So now let's take a look at what's a rental manager do every day. I mean, between daily activities and weekly activities, we've got three things. Looking at our graphic up there, we've got people, process, and products. We have to keep an eye on all of those areas. So let's talk about the staff itself. Salesmen. Whether you have rental-specific salesmen or whether you have machine salesmen that are also wearing the hat of promoting your rental fleet, you've got to have communication with those folks, and you need feedback from them. You need to understand what's going on, why aren't people renting our equipment. You need to understand about competitive forces out there. You need to understand about new jobs that are being started or jobs that are completing. And so the information you need is called market intelligence, and you have to figure out a way to get this information from your sales staff. Whether they directly report to you or whether they report to a sales manager, you're going to have to figure out a way to hopefully daily or weekly interact with these folks. You may also need to ride with them occasionally, but right now we need a communication pathway to understand about market intelligence. You also need to keep up with your rental coordinator. Potentially, you might even have two or three of these people, depending on the size of your company. Or you may have multiple locations, and you've got coordinators at each of those places. So you've got to have a means to be able to talk to these folks and make sure everything's under control, that they have what they need to be successful in their job, that the computer system's working okay, service department has given them the equipment back on a sufficient timetable. And lastly, the service and support side. You've got to be able to work very closely with the service manager at each and every branch to make sure that your rental fleet is being processed and that you're being treated as one of their best customers. So a rental manager's also responsible for rental debt. Typically, if there's outstanding receivables associated with the rental department, you're going to have some responsibility there. And so I would suggest you stay on top of that in terms of communication directly with the customer and through your salesman and with your AR department. Then there needs to be some type of productivity established. And we'll talk more about this in this course, about what type of measurement. But everybody needs to be responsible for productivity. I don't care if it's a truck driver or if it's somebody washing equipment. There needs to be this sense that here was the workload for the day, and I either got it accomplished or I didn't, and that there's some productivity here. So rental managers got to set the pace, the tempo, they've got to create the measurement, and they've got to monitor it. So that creates the accountability for each of the people working in the operation. And then you've got to keep your finger on the pulse for the whole business. And you shouldn't be caught by any surprises that your truck's been involved in an accident, or you've had an employee injured, or you've got a customer that has gone out of business and left you holding the bag with a lot of money. You just have to stay in tune with what's going on in your business each and every day.

rental manager

staff oversight

salespeople communication

market intelligence

rental coordinators coordination