Profile: Kennet Equipment Leasing

Managing director: Steve Swift

Location: Coleshill

Core asset sectors: Small ticket equipment suitable for salesaid leasing

Deals introduced in 2009: £20m (€23m

Deal acceptance rate: over 90%

Staff: 31

Own book stats: Around £4m, with £2.3m written in 2009

Total customers dealt with: 50,000

Customers with outstanding agreements: 15,000

The story of Kennet Equipment Leasing begins in 1990, when current managing director Steve Swift bought the
company, and set up shop in Tamworth as little more than a one-man operation.

The business had been founded two years earlier, spun-off by staff of Austrian-backed Clover Leasing as
something of a “lifestyle business” for its directors. Swift, however, had other ambitions, and used the Kennet name to establish a small-ticket leasing broker, using First National and NHL in Solihull as its initial funders.

Early sales-aid success saw Kennet’s growth fuelled by garage and cleaning equipment deals, and in 1992 the
recruitment of director Tony Devenney put it in a position to begin a campaign of sustained growth.

New premises were acquired in Coleshill in 1997, at around the same time as Kennet began writing its own
portfolio of deals, funded by working capital.

As business built up, it acquired a second office in the same location in 2002, to make room for increasing staff
numbers.

Every consecutive year until 2009 brought year-on-year increases in turnover and profitability.
Between the end of 2005 and the end of 2008, Kennet’s business grew by 46%, with £36m worth of deals paid out
in that last year alone.

 

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