Glenn Pearson launches branded rental App

Glenn Pearson, a former Director at Easi Uplifts and Riwal UK, is launching an online rental portal and Rental App service for rental businesses.

Slovakia-based Pearson, who left Riwal UK a year ago, has created rentitonline.com to act as a one-stop portal for equipment end users to source machines. He is also offering rental companies their own branded rental App, which end customers can use to order machines and manage their rented equipment.

The App is currently being tested by Onestop Access (Scotland) Ltd, Balloo Hire Centres, Lifterz, and Ramirent’s businesses in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with a view to rolling it out to some end customers on a trial basis.

Although the aim is ultimately to get the online portal up and running, that will require a significant number of rental companies to register, so Pearson is initially focusing on launching the App, which will give rental companies a low-cost and quick way of providing online rental capability.

The guide pricing for the App is between £1000 and £3000 for implementation and training - depending on the scale of the business - plus an ongoing monthly subscription.

“It is the big rental companies who are driving the move to online rentals”, said Pearson, “But SMEs will need something that will allow them to keep up in the technology race. That’s what we are offering.”

The App is sophisticated, incorporating Pearson’s ‘real world’ experience – he created his own rental business in Slovakia and Hungary before teaming up with Easi Uplifts – to accommodate various pricing structures, with special rates for certain customers or recognising service level agreements (SLAs). It also incorporates variable transport costing based on defined zones, distance travelled, machine types and more.

Pricing can, for example, reflect the duration of contracts, with an alert and warning for customers who order equipment for long durations and then end the contracts early.

To get up and running, rental companies need only send the list of their equipment and transport fleet, with the equipment specifications then populated from Lectura’s machine databases.

Pearson said the most time-consuming part of the process was getting rental companies to provide detailed pricing structures, but once that is done the App can go live very quickly. He said rental companies can also install an ‘equipment search’ form on their home page, linking to the data on the App.

He argued that fears about price ‘commodification’ using this kind of technology were unfounded, and that the Apps will actually provide an opportunity for rental companies to safeguard pricing. He said establishing pricing through the App takes it out of the hands of sales staff, and can potentially transform sales people into customer relationship managers.

He said the data captured by the App will also help rental companies. For example, they will be able to track lost business in a recordable way.