Adelphi Hire Centres is not your typical mom-and-pop, although it started out that way. More accurately, it's a "family-and-friends business." Co-directors Peter Lewis, the operations guy, and David Hennessey, who handles repair and inventory, share the management role and both do deliveries. Sue Hennessey minds the books and runs the office.

The company is in Eltham, on the eastern outskirts of metropolitan London, next to Greenwich, where the Prime Meridian goes through and Charles Dickens used to drop by to eat "whitebait," a small fish that's breaded and devoured whole, at the Trafalgar Tavern on the south bank of the Thames. Across the river on the Isle of Dogs, upscale condos have sprouted where dozens of docks once stood, when shipping was a staple of the area's economic life.

The area today is, as it has been for centuries, a tangled knot of pretty villages and twisted roads, long since melded into the London sprawl, brimming with people and opportunity.

For years Lewis and the Hennesseys did a brisk business in light construction ("plant") and tool rental, in the tradition of British rental ("hire"), which had been developing steadily since World War II essentially as a mom-and-pop movement, just as in the United States.

The war left most urban areas of the United Kingdom in rubble. Capi-tal was scarce and the massive effort to rebuild England required more equipment than contractors could afford. The hire industry rose in response.

Adelphi, which Peter Lewis and David Hennessey formed in 1983, did very well until a deep recession hit the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. Then things changed, and what Adelphi did about that is what makes Adelphi not your typical mom-and-pop.

"We were busy late into the recession - it took us longer to get into it - but then we were longer coming out of it," says Lewis. "And by then, hire shops were changing their policy on who they were going to deal with - predominantly cash-through-the-door people. There was the emergence of Speedy Hire, from the Allen Group, and Hewden Stuart, which had everything from large cranes down to small tools, Hire Service Shop - HSS, which is now the biggest - and A-Plant [the Ashtead Group, parent of Sunbelt Rentals in the United States].

"So when we came out of the recession late, whether through fair means or foul, we had lost much of our customer base because of low rates, discounts and [pricing programs based on volume and repeat business].

"So in about 1993, we decided to start the toilet business, as an add-on. We found a market that was good for us, and very close to the hire business we knew. We found a niche in the market that was needed. We bought five units and away they went. So now we're a toilet hire company with a plant and tool hire business as an add-on."

The toilet division is called Adeloo. ("Loo" is British slang for toilet.)

Adelphi's business has shifted from 90 percent construction and 10 percent tools to about 95 percent toilets.

"We have four lorries [trucks] on the go six days a week, seven days during the summer," says David Hennessey. "They go out at 5 a.m., every one of them."

Lewis says there was some logic in the decision - which turned out to be wrong, although through no fault of the reasoning: "One of the advantages we saw in the toilet business was getting back into the plant and tool hire business - because we were one of the first ones on a building site, we thought we could develop contacts with the contractors."

"As you say it, 'Adeloo,' it also sounds like 'add a loo,'" Sue Hennessey points out, "which is what we wanted companies to do - add one of our loos to their sites."

"But there was still a problem with this thinking: price," says Lewis. "And the contractors were already well in with the large hire companies and didn't want to switch. We would get smidgens of hire from them, but we couldn't get into the core business."

The large companies had it sewed up, and Adelphi had to find another answer.

"We don't compete with them now," says Lewis. "We found that we were getting told how much people were willing to pay for plant - and that's not my idea of the business."

So Adelphi began focusing more and more on the toilet hire niche, building on distinct small-company advantages and customer service that generates referrals,

and now Lewis and the Hennesseys have an inventory of 370 toilets - 320 typically are out on hire at any given time - and plan to increase that to about 500. Soon they will move into a 6,000-square-foot building nearby, replacing both the present plant and tool hire quarters in Eltham, which takes up only about 1,000 square feet, and Adeloo, the toilet division, which currently is housed in a warehouse about 10 miles away.

Adeloo has a toilet for every taste, so to speak. They're not all those little plastic stalls devoid of all civilized amenities; many are "executive" toilets that flush - spacious, with washing facilities - the kind you might find, say, at Richard Branson's place.

In fact, Adelphi did do an event for Branson, the balloon adventurer and airline tycoon whose Virgin logo festoons trans-Atlantic jumbo jets, record stores and locomotives, now that rail service in the United Kingdom has been privatized.

In addition to construction sites, which must have toilet facilities that meet very high standards under British regulations, Adelphi also caters to corporations, fairs, charity events, television shows, film work and posh private parties and events across a huge market area surrounding London and throughout southeast England to the English Channel - about 7,000 square miles altogether - and in toilets, Adeloo pretty much owns this turf.

The toilet business really has spared Adelphi from the peril of trying to compete head-on with the big hire companies, some of which have tried toilet hire themselves but couldn't make a real go of it.

"They go for numbers, percentages. Their whole business is percentage-driven," says Lewis. "They know what the plant hire business in this country is worth and they determine what percentage of that business they will go for.

"But if you're going to diversify, you have to diversify to what you know. The toilet business has much higher transportation and labor requirements - it's very service-driven."

"We'll work a lorry for every hundred units," says Hennessey. "When [one of the large plant hire companies] tried it, they didn't balance the toilets with the lorries and created bottlenecks for themselves. They couldn't get a lorry from there to there, and provide the service that this market demands."

As a result, the big hire corporations couldn't generate the returns that their number-crunchers called for. This business didn't fit the model they knew.

Adelphi, meanwhile, was more agile, more able to learn the ropes of this service-driven business quickly and adapt operations to it without the complication of a corporate structure to report through, up and down - more able to focus on customer satisfaction.

"We can make a decision here and now," says Lewis. "We're very flexible," adds Hennessey. "It's service."

In a sense, the toilet business may be something like a "poison pill" for Adelphi - a strategic initiative in which a company adds a component to its business that is unappealing to a consolidator and tends to make the company acquisition-proof. For the big boys who have tried it and gotten burned, a company steeped in round-the-clock, on-site customer service, and operating light on its feet in a niche market that plays by its own very different rules, is a live wire they may not want to touch.