The Rental Roundtable

Some of the best ideas in rental come from people who started on the other side of the counter. In this episode I sat down with Robert LeVar, operations manager and partner at American Rental, to talk about building a drive-thru rental counter, using rerents to test new markets, and why every division of his business runs its own P&L.

You can run a profitable rental company and still go broke. In this episode I sat down with Brenden Moran, an equipment and event rental business coach, to talk about fixing cash flow, building a team that sticks, extreme ownership, and how to scale a rental company without the chaos.

Dan Crowley runs peer groups for hundreds of independent rental owners, so he hears what operators are actually doing before it shows up in anyone's data. Back for a record fifth appearance, the owner of Peer Executive Groups breaks down where AI is already changing rental operations: the counter process going from seven clicks to zero, the jobs it fills instead of replaces, and how the best operators now use data to see what's coming, not just what already happened.

Most people who want to start a rental company stall on the capital and the risk. James Polkinghorne started James Equipment in Tennessee with one skid steer and a "rent me" sign, then grew it past 70 machines. He breaks down how he bootstrapped the fleet with no money down, found the contractor market the nationals overlooked, and survived the thankless early years.

Alex Koufos spent 18 years climbing the ranks at national rental companies before betting on himself and launching K5 Rental in Arizona. In this episode, he shares why sales is the most important skill a rental owner can have, how he hires for integrity over experience, and why independents can consistently beat the nationals on the one thing the big players struggle with most: customer service.

Picking the right equipment rental software is one of the highest-stakes decisions an operator makes, and the failure rate on migrations is brutal. In this episode, Patrick Tunnicliffe, CEO of RentalWise, returns as the very first Rental Roundtable guest to talk about why the usual research options fall short, how a rental-specific review site works for both operators and vendors, and where AI is about to reshape what rental software can actually do.

Get free access to the full RentalWise e-book library plus a new Certificate of Insurance grading tool. Sign up and post a review of your rental software to get access.

This episode is a little different. Kyle steps out of the host seat and joins ⁠Leo Gestetner⁠ on ⁠A Founders Life⁠ podcast to talk about something the show doesn't usually cover: how he balances building ⁠Quipli⁠ with family, health, and a life he's proud of. If you own an independent rental company, you're a founder too, and much of this will resonate, whether it's protecting your health or learning to trust your team enough to let them fail.

Hiring a sales rep and hoping the revenue follows is one of the most common mistakes in equipment rental. Dillon Baird, founder and CEO of RepMove, spent years as a high-producing field sales rep before building a tool to solve the exact problems he faced. In this episode, he breaks down how to set up your first rep for success, what a top performer's day actually looks like, and why activity beats everything else when it comes to growing a book of business.

Independent rental companies don't need a national chain's budget to win on Google. They need better local targeting. In this episode, Constantin Cornita, founder and CEO of Activesales, breaks down how to run Google Ads specifically for equipment rental, why being local is your edge over the nationals, and how to track revenue instead of clicks so every dollar you spend is doing real work.

Most rental operators think the carrier is the most important part of their insurance. Michael Bell, President of Robert Bell Insurance Brokers, says it's actually the broker. In this episode, he breaks down how rental insurance pricing really works, the coverage gaps that catch operators off guard, and why shopping on price alone is the fastest way to get burned when a claim actually hits.