It’s Spring Training Time for your Party Rental Company
If you’re not a baseball fan, chances are you didn’t know this is spring training season. Major League Baseball teams have headed south in preparation for their upcoming baseball season. And here in our industry, it’s not much different for your party rental company.
Spring is a vital time for a party rental company to prepare itself for the summer. Getting your rental business out of hibernation is more involved than some newcomers to our industry might realize. You need to prepare your inventory, your staff, and yourself as best as possible for everything the new season might bring.
In the baseball world, spring training kicks off with pitchers and catchers reporting in, and ends with a series of exhibition games warming the players up for the lengthy, grueling baseball season. Of course, things are quite a bit different in the rental world.
For a party rental company, spring training entails brushing up on best business practices, communicating with other companies to spot emerging trends, refreshing your staff on operational topics, and more.
Let’s explore some of these spring training efforts your party rental company could undertake to hopefully bolster your revenue and improve your working relationships with your customers. And most of these tips won’t cost you anything, apart from some free time!
(In)Valuable Training Resources on the Web
No one with a lick of experience will ever tell you running a small business is easy. It’s not. It’s mentally and emotionally tasking. And deciding to start a party rental company means your work will be physically tasking, too.
We can’t do much to help with the physical challenges of the job (apart from suggesting you invest in hand trucks and dollies, of course). But the mental part of the job—expanding your capabilities through training—that’s definitely something we can offer some friendly advice on!
The American Rental Association (ARA) offers its members a massive collection of education and training resources catered specifically to our line of work. The ARA Learning Center and RentalU both offer rental-specific small business training not just for you, but for your employees on a wide range of topics, from the basics of event safety through complex marketing strategies. You need to be a registered ARA member to access these tools, but they’re definitely worth it.
Your party rental company is a small business, and that means broader business concepts will apply to your company as well. That’s why we also strongly recommend taking the time to visit the Small Business Administration (SBA) Learning Center. This is a great (and completely free!) resource for learning about general business practices and small business operations. They have loads of small business training courses and content that illustrates how to lead your company toward success.
This is probably a good time to shamelessly plug TNT’s blog, too. We try to make our blog as informative and useful to party and event rental professionals as possible. Take some time today to browse through our content and find content that benefits you!
Getting Chatty on Social Media
Here’s another free resource readily available on the web to every party rental company owner and their employees: social media. And while few would question social media’s marketing benefits, its use as an educational resource is surprisingly overlooked by most entrepreneurs.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can put you in direct contact with industry professionals not just here in the United States, but around the globe. Facebook groups let you get advice from people directly in the know, and offer your own advice to others as well.
Whatever challenges your party rental company is facing, chances are another business in this space has already faced and overcome it. Join Facebook groups and other social media platforms and ask around. Reply to the questions of others if you’re confident you know the answer and share links to the resources you've found valuable. Get involved in the online community as a party and event rental business operator and elevate your capacity to solve problems.
Avoid Insanity: Stop Repeating Old Mistakes
Let’s reflect for a moment. Looking back on your last party rental season, what were your biggest successes and achievements? What were your most harrowing challenges, and how did you overcome them? And if you didn’t overcome them, what exactly was it that held you back?
It’s important you take the time to figure out not only what went right last season, but what went wrong. And the “why” is critical here, too. It’s not enough for us to know a particular experience was good or bad. We need to know why it was good or bad, and why everything transpired the way it did.
We’ve all heard the word “insanity” defined as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result (it’s apparently not an Albert Einstein quote). It’s only logical then that you’d want to identify your problems from last season and change course in this new season, right?
Take some time to really sit down and write up a list of good and bad experiences from the previous season. Try your best to attribute those successes and failures to factual, quantifiable, measurable factors.
Once you’ve drawn up that full list, you’ll spot ways you and your employees could’ve improved your business practices to avoid mistakes and enhance positive experiences. You’ll dodge problems better and capitalize on opportunities stronger. And the ability to analyze failures and transform them into future successes is the difference between a good entrepreneur and a great one.
Develop a Standard Operating Procedure
After analyzing your successes and mistakes from the last season, there’s a good chance most of you will spot a few trends emerging. And many of you are going to begin to realize something that may be surprising: a lot of the mistakes you and your employees keep making aren’t big, complex, challenging things. They’re little, silly, easy, mundane things.
This phenomenon is a lot more common than you probably realize. Once the human brain masters a standard, repetitive, routine operation, we tend to leave it up to muscle memory while applying our real thought to bigger, more challenging tasks. But muscle memory makes mistakes. You’ll absent-mindedly skip steps. And that’s where those sorts of mistakes stem from.
The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore found that its surgeons were also making simple but costly errors. Errors that resulted in people dying. And their breathtaking solution to this problem was nothing short of inspirational: they created a simple checklist of those simple, basic, almost primitive steps that doctors had so haphazardly overlooked.
The end result? They saved a whole lot of lives and prevented the spread of infections.
The moral of the story is simple. Create checklists of your party rental company’s standard operating procedures. Don’t skip the small stuff; be sure to include notes on small, repetitive mundane tasks as well as bigger, more complex items. Load up the checklist with safety elements, too!
Make sure employees are taking your checklists seriously. Spend one day per week looking them over. It only takes a few minutes out of their day, and maybe 10 to 20 minutes out of your week. And it’s better to spend that time on checklists than hours or even whole days correcting a mistake.
Spring Training with Your Party Rental Equipment
When was the last time you set up a bounce house or a party tent? What was the exact date? If your party rental company ceases operations for any portion of the year due to weather, it may have been a good while.
Some of you stopped setting up in November, while others haven’t done a setup since October. And some people reading this might have not set up a bounce house or party tent since September or even August!
It doesn’t matter if this is your second season in operation or your twenty-second … a refresher isn’t going to hurt anyone. You’re already planning on taking your equipment out of storage to inspect, repair, and clean it, right? So why not use this as an opportunity to make sure everyone understands those standard operating procedures we talked about?
Create checklists and have your staff practice a few setups and tear downs. Workshop ideas on how to improve efficiency and reduce the amount of time you spend on different tasks, without compromising safety. Cultivate a sense that each employee is free to weigh in and make suggestions, too.
It’s not just a matter of practicing setting up, maintaining, and tearing down rental equipment. It’s a process that gets your staff working together again as a team and tightening up the proverbial bolts. And it’s an opportunity to try new procedures and brainstorm better ideas to get things done. When those summertime orders start coming in, your team will truly be firing on all cylinders and ready to take on each job as it comes.
Party Rental Company Spring Training: The Big Takeaways
Let’s put all this together into a brief “TL;DR” summation, shall we?
- Make use of online education, webinar, and training opportunities; find valuable small business training programs and courses online.
- Ask and answer questions on social media; get involved in rental industry groups.
- Analyze your last rental season to find mistakes you can avoid in the new season.
- Figure out ways of turning good, bad, and even ugly past experiences into great future experiences.
- Use checklists to prevent small, simple mistakes from snowballing into huge time-consuming errors.
- Take some time to rehearse setting up, maintaining, and tearing down equipment and use this time as an opportunity to improve efficiency.
We hope your party rental company’s “spring training” goes off without a hitch. If you have any questions regarding any of the tips we shared here, please comment below. And one last thing, before we go: if your party rental company needs to replace any commercial inflatables, party tents, folding tables, or party chairs, give us a call at 1-716-832-8368 and we’ll help you find what you need!