You can run a profitable rental company and still go out of business. It may sound backward, but a good share of the companies that go under were making money right up until the end. What got them was cash flow, not profit.
On episode 119 of The Rental Roundtable, I sat down with Brenden Moran, an equipment and event rental business coach who recently joined the Peer Executive Group as a facilitator. Brenden spent years running multi-million-dollar rental operations before starting his own coaching practice, and he works exclusively with equipment and event rental companies on the two things that quietly decide whether a business makes it: cash and people.
We covered a lot, from the 13-week cash flow forecast to hiring for values to why extreme ownership has to start with you. Here is what stuck with me.
Getting Laid Off Three Times Pushed Him to Bet on Himself
Brenden always knew he wanted to coach. A professor introduced him to it in his undergrad years, and the plan was to climb the corporate ladder first, learn everything he could, then bridge into helping other businesses do what he had done. The timeline he had in mind was ten or fifteen years out. Life moved that timeline up for him.
“I was laid off three times in 6 years. And after that third one, I said, maybe I need to pull that dream up into today instead of waiting another 10 or 15 years.” Brenden Moran, Equipment and Event Rental Business Coach, (5:53)
I know that feeling. I was at Uber, a great company, and the pandemic hit and I got laid off, and that was the push I needed to go start Quipli. Sometimes the hardest moment is the one that finally forces you toward the thing you were always meant to do.
Niche Down Until You Are the Only Option
Brenden started out as a generalist coach and quickly realized his message was landing nowhere. So he did his research, looked hard at the rental industry, and decided this was where he belonged. His site now calls him the only consultant dedicated to helping equipment and event rental companies grow profitability.
That kind of focus feels risky, like you are turning away everyone who is not a perfect fit. But that is exactly the point. If you are not an independent equipment or event rental operator, Brenden is not for you, and he is fine with that. For the operators he does serve, he goes deep. His ideal client is a one to five million dollar, locally owned company with one or two locations, run by an owner who is trying to graduate from working in the business to working on it.
The lesson carries straight over to rental. The riches are in the niches. The more specific you are about who you serve and what you are great at, the easier it becomes for the right customers to pick you out of a crowded yard.
Profitable Is Not the Same as Solvent
The first thing Brenden works on with almost every client is cash flow, because if the money side is not figured out, nothing else in the business matters.
“There’s some really interesting statistics out there that show that a good portion of companies that go bankrupt were actually profitable companies. They just didn’t have the proper cash flow.” (10:30)
Rental is capital intensive. You make a big purchase, you get locked into payments, and suddenly your monthly cash is tied up while your receivables slip behind. I heard the same idea last week sitting with 45 other software CEOs. The founder of the biggest company in the room said it perfectly: ARR is vanity, cash flow is sanity.
Brenden’s fix is not a mountain of new tasks. It is a disciplined cadence around a few things that actually matter: your P&L, your cash flow statement, and a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast so you can see a dip coming and pull a lever before it hits. As he put it, with knowledge comes power, and that lets you make decisions with confidence instead of out of fear. Good software should make that visibility easier, not harder, which is a big reason we built Quipli to put your utilization, revenue, and receivables in one place instead of scattered across spreadsheets.
Good People Are Out There, You Just Have to Manage Them
The second recurring issue is team. Every owner tells Brenden the same thing: good help is hard to find. He likes to point out that this complaint is not new. There is graffiti scratched into ancient walls, going back thousands of years, griping that the youth these days are lazy. Every generation says it about the next one. So he flips the question back on the owner.
“The question I have is, is the new generation insufficient or are you not doing a good job at managing them?” (12:49)
His point is that the great people are already out there, waiting for you to find them, develop them, and, in his words, set them on fire inside your company. Most organizations train you just enough to do your job, and often not even that well. They never teach you how to turn the job into a career. The owners who build real teams are the ones who mentor people into more and more capacity over time. Every hour you skip on development, you end up spending on turnover, which costs many times more and is a hidden cost you can barely quantify.
Hire for Values and Tell People the Truth
Brenden ties hiring back to strategy. Before you post a job, you should know your operating values, because you hire, onboard, train, and evaluate through the lens of those values. You end up with an ideal profile for the people who join your company, the same way you have an ideal profile for your customers.
“We don’t want most people. We want the people that really believe in what we’re doing here.” (19:17)
He is also a firm believer in the good, the bad, and the ugly conversation up front. He told a story about interviewing a young man for a hard role, laying out exactly what it would demand, and watching the guy honestly admit it was more than he could take on. Kudos to him for being honest. That is a win, not a loss. If you had hired him anyway, he would have quit or been fired in 60 days, and you would have eaten all those hidden costs. Setting real expectations is not scaring people off. It is respecting them, and it is a form of extreme ownership. If someone shows up on day one shocked at the job, that is on the company. This same instinct is why we go deep on building a real sales team over on episode 113.
Extreme Ownership Starts With the Person in Charge
One of the books on Brenden’s shelf is Extreme Ownership, and it came up again and again. The core idea is that you are far more in control of what happens to you than you think. You may not be at fault, but you are still responsible for doing something about it.
For a leader, that means going first. When you say here is where I could have done better, it breaks the ice, and your team starts doing the same. The alternative is a cover-your-back culture where people hide mistakes because they are afraid of what happens if the truth comes up.
“I don’t care whose fault it is. I just want it to be fixed.” (26:12)
I have lived this. Recently our sales and engineering teams were pointing fingers, and I walked in and said this one is mine, I did not communicate well, 100 percent my fault. Everyone’s guard dropped and we got to work. Our number one company value is customer obsessed, and number two is act like an owner. Some of the best people I have ever worked with were not the top performers, but they took ownership, so I could trust them completely.
Scaling Is Just a Plan You Actually Execute
When I asked Brenden about scaling, he took the mystery out of it fast. In most companies, the strategy lives entirely in the owner’s head. It is never written down, never shared with the leadership team, and certainly never explained to the average employee, who clocks in, clocks out, and has no idea where the company is going or why.
His fix is to write it down and work backward. Strategy, simply stated, is where you are going and how you are going to get there, done in a way few others can replicate. You set the goal, break it into steps, break those steps into smaller pieces, and give everyone a blueprint so they wake up knowing the destination and their part in reaching it.
“There’s nothing mystical or mystifying about it. It is literally coming up with a plan and then making sure we execute that plan.” (33:12)
He compared it to Bill Belichick’s line that football comes down to tackling and catching. Do the basics consistently at a high level and you win most of your games. The hard part is that entropy is always pulling your systems back toward chaos, so you have to reinforce them again and again. It is the illusion of transparency: you said the mission once, it is crystal clear in your head, and you assume everyone got it. They did not. You have to repeat it, and keep repeating it, the same way small consistent gains compound over time. A tool like Quinn can catch the demand while your people stay focused on the plan.
Consistency, Candor, and Ownership
I close every episode by asking for the best career advice someone has gotten. Brenden cheated a little and gave me three, and they happen to summarize the whole conversation.
The first is consistency. Most people will not do it, and that alone will set you apart.
“Most people will not be consistent. If you can be, you will be separate from 99% of the people that are out there.” (36:50)
The second is candor. Honesty is always the best choice, because every drama you have ever watched is built on someone deciding it was not. The third is ownership: it is not what happens to you, it is what you do with it.
Cash flow, team, extreme ownership, and a plan you actually execute. None of it is mystical. It is the basics, done consistently, for a long time. At Quipli, we built our platform for operators like you who want to spend less time fighting their tools and more time running the plays that grow the business. If that sounds like the year you want to have, come see it in action.
