As a rental manager, we need to constantly inspect the products and the services that we offer the community, our contractors, our customers. And so daily and weekly, the rental manager needs to be on alert and walking around and checking out the fleet, inspecting the quality control that's taking place with your equipment, making sure that things are tagged properly. You need to look at the number of work orders that are open and see where things are getting stuck, just a visual inspection. So the bottom line is don't get stuck in a cubicle and don't get stuck in an office. You need to periodically walk the floor and go out and see what's going on, look at the ready line, see if you can find any fault with it. Be the ultimate quality control inspector for your fleet. If something's not clean enough or something's missing, make a big deal about it because you're going to set the tempo and so you're constantly watching how the fleet is being managed by your own internal forces and support team. We're also going to look at the fleet utilization. So on any given day and week, you're constantly looking to see what's working and what's not working. Later on in this course, we're going to talk about some reports that you can look at and how you can keep an eye on those things. You want to know really whether the equipment is working very hard or not or whether there's more upside potential. If we could keep it busier, then all of a sudden money falls out of the sky. With the same amount of investment, we can earn more if we keep the equipment busier and keep it out on rent. You're also looking for opportunities to improve our services. The way you do that is you need to be talking to customers, whether they come in your store or whether you give them a call or whether you ride in the field with your salesman. You should constantly be looking for opportunities to improve the services and make your offering a little bit more attractive to somebody. So if you find that you're missing opportunities because of your pricing or you're missing opportunities because we've only got two delivery trucks and we can't seem to figure out how to use an outside party to help us with the highs and lows of transportation demand, you've just got to be creative and innovative. I ask most rental managers, what is the voice of the customer for you? How do you hear the customers telling you either you're doing a good job and they want more of it or why they are not using your goods and services? You've got to have a way to hear the voice of the customer. Primarily, you're getting that information through your salesman, but you need to get that information unfiltered because sometimes salesman won't tell you everything. Then you also need to know if you've got a machine that's going to be down for a while. The term in the industry is called down hard. Somebody's got to make an assessment. Is this a blown engine? Is this something that we've got to put a transmission in? It's going to be under some type of a warranty claim and it may be down a while. You need to know about those machines because that's kind of outside your normal framework of just rotation and you've got to make sure that those things get back in play as soon as possible. So we've looked at the people and our products for kind of daily and weekly activities. Now we need to be thinking about our processes. This is where measurement is really, really important. You can't fix anything that you can't measure. So we've got to figure out a way, you've got to figure out a way to measure almost everything. The number of tickets that's being written, how long does it take you to create a rental agreement, you need to look at your transportation intervals, how many deliveries are we being able to make a day, those types of things. You need to record the missed rentals. So that's both the customers that call in and we mark it down on a ledger pad or even the salesmen out in the field every time they miss a deal, you need to record those because that's how we're going to figure out how to get better and how to make the necessary adjustments. Your checkout process, we've got to continue to work on efficiency there and make sure that we don't make mistakes. So that's the tagging process that we've talked about earlier, that's accountability, and that's both for equipment that's going out as well as equipment that's coming back in. And then our turnaround time. In one of our other courses we talked about where does equipment get stuck and oftentimes it's in our service process. We can send a piece of equipment out for two days and when it comes back it takes four days to get through the service department. That's not a very good trade off. So we've constantly got to be monitoring how long does it take and is it a labor issue, do I just need another pair of hands, or is it something that we don't have the facility laid out very well and it just takes too long to move something from one place to the other. But a rental manager needs to be focused on process and paying attention. Quality control efforts. So you need to count the mistakes that are made. So for instance, you might want to keep a tally on how often when we rent equipment out do we get a call from the customer say in the first 24 or 48 hours and it is something that is not damage related, it's a fault that happened with the machine and is it something that we could have prevented before we delivered the machine if we had inspected it better. You also want to look for the accuracy of your rental billing. In other words, the rental manager should have oversight of the billing activity