So as we just finished talking about the rental order process, I want to give you a couple of tools that I think will help you be more consistent in your process and hopefully make you more efficient in terms of how you do it. So I would recommend the following minimum qualifying details in how you do business with existing accounts and non-account customers. For most dealers, their process starts to break down when they're trying to do business with someone that does not have an account. They usually don't have a very good way of getting the information, certainly can't get it into their computer because there's no customer record there. So generally it needs some type of form or application and you need a baseline of information. You need to know who the people are, who the person is, what company that they represent. If they're going to pick up the equipment from you, you need to know something about their vehicle, license plate, that type of stuff. You need to know where the job is, who the owner of the project is, that type of stuff. You need to know if they've got insurance or not. How are they going to pay for it? Is it going to be using a credit card or a check? And then actually a few trade references, I mean people that they may be buying things from in the area or they normally source materials from. I believe that will give you a good baseline of information to render a decision on whether somebody qualifies to rent equipment from you. I mentioned earlier about being able to record misses at the rental counter. This is a tool that I think you could potentially make up. I recommend getting them made into a blotter pad that you have right by your telephone at the rental counter. So literally every phone call that comes in, we put today's date, we put who it was they called and why they called, what company they represent, were they looking to rent something, they were trying to get some quotes on some things, were we successful in renting to them. So pay close attention to the detail in this form. You can create it on a spreadsheet and make a tablet out of this. It makes it real easy for a rental manager or any other person in management to come along and take a look and get a real sense of how many phone calls have come into the business today, what was the nature of those calls, who was it that was calling and what were they asking about. This also is very helpful for the salesman when they come back in in the afternoon or maybe first thing in the morning. They can scroll through that pad and they can determine whether some of the prospects that they have been pursuing have actually called in and that's an encouragement to them. So gathering this information is really critical. So after we have improved our process with taking the rental order, the next thing we need to do is figure out how to check out the machine, in other words, hand it off to a customer. So the customer may come in our yard and get the machine. We may be loading it on a truck for a third party hauler or we may be taking it out to a job site with our own tractor-trailer. So the first thing we need to do is verify the machine ID. And if you don't already, I would highly recommend you come up with some type of numbering system that would have like a category and a class, maybe backhoes or class 100 and 90-horsepower backhoes might be category 10 and 110-horsepower or 120-horsepower might be a different class. So basically what you do is create a cross-reference between this long serial number that comes from the manufacturer and some number that you want to track that machine by. And then what you do is you get some two-inch letters, numbers. It can be alphanumeric or it can be all numbers. And you create your numbering system and you put these decals on your equipment in such a place that it's real easy for you to see them from, say, 50 yards. You don't want to have to be going out in the yard all the time and hunting around for the serial number plate and those things sometimes get scratched or they get grease on them. They're hard to read and understand and it's real easy for someone to potentially write the wrong number down. But when you're talking about two-inch letters or numbers, it makes it very easy to make sure that you've got the right machine. For inventory control purposes, we've got to be able to do that. Secondly, the machine needs to have a quality control tag in place. And what that means is that we've got a rental-ready tag on there that is a result of that machine going through our service process and coming out the other side and someone has basically verified that this machine's ready to go, that it works the way it's supposed to, it is serviced the way it needs to be, and that everything is in order. There should be a date and someone's initials there so that we know who did it and when did they do it. At this point, now we're either with our truck driver, an independent driver, or a customer. We're going to walk around the machine and give it one more chance of visual inspection. If we see something, we write it down on the rental contract and we note that this is already damaged before it left our yard. Then we need to verify the hour meter and make sure that what's showing on the rental contract is the same thing that's actually on the machine. We need to inspect the machine to make sure that the safety decals are in place and any operating instructions that need to go with this machine and that our company decals are in order. We want people to know, it's part of our marketing, we want people to know where this came from. You might spin the cap off or pull a dipstick just to reinforce that everything was done correctly. At this point, the rental checkout is the last chance we get to potentially catch something that might have been missed. Whether you are a yard man, whether you're the rental coordinator or a truck driver, we need to all understand this process that we want to get it right before we give it to the customer. We start the equipment, make sure everything works correctly. If the customer is in front of us, we're going to make sure they understand the controls and how things work. We're going to load that equipment and we're going to do that in a safe manner. We're going to tie it down securely so that this machine doesn't move around. If a customer is coming towards us, we also have the issue of their trailer. Is it the right capacity trailer? Do they have the right size chains and binders on there? Is the hitch on their trailer or truck, is that adequate? This gets a little bit more complicated when we put things on other people's vehicles because that's a variable. We've got to