Spend a career trading corn, wheat, and soybeans, and you learn exactly what happens to anyone who sells a commodity on price alone. Patrick Hart brought that lesson into rental, and you can see it in almost every decision at One Call Rentals.
On episode 124 of The Rental Roundtable, I sat down with Patrick Hart, owner of One Call Rentals in Denver, Colorado. The company focuses on temporary power, temporary heat, and fuel delivery, and Patrick bought it a little over a year ago after a career in finance and global commodity trading.
An outsider’s first year is a useful mirror for those of us who have been in rental a long time. Patrick’s fresh eyes caught a few things the rest of us might be too close to see.
Know Which Parts of Your Fleet Are Corn
Patrick’s trading career grew into a global vessel program serving Central America and the Caribbean, where corn and soybeans can be a matter of national security. If the grain doesn’t come in, they can’t feed the herds. Important work, but it meant 12-hour flights away from a couple of young kids. Patrick wanted to put that effort into the local community, and found a 20-year-old rental business whose owner was ready to move on, winning it against in-state and out-of-state bidders.
The business, originally called One Call For It All, had been built entirely on word of mouth: no website, no marketing, no ERP, just good customers and fantastic employees. Since closing, Patrick has added all three and doubled down on temporary power, temporary heat, and a fueling division that runs almost like its own company. They still do some general rental when customers ask, but it isn’t the focus.
“I don’t love general rental. I would view a 19-foot scissor lift as corn; it’s a commodity. Everybody’s got one. We do them where there’s need and where customers ask us to play, but we really try to focus in the specialty space where we have a lot of expertise.” Patrick Hart, Owner, One Call Rentals, (5:14)
That’s a useful lens for any independent. Which parts of your fleet are corn, and where do you have expertise nobody down the street can match? The specialty side is where you can compete on something other than the lowest rate.
Buy the Foundation, Then Build the Platform
Patrick was open to almost any business, with a few criteria. It had to be big enough to be worth the effort; owning nine companies that make $50,000 each just means nine jobs and nine sets of books. And it needed decent margins, because at 3% or 5%, one lever flips the wrong way and you’re upside down.
Coming from outside the industry, Patrick wanted cash flow from day one, so buying an established book of business meant “buying a foundation that you can then build a platform off of.” You pay a multiple for that, but it beats building customers, staff, and fleet at once while burning cash. Learning the equipment meant jumping into the deep end: research, ride-alongs, and site visits. If you’re weighing a purchase, start with our guide on how to value a rental business. Chris Graeler also walked through the build-from-scratch route on episode 106.
Learn From Other People’s Mistakes
The biggest help in the last six months, Patrick said, has been a peer group, with a shout-out to Dan Crowley of Peer Executive Groups.
“The peer groups, if not for just your own sanity where you’re sitting there going, okay, am I thinking about this wrong? Are we just totally missing the ball? Having peers to say ‘Hey, are you guys dealing with this too?’” (10:08)
Hearing that other owners deal with the same problem beats stewing over it for a week, and Patrick tries to give back by making connections.
Charlie Munger said one of the surest ways to a miserable life is to refuse to learn from the experiences of others. I joined a peer group myself a couple of years ago, and the biggest benefit has been emotional: you realize you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. As Patrick put it, the owner is the backstop. Some days you get great news followed by two terrible things and wonder if you can just enjoy one day. Noah Crowley made the case for peer groups in the age of AI on episode 122.
Swim With the Sharks, Not Against Them
Denver is a top-20 market with every national and large regional, and a dwindling number of independents. One Call focuses on commercial work: delivery-oriented, larger, longer-term projects. Patrick leaned into partnerships with the competition, picturing the little fish that swim under a shark’s belly.
“You have these sharks that are the nationals. We’re not going to replicate that... We’re not a billion-dollar company. We don’t have the scale... But there’s a lot that we can do that they’re not able to do.” (14:31)
That means rerentals in both directions, without taking advantage of what you learn. When a national sees a customer as a credit risk, One Call can manage that customer while the national still gets utilization. Some branches have told Patrick that One Call has been behind some of their record years.
The pie isn’t fixed. Independents who work together can grow it. Robert LeVar explained how American Rental uses rerents to test new markets on episode 120.
You Can’t Win Loyalty on Price
At a rental owners’ dinner in July, one owner had found a 10-year-old rate sheet, and the 19-foot scissor lift rate hadn’t moved. Patrick sees it through supply and demand: post-COVID, by Patrick’s read, the industry carried around $5 billion of excess equipment, and new shops often get in by going cheap.
“You can do that and you’ll win the business, but the moment you move pricing, they were only choosing you for price. We try to trick ourselves into [thinking], once I get them, they’ll love me and then we’ll be able to take pricing up and we’ve got them. But that’s not why they went with you in the first place, so you’re going to lose them on price.” (19:03)
You have to be competitive, but not bottom of the barrel. Because an independent isn’t the swing renter in its market, it can stay more disciplined when demand dips. When a customer sends Patrick a competitor’s quote at half the rate, sometimes the answer is simply good luck.
In specialty work, “the service is worth way more than the price.” One customer told them every one-minute delay costs $10,000. If heaters fail on a night Colorado drops below zero, you could be redoing the piping on a seven-story building. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, not a couple hundred saved on a monthly rate. Most operators find the most price-sensitive customers are also the most likely to damage equipment and pay late. Build around the ones who pay for reliability.
Twenty Minutes a Day With AI
At an in-person roundtable in January, Dan Crowley pushed owners to start using AI. Patrick had excuses: no time, couldn’t figure it out, still carrying an iPhone 6. Dan’s tough love was to give it 20 to 30 minutes a day. Patrick blocked the time, settled on Claude, and was soon writing Python with no software background.
“It’s almost like IKEA instructions for how to build software or different tools. If you can follow directions and if you can come up with ideas... now we’re in a world where you have that tool.” (26:22)
One Call now uses AI for marketing, FP&A, dispatch, and almost every other function. A month-end report that took three or four hours of pulling from QuickBooks now just shows up, and every field employee has a Claude subscription with guardrails. Patrick sees AI as an equalizer: independents move faster, and when one extra hire is a huge bump in operating expenses (opex), efficiency matters more. In Patrick’s words, this is “our reading and writing of the Renaissance era.”
I shared a sneak peek of where we’re headed: an MCP on top of Quipli data, so you can ask Claude “what’s my best performing equipment today?” without exporting anything. For owners who would rather buy it off the shelf, we’re building agentic tools like Quinn. Patrick’s take: it’s your data, and you should be able to use it. Dan went deeper on AI in rental operations on episode 118.
Decide What You Want, Then Work Backwards
I close every episode by asking for the best career advice a guest has received. Patrick’s answer was a question.
“Something I always ask the kids I mentored is what do you want in your life? Figure that out and then start to work backwards.” (34:27)
The answer is different for everybody, even though we all get pushed toward one path. Patrick’s advice is to spend real time on what you want, then shape your work, your schedule, and your health around it. Your journey is your journey.
You get to define what success means, and somebody else winning doesn’t mean you’ve lost. Patrick lived this. I’d bet the question got answered somewhere on one of those 12-hour flights, and the answer was a business close to home. If part of what you want is more hours back from the busywork, I’d love to show you what we’re building.
