For as long as Kalli Fowler can remember, her dad was on the phone with rental customers at all hours of the day. On the road to her golf tournaments, he’d point out the projects his equipment was working on. He took pride in the work, but Kalli was sure the rental industry wasn’t for her.
On episode 123 of The Rental Roundtable, I sat down with Kalli Fowler, Director of Operations & Marketing at Kaige Kubota, a family-owned equipment dealership and rental company in Odessa, Texas. She’s also the current president of the Texas Rental Association. When she joined, the company had zero online presence and no website.
What I love about her approach is that none of it requires a national-sized budget. It starts with the questions her sales reps already hear from customers every day.
Learn the Business From Every Seat
Kalli’s dad worked his way up as a salesman for some of the bigger players in rental, including United and BlueLine. She had other plans: play golf at the University of North Texas, earn a finance degree, and stay completely away from the equipment industry. Then a wrist injury ended any hope of taking golf further, and by graduation, finance wasn’t that interesting to her anymore, but marketing was. She’d taken a lot of marketing courses at UNT, and she saw her family’s business as a place to grow that career and put her finance background to work.
“I decided to go that route to better myself and better my family company while I was doing it.” Kalli Fowler, Director of Operations & Marketing, Kaige Kubota, (10:14)
Her timing was rough. Her dad had opened his rental location in 2016 and brought on the Kubota dealership in 2020, right as COVID hit and new equipment was arriving in the yard. She came in to own the marketing and the website, but with fewer people able to work, she also helped with parts, worked the rental counter, and handled day-to-day operations. She credits that “learning by fire” for where she is today, helping every department manager build processes that make the business flow together.
You don’t need a pandemic to get that education. Whoever runs your marketing will do better work if they’ve stood behind your counter and heard what customers actually ask. And if you’re hoping the next generation comes back to your business, Brittany Haas shared her version of this story on episode 110.
Show Customers What Your Equipment Builds
What Kalli didn’t expect was how much she’d enjoy rental itself.
Part of it was the variety of customers, from someone working on their own property all the way up to construction companies and the oil field. The other part was the impact. Rental companies have a hand in almost all the buildings and infrastructure around West Texas oil field production, because, as she put it, “you can’t build all of this stuff without equipment.”
That’s worth putting in front of your customers. When you can point at a building and say your equipment helped build it, you’re telling them why you’re worth renting from.
Your Customers’ Questions Are Your Best Content
So how do you tell that story without a national marketing budget? Kalli started from scratch. Her dad built the business the traditional way, by knocking on doors and making phone calls. She also learned fast that a dealership and a rental company are two completely different businesses to market, so they run separate tactics and split the budget.
On the dealership side, Google search ads, SEO, and Performance Max get awareness more easily. On the rental side, it’s very hard for an independent to match the SEO budgets of the bigger players. So Kalli tells her sales reps where the content is.
“Your conversations that you’re having with your customers on a day-to-day basis... that’s our content.” (15:06)
What size excavator do I need for this project? What attachments do I need? Can this skid steer do what I’m trying to accomplish? Those everyday questions become videos and posts, and custom content is their main campaign for 2026. They still run the polished campaigns everybody runs, but walkaround videos and custom builds get far more views. A video of a mower they put a cab on is the closest thing to viral they’ve had.
That’s how you beat the nationals. They have the sterile, perfectly cut marketing, but some of the best-performing ads out there are janky cell phone videos, because when something is too polished, it’s almost not believable. Your reps already know the questions. Answer them on camera. (If you want to go head-to-head on paid search, Constantin Cornita walked through it on episode 112.)
Everybody in the Company Is in Marketing
Some of Kalli’s best results don’t come from the marketing team at all. Reps take a selfie video out on the yard and post it to their own LinkedIn pages, and people message them directly to say they’d love to rent or buy that machine. Individual pages tend to outperform company pages, because people buy from people they trust. To Kalli, marketing and sales are “one and the same.”
It doesn’t stop with sales, either.
“I think ultimately if you look at the big picture, everybody’s in sales. Everybody’s in marketing at a certain point, whether you’re a technician in your bay... you still have to provide good work on that piece of equipment and then it’s going to go into the customer’s hands at that point and that’s good marketing.” (20:04)
Good work in the shop goes into a customer’s hands and comes back as word of mouth. You don’t need a big marketing department. You need a team that understands their work is the marketing.
Make Sure You’re the First Name They Find
Once people are talking about you, how do you know what’s working? Kalli was honest that they don’t do a great job of it yet. They recently implemented Salesforce, and her goal is to follow a lead from a Performance Max click or a Facebook ad all the way to a closed sale. For now, customer surveys tell her most business still comes from word of mouth.
“My job as a marketer is just to make sure that if they do go look for us after they hear about us that we’re the first ones to pop up.” (22:57)
That was the right answer to a trick question, because attribution is never 100%. A customer might hear your radio ad, see a rep’s LinkedIn post, and drive by your yard, then tell you it was the radio. You can’t credit any one touch perfectly, but you can make sure you show up when they search, and track which leads turn into rentals.
Search is changing, too. Kalli hasn’t traced leads to AEO, showing up in AI answers, but she hasn’t been tracking it either, and she wants to get ahead of it. Her instinct is to make your website a knowledgeable source AI can pull answers from. I’d add robust FAQ pages and getting listed on other sites. Most rental companies aren’t building for AI yet, so there’s an opening to move before the nationals catch up.
The TRA Is Where Knowledge Changes Hands
Not everything you need to learn shows up in a search result. The Texas Rental Association is a state chapter of the American Rental Association, and if you’re an ARA member in Texas, you’re automatically a TRA member too. A lot of people don’t realize that.
The board focuses on education, keeping members ahead of legislative proposals that could affect their businesses, and events with ideas operators can implement. Kalli admitted she used to think networking events were just a chance to chat and drink beer. The TRA changed her mind. The generation that started many independent companies is starting to retire, and there’s a huge transfer of knowledge happening.
“You can sit there and have a conversation with someone about retaining employees or how they get their rental utilization up and things like that. Things that you’re dealing with today and they already dealt with it five or 10 years ago and they have an idea.” (31:02)
The relationships pay off in revenue, too. TRA contacts call Kalli when they have a customer with a West Texas project and no equipment available, and ask about a rerent. Her vision is to take the processes veterans spent 20 or 30 years building and fine-tune them with new tools like AI. If you’re newer to rental, get to these events. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Leave It Better Than You Found It
I close every episode by asking for the best career advice a guest has received. Kalli’s answer was simple.
“Leave everything better than you found it. You know, leave your customers better than you found them. Leave your company better than you found it. Leave whatever project you’re working on better than you found it.” (34:55)
That’s her goal as TRA president, building on the position the presidents before her left it in, and her goal at Kaige as she builds it for the next generation. In rental, she said it’s our opportunity to leave our communities better than we found them.
For the record, she left this podcast better than she found it. At Quipli, we built our platform for operators like you, so the busywork gets lighter and you have more time for the customers and the community you’re building. If that sounds like what your team needs, come see it in action.
