So you’re ready to grow your event rental business – congratulations! But before you do, you need to make sure that your operations can scale with the growth of your company. Regardless of sales are soaring and customers are flocking in; you’ll soon have another challenge on your hands: being able to deliver on-demand to that enlarged customer base.
Before taking the next necessary steps to grow your business, you must remember that if growing your company causes events and orders to fall through the cracks, miscommunication amongst your team is constant, and client’s events aren’t running smoothly- the growth is not worth it. The manual processes may have been sufficient when you were a smaller event rental company but now won’t let you move fast enough. You’ll either be putting out fires or desperately trying to keep your head above water, which is exhausting! It not only means extra stress and headaches for you but also any staff members who are forced to deal with meeting your increasing needs and your expanding client base.
Scaling a business requires careful planning. It is part of the process of turning a company into a stable and long-term organization. When planning to scale your event rental businesses, there are several growth factors to keep in mind: Technology and Resources – no business grows if they don’t invest in resources that will be fully utilized by its customers at some point in time. In addition, you’ll need the right systems, staff, and processes to aid your growth.
Understand where you are, and where you want to be
Even before you get to the details of HOW you’ll scale your business, think of this scenario instead: If you were to suddenly double or triple your current number of orders overnight – Does your company have the workforce and systems in place to handle that sudden surge? If the answer is ‘No’, compile a list of all the reasons why you wouldn’t be prepared. Are you counting most of the inventory manually and keeping it all on an outdated inventory system, Excel worksheet, or simply storing it all in your memory? Are you and a part-time employee doing the event delivery, setup, and pickup yourselves instead of having a crew in place so you can take care of the more “big picture” tasks? Then, proceed to find solutions that will meet your growing needs.
Additionally, having a specific sales and revenue goal is extremely important to creating an effective plan for attaining it. Breaking down your goals with numbers and progress reports will create structure in your plan. Including a spreadsheet that easily breaks the numbers down by month is also vital, as you can see how much further away you may be from reaching your goal. It’s also important that you set attainable but realistic goals so that you’ll actually reach them.
Options For Funding Your Growth
Scaling a business costs money. If you plan on expanding your operation with more staff, technology, or additional equipment, or perhaps need to hire an agency to help you get the job done, how will you be in a position to pay for all of that? Businesses often need outside capital to fund their growth. For this reason, startups often look towards venture capital firms, family offices, or Angel Investors as they see fit to provide this crucial financial support channel for event rental businesses aiming to scale up quickly.
Bank loans and lines of credit are often a viable option to accelerate growth and can be easier to get in the door with since you may not have to provide full business plan details or revenue forecasts. If that sounds like an option worth considering, here’s how it works. First, determine how much you’ll need; then apply. It also helps to start preparing your application as soon as possible since the process may take several weeks, if not months.
Automate Your Processes with an Event Rental Software
Rentopian Event Rental Software enables businesses to expand more quickly and at a lower cost for staffing. You can gain huge economies of scale with less labor if you invest wisely in tools that will automate your workflow. Event rental software will help eliminate time-consuming tasks so that you can focus your efforts on what’s important – ensuring that the entire show goes off without a hitch!
Running an event rental company requires a whole lot of tools for the owner to use in managing every aspect of his or her business. Not only do you need to keep track of where your inventory is located, but you also need to stay on top of communicating with clients and managing your internal team. You have to do everything from keeping track of who’s coming and going in and out for their shifts, determining which items go where as well as making sure that everyone has all they need at their disposal to do their jobs effectively within a given time frame.
This past year alone has been proof of how much the internet can grow and progress in terms of technology. For example, there have been many instances where we’ve seen entire industries become more familiar with relying on virtual platforms or softwares that were never around before – such as online marketplaces like Airbnb, for example. While the idea of shifting your business to one that’s completely online might seem daunting at first, there are definitely some areas of your event rental business that are ready for a change (and could dramatically improve your workflow) as software like Rentopian can help you streamline processes, increase productivity and save users time overall while growing your business.
- “Inventory Availability” module within Rentopian Event Rental Software
- “Driver Dispatching” module within Rentopian Event Rental Software
- “Online Signature and Payments” module within Rentopian Event Rental Software
Determine Your “Time Suck” Tasks and Outsource Them
“Time Suck” tasks are pretty obvious – an activity to which one devotes a lot of time that might be better or more productively spent doing other things. For example– as a smaller event rental company, maybe you were able to handle laundering your rental linen in-house. If you didn’t have too many linen rentals going out, you could get away with laundering and ironing the linen once a week by yourself.
As you scale and grow your business, the number of linens you rent out will increase. While you may be able to handle the time-consuming tasks that need to be done if you’re renting out linen, you can only keep up for so long. There will be a tipping point where the expenses associated with keeping several staff members to launder the linen, commercial equipment to wash and steam the linen, and commercial detergents will outweigh the expense of outsourcing it to a laundry company service. In contrast, the laundry company provides services of laundry pickup, laundering, ironing/steaming, and dropping off back at your location for a minimal fee– typically much less than it would cost you to do so.
Sometimes it’s best to outsource things. After all, you don’t only need money to scale your business – you need time too and if there are people out there who can do the job cheaper and quicker than you can, why not let them? Hire a reliable third-party vendor instead of trying to do everything in-house; then you will be able to spend more time on the important things that only you can handle as an entrepreneur like handling customers or working directly with suppliers for example.
Final Thoughts
There are a lot of moving parts to a successful business. Assuming your event rental business is going well, you might be thinking about how and when to expand operations. That’s a natural decision for companies experiencing growth – especially those that have high demand and limited resources.
Scaling a business comes with its own challenges. As an event rental business owner, one must be able to honestly assess what they have and what they need to grow their company. One must employ the necessary resources that will help them save time and money, and automate processes by using event rental software.
Rentopian streamlines the management of your events and makes it easier for you to carry out your day-to-day tasks. For example, thanks to Rentopian’s automated inventory management and order bookings, you won’t have to manually update your inventory or input new orders when customers request different items. You can also be sure that invoices are issued promptly because Rentopian features an automated billing system for your clients. To learn more about how Rentopian helps you improve upon standard rental business processes at an affordable cost, contact us today for a free demo and a 2-week trial!