Let's begin by taking a look at the primary duties of a rental manager. If you've completed course one and two, you probably saw this same list of responsibilities, but we'll review it briefly. Obviously, a rental manager is responsible for the profitability of the rental department. You're also the asset manager. Each and every piece of equipment that is in the rental fleet is owned by the company as an asset. That has an owning and operating period to it. For the duration that it's in your rental fleet, you're responsible for managing that asset. That asset has a value to it. The reason it's in the rental fleet is so that it can earn money. You have responsibility for the earning and the expenses associated with that asset. Fleet performance. With looking at the rental fleet, if you've got too much money or you don't have enough, or you've got some machines that aren't performing very well, you've got to be able to figure that out. It's very important that you have some analysis skills and some strategy about how to find the winners and the losers. We're going to take a look at that in this course. Then you've got responsibility for the departmental expenses. Everything from payroll to managing the maintenance and repair costs, anything associated with an expense to the rental department, you have to know about it. Then just the daily operations of renting equipment, things going out, things coming in. Some folks may, depending on the operation that you might have worked in before, some people might think that the job of a rental manager is just to keep a smile on the customer's faces and put out fires during the day. Of course, that is part of the job. The bigger picture is that potentially you've got millions of dollars of assets and they're supposed to be earning money for the company. There's a lot of things going on in the background, whereas interruptions during the day when operations don't run very smoothly, a rental manager has to step in and take control, give some guidance on solutions, and then go back to the big picture. The last thing on this page I want you to see is that we really believe that to be effective, a rental manager, that this department needs to be standalone. It does not need to be a subset of the sales department, for instance. I think it's very important that the rental manager be a direct report to a vice president level within the company because you're managing millions of dollars of inventory and there should be real responsibility associated with that and it should not be filtered by the sales department. Additional responsibilities for the rental manager include all the decision making, everything from qualifying customers, which would mean who do we rent to, are we going to rent to this customer, and who ends up making the final decision on whether they qualify, can they pay, is it in an area and an application that we want to take the risk of putting equipment or machines into that spot. The rental manager should be the guy that gets to make the decisions on rental rates and deciding how competitive we need to be, and also enforcing company policy within the department, and that's everything from attendance and conduct, and if you've got salesmen working directly for you, then you've got accountability for those guys. So with that comes the hiring and firing of rental department employees. As a rental manager, you need a strong team of people around you that are competent, that can stay focused on their job and their activities, and represent the company well, and serve the customers. Rental manager also needs to be responsible for putting in place standard operating procedures, and this is a big task because a lot of things need to be defined, and quality control comes from our ability to do things consistently, and then customer satisfaction comes as a result of us being consistent in what we do all the time, and our quality control. So standard operating procedures is a big deal about how do we check out equipment, how do we check in equipment, what do we do to make sure that it's rental ready, and that type of thing. We need a rental manager also to develop a culture of urgency. Within most equipment dealers, dealerships, the tractor side of the company moves at a certain pace, but the rental operations moves at a different pace. It's very much like the difference between a car dealership, and if you were going to go there and buy a car, it seems to have a certain pace to it, but if you go to a rental car company, it's got a very different pace to it. At a dealership, if you're going to buy a car, you can probably expect that process to last a few hours. But at a rental car company, if you are standing there for more than 15 minutes and trying to get a rental contract and get a car assigned to you so that you can leave, something's wrong if it takes more than about 15 or 20 minutes. So they're both cars, but your expectation as a consumer is different. Same thing goes for the equipment business and a rent-to-rent fleet. There needs to be a real sense of urgency about how we dispatch equipment when it comes back from rent. There's got to be an urgency about getting it through the service, getting it checked out, and getting it back to be available for rent. Also as a rental manager, there's a tremendous need for training, employee training, and this has got to be an intentional effort, not just by accident. And so a rental manager has got to figure out what to train, and so that's everything from product training and application training. There are service aspects of maintaining equipment, and the rental manager needs to know about that and be able to convey that information, especially to the rental coordinators and salesmen and such as that. And then you've got customer service and you've got sales skills, so a lot involved in leveraging knowledge across the rental department, and the rental manager is responsible for that. And then lastly, a rental manager is responsible for satisfied customers. At the end of the day, we want to make money for the company, we want to be successful in that area, but we're also trying to put a smile on customers' faces and so that they'll continue to do business with us, and it's an ongoing pipeline of revenue because we take good care of them. So rental manager has a lot of things going on besides just putting out fires all the time. So I've broken the responsibilities down into three major areas, and those areas are administrative, and then what I would call people skills, and then technical. And so I want to start with the administrative, and it's just another way of organizing so you can see, gosh, in the course of a day or a week or a month, how much of my activity is administrative, and that's things that potentially I'm sitting behind a desk or I'm having to process information, and so monthly P&L responsibility for the department, that's a key piece of administration is that you are making sure literally on a daily basis that the activities of income and revenue are being recorded correctly. You've got to stay up on staffing requirements, hiring and firing, and potentially where's your next rental coordinator going to come from, or if you have a salesman that, if the salesman are assigned to the rental manager, where's the next guy going to come from? You don't want to get stuck without having somebody in the queue, so I think it's really important for a rental manager to be a real recruiter, and so that means you've got to have a pocket full of cards, and as you come across people that you see out and about in your community, you need to hand them a card and say, look, I'm always looking for some good people, and give me a call if you would ever consider working at an equipment dealership. Risk control and being able to put together a forecast and a budget, that's a big