be wise enough in inspecting their truck and trailer and their ability to secure our equipment that we're not putting ourselves in a dangerous position. All of this leads up to our ability to have consistency in our checkout. What that does is build quality control for us. It creates accountability for everybody that's in our system that is basically supposed to be servicing our equipment and inspecting it. This is a final check. Get this 10-step process down for your company and make sure that everyone understands this is what it takes to make a machine go out of our yard. The next thing we want to take a look at is transportation. This can be a real problem for some dealerships because maybe they don't want to use outside hauling or maybe they only have one preferred outside hauler and they for some reason restrict themselves to maybe only having two or three trucks. The whole idea behind transportation is that it should be very strategic. In other words, it's either going to help us rent equipment more often or it's going to hurt us from renting equipment because we're not very good at it. We've got to look at transportation and decide is this something that we want to do in-house or do we want to outsource it all or do we want to do a combination of both of those things. As it says here on the slide, customers don't really consider your equipment ready if you can't get it to them. It's very critical that we can deal with these high demand times, which is generally sunrise or 6.30, 7 o'clock in the morning, maybe up to 9.30 or 10 o'clock. Everybody needs everything right away. Not so much during the middle of the day and then late in the afternoon, people want to turn the equipment in. Again, there's this big demand of please come pick up this machine. We have these peaks and valleys for managing our transportation and it can be a little bit challenging. The idea with outside transportation is that should be a strategy for you to handle peak demand. Let's just say you've got three trucks and trailers and you might want to have a couple of different relationships with local towing companies so that anytime somebody says I'd like to get that thing first thing in the morning, you should be able to say yes because you know I've got these outside haulers, more or less I've got them under contract to show up when I need them. This also enables you, should have a multiple style of trucks and trailers so that you can get the pricing appropriate to the type of equipment that you're hauling. I see some dealers and I've seen some major rental companies that kind of go with the concept of one truck fits everything. You may hit the lion's share of your stuff that way, but in some cases your truck is going to be overkill for what it is you're hauling. Take a look at the type of inventory that you have and try to match up variety of trailers and transportation choices, whether it's rollbacks, whether it's trucks with a fifth wheel or low boy trailers. And the pricing associated with the transportation also can be a bit challenging. It can keep you from getting deals. So I would highly recommend, no one likes to lose money, but if you are missing rentals over and over because your transportation costs are too high, then I would suggest you really work hard on trying to figure out how to get that down or maybe you're going to have to subsidize it a little bit to get competitive because transportation can make or break the deal. And the reality, look at the very last bullet here, transportation generally is a loser. By the time you pay all the costs, the truck, the trailer, the tires, the maintenance, the licensing, the fuel, the insurance, and you do that for the truck driver and his wages, generally, I don't know too many people that can make money with transportation. So it's being offset anyway. So do not let $20 or $25 on a trip on transportation, don't let that keep you from renting your equipment because ultimately, your biggest investment is in that rental fleet, not in your trucks. So don't have the expectation that you're going to make a lot of money in renting or in transportation, it's really to support the growth of your rental fleet. The fourth area that we wanted to focus on with improving processes is our rental check-in. And so this is a key area in a couple of different ways. One, we need to be real clear in our facility where do we unload equipment. I've been in a lot of dealerships that it's not very well marked. A customer pulls into some space that looks unoccupied, they offload the equipment and there it sits. And so they go in the office, they get the paperwork done and they leave, and now you've got to go out there and you've got to put somebody in the machine and it's got to be moved to wherever it is we're going to wash it or refuel it or inspect it. So you do that time and time again and now you're using all this labor to move and jockey machines around your yard. So I suggest that you look at the layout of your yard and put appropriate signage so that the customer or the third party transportation company or your truck driver will drop the machine exactly where it needs to be. And at this point, we need to have a rental employee. So maybe this is the rental coordinator. It could be your yard man. Someone needs to meet that truck driver when they're unloading it to make sure that they are observing the condition that the machine's being returned in. It needs to be refueled. We need to mark that down on the rental ticket. And we need to inquire whether the machine's been running okay or not. Is there anything that we need to know about? Maybe a tire is leaking air, the machine starts to run rough after it gets hot, it could be a number of different things. And so this process is number one in being able to receive the machine back and make sure that we're clear on its present condition before it takes another step through our service process. By everyone understanding what these steps are, what it will do is, again, drive consistency for us. So day in and day out, we can do this same process over and over and over. And then it becomes kind of a way of life. It's a culture for us. We can catch damages that way. We hardly ever let anybody slip by because we know how to record the fuel on a ticket. We know how to record the hour meter on there. We know who should be doing it so we can close out tickets quicker. All of the things roll up to us being much more efficient in closing out a contract, accurately billing the customer, and then getting the machine into our service flow.

rental order process

minimum qualifying details

customer interactions

quality control

transportation strategy