before we send it to the customer because what you don't want is customers calling back in and saying that you didn't invoice me the right amount, this is what the salesman told me and that's not what you charged me because now all of a sudden we've got, we potentially agitate the customer, now you've got somebody in your billing department and then at least yourself if not your salesman involved in trying to solve an issue. And sometimes it may even be for as little as $25 or something. So you can save yourself a lot of headache and agitation to the customer if you work on that billing process to make sure that you screen everything before it goes out. So now let's think about monthly activities. There are certain things that are daily, weekly activities and now we kind of turn our focus into looking on monthly basis. And so from a people standpoint, what do we do differently on a monthly basis? So you need to report to upper management about what's going on. And they may not even be asking you, but you need to be proactive in this particular area. And so sometimes they can only see the numbers and they don't have a sense of how your blocking and tackling is going. And so I recommend that you think about creating some type of communication to senior management that's talking about how you're developing customers, the number of open rental contracts that maybe you have, how the billing per contract is going up. There's a variety of things you can do to talk about how your people are getting better, your processes are getting better, the products are getting better. And that is in addition to whatever the P&L statement says. The P&L statement is a snapshot of whether you made money during that particular 30-day window or not. But I think there's a lot of other activities that you need to report up that suggest that you're doing a good job. And so keep them informed. And then taking that same monthly goals and objectives and sitting down with your rental department and talking to everyone and explaining to them where you were successful as a team, we met our objectives, good job everyone, or here's the areas that we fell down during the month and we need to understand. So, so often when I work with equipment dealers and I ask people in a particular department or in some cases throughout the dealership, I ask them, do you know if we're winning or losing? And the answer is generally no, I don't. Because no one has shared any information with me. So I would suggest to you as a rental manager that your goals be clearly defined every month and everybody knows what it is we're trying to achieve. And then on a weekly basis, keep them informed as to whether you're on track or not. Are we going to make it or not? And I would also suggest some type of a reward. And it can be either acknowledging people and job well done. You might even want to spring for barbecue lunch if the department makes its goals. But we just need to keep everyone informed of how we're doing. We need to highlight good customer service examples. And this could be from anyone. I recommend actually that the salesman be cognizant of this particular aspect. They can be out in the field and they can hear a customer talking about, you know the guy that drives your truck and delivered the equipment, he did a really good job the other day. Or one of your mechanics was out here and seemed to fix something really quick, came in and informed me. The salesman, I think, should have a real sensitivity for the support that's going on. Either how we answer the phone at the rental counter and we put together and coordinate rentals or the way things are delivered or the way that we maintain them. All of these are touches to the customer that I think we should be acknowledging where somebody on your team has gone above and beyond. And so I think it's a good idea as a rental manager to look for those things and to highlight them and let everybody on your team know who did an exceptional job. You should also be taking notes as the rental manager throughout the month, keeping a running list every time you see something that's not done well. How can we make it better? I would suggest to you that periodically you go ride with a salesman or maybe you work the front counter, maybe you ride with the delivery driver, maybe you go work in your own shop for a day or at least a half a day and look at how your rental department is operating from that particular perspective. It'll probably shock you what you'll see because you'll always find opportunities for improvement. And so as a rental manager, especially with your people, you may find that they didn't know the answer to something and that gets down to a training issue. Maybe you didn't communicate it well enough and they don't understand. So constantly be looking for opportunities to improve the people, but you've got to monitor them and measure them. And to be really effective as a manager, you also need to be able to take effective and constructive criticism. So I would suggest that you, talking to your salesman, talking to your rental coordinator, talking to your drivers or mechanics and say, how can I do a better job as a manager? How can I make your job easier? Is there something that you need from me? Is there some type of training or tooling or time? What is it that I can do to make you be a better team member? And invite that feedback from them. It's very valuable in terms of creating relationship, being collaborative as I described earlier, and just being a good, caring manager.

rental manager

quality control

fleet inspection

customer feedback

performance measurement