Every so often on this show I get to close a loop, and episode #115 was one of those. My guest was Patrick Tunnicliffe, CEO of RentalWise, and if the name rings a bell, it should. Patrick was the very first guest we ever had on The Rental Roundtable. 114 episodes later, he came back, and this time he built something the industry has quietly needed for years.
Patrick’s road into rental isn’t a straight line, which is exactly why it’s worth hearing. But the real reason I wanted him back was to talk about RentalWise, the first software review platform built only for equipment and event rental operators. If you’ve ever tried to pick a rental software and drowned in a Facebook thread full of conflicting opinions, this one is for you.
From World Cup Snowboarding to the Rental Yard
Patrick is an engineer by training who took a hard left turn long before he got near a rental counter.
“I finished that up and joined the snowboard cross racing World Cup. I raced, represented Canada doing that.” Patrick Tunnicliffe, CEO of RentalWise, (3:51)
After the racing chapter closed, he took an engineer’s mindset, analytical and process-driven, and mashed it together with the mental toughness he’d built on the mountain. He spent the next decade in equipment rental, growing an operation from nine employees to thirty-three, with the fleet and revenue to match. That operator’s scar tissue is the foundation for everything he’s building now.
The Lesson That Took a Decade: You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
For a while, Patrick ran his company like an engineer - A/B testing, trial and error, figuring it all out himself. And it worked. But the thing he wishes he’d found sooner wasn’t a tactic. It was community. He didn’t come across Peer Executive Groups until late in the game, and looking back, that’s the thing he’d change.
“Had I known, I would have been doing that all along and doing a lot less trial and error and using some proven ideas.” (5:35)
I’ll admit I was guilty of the same thing. I spent years telling everyone to join a peer group while I wasn’t in one myself. I finally joined one two years ago, and I’d literally come off my monthly meeting ten minutes before we hit record.
So how does a newer operator, or someone out in a rural area without a competitor across the street, actually get connected? Patrick’s answer: peer groups first, then the big rental Facebook groups to get calibrated on what the industry is talking about, then the ARA show. None of it works if you keep your cards to your chest.
Why the Big Review Sites Don’t Work for Rental
When it comes to software, the community instinct is right but the tools are wrong. Nobody serious is buying their rental platform off G2 or Capterra. Those horizontal sites rank everything and understand nothing about our industry. And Facebook groups, as useful as they are, turn into chaos the second someone asks “what’s the best rental software?” You get a pile of well-meaning answers from people who know nothing about your market, your fleet mix, or the problems you’re actually trying to solve.
I compared it to someone asking me how to run faster. If I don’t know your times, your injury history, or what race we’re even talking about, any advice I give is worthless. That’s the gap Patrick set out to close.
It’s the same reason nobody runs a rental business on Salesforce or QuickBooks. You need vertical software built for the way rental actually works. That’s the whole reason we built Quipli, and it’s the same logic Patrick applied to reviews.
How RentalWise Actually Works
RentalWise serves both sides of the market, the way the ARA show does. Vendors can claim and curate their listing so it accurately represents what their system does. Operators can review any software they’ve used, past or present, and it goes far deeper than a five-star rating. You review feature by feature: what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s missing.
“Now we have a very well-indexed, very well-classified set of softwares, where vendors can pay to get visibility, but they can’t pay for a ranking.” (12:47)
It’s moderated and vetted both ways, more like a Reddit thread than a pay-to-play comparison page. If an operator says a platform is missing something, the vendor gets a chance to respond in their own voice. And under it all is the piece Patrick is proudest of: the taxonomy.
“I’m particularly proud of how we’ve created a taxonomy that works for everybody and consolidates those features into a proprietary list of features.” (14:36)
That structure is what lets you go line by line instead of arguing over vibes. It’s early, 150 features cataloged across 81 platforms already, but the model is built so that every review makes the next operator’s decision sharper. And the best part for vendors: a happy operator leaving honest reviews costs the vendor nothing and helps the entire industry.
Integrations Are Part of the Whole Picture
One thing Patrick learned quickly after launching: you can’t review a rental platform in a vacuum. If a vendor offers telematics through an integration partner like Hapn, that’s still a real, usable feature. The operator doesn’t care where the line of code lives, they care whether the whole stack works. So RentalWise expanded to index integration partners too, and you can now filter for the platforms that connect to the tools you already run.
That mirrors how we think about it. A modern rental platform is the control point in the center, the ERP, with routing, payments, telematics, and the rest connecting in around it. The question isn’t whether one product does absolutely everything. It’s whether the full solution fits how you actually operate.
Building for the Age of AI
The reason RentalWise has to be dynamic, not a static page reviewed once a year, is that features are moving faster than ever. What a platform could do twelve months ago is almost irrelevant now. Patrick has already started indexing AI capabilities, so an operator can search for who has an AI-powered feature, whether a voice agent, a chat agent, or AI-assisted routing, instead of guessing.
I shared an example from our own world: an after-hours voice agent that had booked five rentals the night before. That’s exactly the kind of “wow” moment Patrick sees coming for the whole industry, and it’s the thinking behind Quinn, our AI agent. His bigger point was aimed at software vendors: the ones who open up win.
“The software vendors have this really cool opportunity now to become a little bit less closed... offering an API or an MCP, a model context protocol.” (33:22)
When your system of record becomes a system of action, when your rental data can feed a dashboard, a CRM, or an agent that does real work, the ceiling on what an everyday operator can build goes way up. The platforms that make that easy are the ones that will matter in three to five years.
Start on the List
I closed with the question I now ask every guest: the best career advice you’ve ever gotten. Patrick’s went all the way back to a teenage job at a marina, where his boss caught him sitting on the counter drinking a coffee and handed him what he called the “infinity list”: everything that always has to get done, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. If you ever feel idle, start on the list.
That habit grew into how he runs his life and his consulting work today, and it’s pure EOS: name the one-year goal, break it down, and protect the things that actually move you forward.
“You’re always focused on those big rocks being sorted out, and then fit in the rest in between those things, because those big rocks have to be what happens.” (40:09)
For rental owners, that’s the whole game. Get clear on your big rocks, your team, your customers, your fleet, and build the systems and choose the tools that keep you focused on them instead of the busywork in between.
If you want to check out what Patrick built specifically for Rental Roundtable listeners, head to RentalWise, leave your first review, and it unlocks a set of free e-books pulled from years of rental industry insight. And if you want to see how we help operators take work off their plate, come take a look at Quipli.