deal. Establishing monthly goals and objectives, I think there's big opportunity for this. A lot of rental managers don't operate in this realm, and so each month they are just kind of saying what we get is what we get, but as an asset manager, you need to be thinking about real profitability and establishing the goals for the department, so at the beginning of the month, everyone on your team knows what the objective is for the month, and if that means that we need to create $600,000 worth of revenue this month to make money, the people on your team need to know that. So the rental manager, he may not be the person that's actually doing the invoicing, most likely that's a rental coordinator, but the rental manager does need to be in tune with how much is being invoiced on a daily basis and how many invoices, so that you just have a real sense of the tempo. Goal management for the rental staff and also creating incentives, I really believe that the incentives should be attached to the goals so that we don't overpay. I see a lot of misalignment of compensation plans for people, and in most cases we're overpaying salesmen before the company's actually making money. So that's something that you should take a look at and see when's the last time we aligned the commission structure of our rental department with the profitability of the rental department. And then working with the sales and service department is also very vital to being able to achieve corporate results. So the sales department probably has some goals and objectives, and the rental department should not be a silo working all by itself, it should be in tune with understanding what is the objectives of the sales department, and how can we, if you will, help that. We certainly don't want to create problems between the rental department sales and service, so there's some real work that has to be done back and forth between the departments to keep everybody happy. As I said before, establishing rental rates, and periodically you need to review those, and I'd say no more than six months, and maybe every three to six months is better. At least take a couple of categories and test your rates against the market and see how you're doing. Maybe you're high, maybe you're low, maybe it's your weekly rate that you need to adjust to be able to drive some more business. So also the rental manager should be the person that determines our discounting policy and how we feel about discounting on a one-month rental or four-week rental, whichever way you do it, whether that's allowed or not, and then what are the limits in terms of how aggressive we will be with discounting. So now let's take a look at the people skills. So leadership is so important in being a manager of any kind. It's not limited to just being a rental manager. If you're a manager, it requires leadership, and so I would highly recommend that you read articles in business magazines, find some books. Leadership isn't taught very well, by and large, and leadership is a key ingredient in being successful. A salesmanship. I believe that a rental manager's got to have some sales skills. He can't just be someone that's a good asset manager and maybe understands numbers. You've got to be able to work with people. You've got to be able to exchange thoughts and ideas, and you've got to have a sense for selling and promoting so that not only can you encourage your salesmen, but you can basically help set the tempo for attracting new business. I think a rental manager's got to be collaborative, and what I mean by that is someone that will kind of make it feel to everyone that's in your department that they have a voice and that they can contribute, and it'll be taken into consideration, and so it's not the rental manager making all the decisions. You need to include people along the way so that you start to empower people, and so if you've ever worked for a manager that was collaborative, it actually feels nice as opposed to, gee, they're the ones that get to make all the decisions. They never listen to what I have to say. And negotiator. And negotiator, the reason it's so critical is there's such a variety of situations that negotiation comes into play in solving conflict, and so a rental manager's got to be able to figure out what's important to the customer, what are the real issues, and come up with a resolution that basically solves the problem, and so good negotiation skills is really important. And then lastly, we look at the technical skills involved in being a rental manager. I believe you need to have some, you don't have to be a mechanic, but I think having mechanical aptitude is critical. You kind of have to have a sense of how things work, especially equipment, so that when somebody's describing something to you, it kind of makes sense to you when they say this is how it broke or this is what it's not doing because you'll have some idea of how the machine works. So if this is a gap for you, I would highly recommend you spend a little bit of time in your service area trying to get a better understanding of how things work. Problem solving is a real key piece for a rental manager, and this is everything from equipment problems to dealing with customers and any kind of conflict. You've got to be able to be a good listener, first of all, to be a problem solver. You've got to listen to all the facts, don't be too quick to respond, process a little bit. You need to think long term, is this a sustainable solution when you're solving a problem? You're not putting a Band-Aid on something that actually needs a tourniquet. So problem solving is a key piece of being a good rental manager. Training skills. You've got to be able to get on a piece of equipment. I'm not suggesting that you could go level a job site, but you do need to be able to have an understanding of the controls, how machines work, so that you can train other people on them. And you need to also understand the difference between sizes of machines and what they're appropriate for and different models. You've got to have good application knowledge. That's really critical, because that also shows a level of expertise to your employees as well as your customers, and this is going to pay dividends for you trying to solve problems for people. If you can listen to the situation and then you, in your database in your head, you know this piece of equipment will handle that task, or no, this will not. And then lastly in the technical, you really do need to have an understanding of construction phases. So civil work, for instance. When they're putting in utilities and they're putting in a roadway, you need to kind of understand what happens first, what happens second, and so on, because that sequence happens over and over and over, and that will help you kind of align your services and equipment availability based on understanding what comes next. And the same thing applies to commercial construction. So when they go in and they are basically doing the site prep and they're going to put in the footers, or they're going to put in columns, or they're going to put in an underground parking garage before they start coming out of the ground, you need to kind of understand what happens next, what equipment is going to show up, and what kind of subcontractors are probably going to come on the job next, because that is critical to you aligning your fleet so that it's readily available at the right time. So many of these things, in today's world, you can go online and you can watch some videos of buildings being built. You don't have to go to the library and check out a really big book to be able to understand about civil construction. There's a lot of ways that you can gain this information really quick.

rental manager

fleet performance

departmental expenses

daily operations

analysis skills

customer satisfaction