerging technologies will allow us to create more value as an industry. Whether it is the technology of the equipment itself, fleet management technologies such as remote diagnostics and servicing, or technology to optimise and streamline our processes and interactions, there is a lot of potential.

H&R: What are your priorities for the coming three to five years?

We are still in the process of developing our strategy for the next five years, but I am very ambitious for Onsite to achieve substantial growth. To do this, we need to make sure that we are supporting our customers to achieve their goals, particularly in sustainability and indigenous engagement, and that we are building out the skills, capabilities, systems and fleet that we need to expand into new areas.