Before we get too far along in our discussion about processes, I wanna talk to you about some of the inherent challenges that a dealer has in trying to get an efficient rent to rent department going. I used the rental car analogy earlier and I'll use that again. If you've ever been to a dealership to buy a car, you recognize what the facility looks like. They've got a really nice showroom, they've got plenty of new cars parked out by the fence, they've got a good parts department, they've got a service department. What you won't really find is a very robust rental car fleet that's not typically part of their business model. So, can you rent a car at a car dealership? You probably can, but they're gonna have a limited number of them and their processes are not gonna be really good. It won't be anywhere near as fast as if you were getting it at the airport, for instance. But if you look at a rental car company at an airport or some other place, it is minutes from the time you walk up, you can make an online reservation, they know who you are, you give them a credit card and your driver's license, and literally within minutes, you're driving off a lot with this car. Now, if you were buying a car, you go back to the negotiation process and then getting your credit approved and getting the car prepped to sell, and it could be a three or four hour process to buy a car. So, the point I'm trying to make, and I hope you can realize this, is that a dealership has some built in bias to it, about everything that goes on there generally has to do with selling equipment. And so, now all of a sudden, we're gonna try to put a rent to rent department in this business and try to make it have a different type of urgency, a different type of culture, and a speed at which it needs to respond to customers and get equipment out the door, and that kind of stuff. And that's not easy for dealerships to put in place. And so, a few of the different things that I see from time to time, sometimes they don't... They have relegated the rental piece of equipment to potentially a sales clerk or somebody in the business that it's kind of more of a administrative responsibility to take down the name address and everything, and write up a rental contract. But this person really is not focused on trying to make sure that they're using the right piece of equipment, or if we don't have it, that they know anything about substituting other equipment, or could they approve somebody, yes or no. So, I see dealerships that try to get by, and they don't recognize that a rent to rent department... Actually, the more equipment, the bigger your exposure is on the size of your rental fleet, the more need there is to really support it properly. And credit approvals, just somebody's calling or a salesman has met a contractor on a job, and we can't seem to get a credit approval done in maybe even just a couple of hours. We don't have days to try to figure this out, because most of the time, the customer's needs are more immediate. And so, we've gotta be able to make quicker decisions. And then, honestly, there's very few dealer computer systems that line up really well with rental. The functionality generally just wasn't there from the beginning, and oftentimes, it's a module that is lacking. There's no ability to put reservations in, for instance, or even being able to connect rental history with certain... With the customer records and that type of stuff. And so, it's a real handicap. A few other common issues are too many machines get stuck in the service department. They come back through to be serviced or inspected, and of course, guess what? Customer's equipment starts to take precedent over our own rental machines, and the rental machines start to get pushed over to the side, and we don't get them out of there very fast, even for very routine things. So, there's often no real flow to the service. It's never really been mapped out or a process put in place as to the steps to get something through service. We're not taking any measurements, so we don't really know how fast it's happening or where things are getting stuck. We lack quality control standards, so we're not putting tags on things and making sure that somebody signed off on that machine is good enough to rent. Or maybe when we hire the personnel to do these type of tasks, we're not training them well or we don't have the procedures well defined. And then, transportation. To be successful in Rent to Rent, having it sitting on the yard is only half of the equation. It's really not available to the customer if we can't get it to the job site when they want it. So, that means we've either gotta have enough trucks and trailers and drivers of our own or we've gotta have enough relationships with transport companies that we can really respond. And so, I have seen dealers that don't think about using outside transportation. They try to do everything themselves. And let's face it, if you have two trucks and you have three customers that would like a machine at 7 o'clock in the morning, only two customers are gonna be happy. Somebody's gonna be getting their machine late. And so, sometimes that can make the difference whether you got the rental or you didn't get the rental. So, we're gonna dig into about five key performance areas that I think should be focused on at your dealership. And that's the activities that go on around the rental and the sales desk about everything from the process, the consistency in which we ask questions and the forms or the computer system and what's available, what is it that we can see, how accessible is specifications for equipment. The rental checkout process, part of our quality control, we need to make sure we've got the right machine and that it's been inspected and everything's good and safe about this. The transportation, we have... As I just mentioned, we have got to make sure that our transportation is matching with our opportunity in the marketplace. And so, we've got to figure out how to leverage ourself in terms of trucks and drivers and trailers. The rental check in process is also part of quality control and we've gotta be able to quickly get that machine back and push it through into our service department, which is point number five, is our service processes really need to be worked on. And then QC is, of course, quality control. So, speed without quality control is a mess, so we need both of those things and we're gonna take a deeper look into each one of these. So, let's take a look at a sample view of what a typical rental order might look like. So, we have a customer that either calls or walks in to our business and they're making either a new inquiry about rental or maybe they are following up on a quote. So, let's just say that it's a new inquiry. The very first thing we need to do is figure out what it is these people need. So, we've gotta ask a series of questions about who they are, what they're doing, what the application is, how long do they need it, and so on and so forth, to see if we even have the right products or services for them, alright? Once we do that, then we have to figure out if these people are an existing account or not, and if they are, then we can continue with our process. But if by chance they are not, then we've gotta qualify this customer. And for virtually every dealership, this is a different set of criteria as to what constitutes a qualified customer for you. Some of you may not wanna rent to anybody that does not have an approved account. Some of you may want to rent to someone and you'll accept a credit card and maybe it requires a deposit. But whatever your qualification process is, it really needs to be in line with speed and that the decision can be rendered virtually at the rental counter by someone, whether it's the rental coordinator or whether it's the rental manager. And so if they do have to apply for credit, can we get the credit information back quickly? Are we tied into a database of some description so that we can verify someone's legitimate credit worthiness? And then once that we've decided that, if it's an approval, then all of a sudden, now we're down into being able to look in the inventory, say, yes, we have it, create a quote for the customer. And then we are gonna... If we've got the machine available, we're gonna create the rental contract or the reservation. And one of the key things I want you to see here is that by chance that we don't have the machine available and we miss this rental, it's highlighted in yellow because virtually every time the phone rings and every time someone comes in our business, that is market demand. And so we need to measure the activity. And so if we were to say yes to every person that walked in the door and every call that came in, then we would be able to, basically like a batting average, say that we're batting 1,000 because you should have one rental contract for each and every inquiry that came across through the door or on the phone. But we all know that that's not true, that we miss rentals because we don't have it available. Maybe we don't have the right size. Maybe we don't have the right functionality. Maybe our price is too high. Maybe we had the machine, but we couldn't get it there on time. Maybe we had the machine, but our transportation cost was too high. Maybe we had the machine, but it's in the service department and we don't know when it's gonna be out. All of those are legitimate reasons why we have to say no. And we're never going to be able to fix anything until we measure. And so if you were then to measure something and you see that, oh my, we've had 14 misses in the last two weeks because all our machines seem to be in the shop, then you can do something about it. So this is a real critical piece of being able to figure out how you're doing against market demand.

rent-to-rent departments

efficiency

culture

rental processes

fleet management