Most business books are written by people who have never had a van fail to turn up at five in the morning.
Rental is a fantastic model for generating income from an asset you still own. You buy a thing, it earns for years, and you still have it at the end. The returns are healthy as long as you’re clever about four things: what you buy, what you pay for it and when, what you charge to send it out, and what you sell it for when you’re done.
Out January 2027.
By Benjamin Bowles, founder of Signals Rental Framework
“There was nothing wrong with the business except that it was illegal to operate it.”
The book opens in March 2020. In the second week the bookings started to evaporate, and by the time lockdown was announced the forward pipeline stood at zero. What looked like a half-million-pound problem turned out to be nearer one and a half, most of it the cost of money. The team went from five to two.
Two people, no work, and a warehouse full of kit that wasn’t going anywhere. It would have been easy to lock the door and wait. We treated it as the one chance we’d ever get to rebuild the business with nobody in the way. The rest of the book is what we rebuilt, and why.
Four things to manage, two foundations to build, and twelve chapters on how.
Utilisation
How hard the fleet works. The only way to get it high is to own the kit people actually want, and not the kit they don’t.
Yield
What that work earns. Pricing sits underneath it, and most rental owners set prices with a shrug.
Customer satisfaction
What keeps the engine fed. Good service is where pricing power and repeat business come from.
Debt
What makes the whole thing possible, and what will end it if you get it wrong.
People and systems are the foundations. The twelve pillars, in order:
- Fleet and demand
- Market
- Customer
- Route to market
- Pricing
- Utilisation
- Yield
- Systems
- Customer satisfaction
- People and culture
- Capital and funding
- Financial management
From chapter one
“We’d thought we sold shows, then we thought we sold equipment, and we sell neither. We sell the time that equipment spends working for somebody else, and the whole business is a machine for making as much of that time as possible.”
“In 2014 we bought a Robe Pointe, a moving light, for about £2,500. It’s still on the shelf, it’s still going out, and it’s still earning £40 to £50 a week in 2026, going into 2027.”
“The revenue goes up and the margin on the extra work goes down, and at the end of the summer you’ve worked harder than ever and have less to show for it than the year before.”
Written for three kinds of people. I’ve been all three.
Thinking about starting
You want to know what you’re getting into before you sign the first finance agreement.
Running one, and stressed by it
Working every hour, without the financial security or the freedom that owning a business is supposed to bring.
Running one in the dark
Making decisions on instinct, because you’ve never had the numbers to make them any other way.
Benjamin Bowles
I’m the founder and group CEO of Complete Equipment Group (CEG), a UK equipment rental business supplying the live events, festival, broadcast and touring industries. I started it from scratch in 2008 and have grown it bootstrapped and independent, without outside investors, through the unglamorous realities of the trade: fleet investment, logistics, seasonal cashflow and the constant pressure of keeping kit working on site.
That has left me with a practical, numbers-first view of what makes a rental business succeed, and a healthy scepticism of software and advice built by people who have never had a truck turn up late. So I built my own. Signals Rental Framework is an open-source rental management platform for owner-operators, and it runs CEG’s own operation. I live near Cambridge, England, with my partner and young son.
Signals Rental Framework