TMI / EQUIPMENT RENTAL
TMI helps rental companies see utilization as it happens rather than at month end, close contracts when the unit actually comes back, recover the damage they are entitled to, and hold the rates they publish.
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WHY THIS IS EXPENSIVE
A rental business has a short list of numbers that decide the year: what share of the fleet is on rent, what it rents for against what it should, how fast a unit turns around between contracts, and how much of the damage done to it comes back as revenue. Every one of those numbers is produced by paperwork rather than by the machine.
The equipment is rarely the problem. It is bought well, maintained by people who know it, and delivered by drivers who have done the route for years. What leaks is the record around it: the three days between a unit coming back and someone closing the contract, the damage nobody photographed at delivery, the rate somebody discounted at the counter, and the utilization report that describes last month instead of this morning.
Between the unit returning to the yard and the contract being closed, the asset is neither earning nor available. Nobody decided to give those days away. The off-rent call came in, the unit was checked in by whoever was there, and the paperwork caught up later in the week.
Damage recovery is an evidence business. Without a dated condition record from the moment the unit left, the conversation with the customer is one memory against another, and the company that cannot prove it usually eats it.
Published rates and realised rates separate quietly. A discount given to keep a good customer becomes that customer's rate, then their branch's rate, then the rate anyone who asks gets. The gap is only visible when someone reconciles realised revenue per unit against the card, and almost nobody does that weekly.
None of this needs a bigger fleet. It needs the information the yard already produces — the off-rent call, the delivery photo, the counter's discount — to reach the system on the day it happens rather than at the end of the month.
WHERE COMPANIES GET HELD BACK
The same six things come up in almost every rental company we walk. None of them are about the equipment.
WHAT WE LEARN ON SITE
WHAT TMI CAN BUILD
Off-rent discipline is easier to fix when somebody is sitting at the counter doing it. An operator inside the business →
THE $25,000 AUDIT, READ THROUGH THIS TRADE
The audit is the same instrument in every company: ten areas, ten points each, scored against a written rubric. What changes is what we go looking for. In a rental business it is mostly the distance between the yard and the record.
What the audit is, and what you get → What your software sprawl costs → What the repeat work costs →
THE FIRST BUILD
The off-rent call, the pickup, the check-in and the contract close become one flow with one clock on it. Most rental companies recover billable days here before anything else is built, because the days were already earned.
The hard part is never the screen. It is agreeing what counts as off-rent, who is allowed to say so, and what happens between the call and the unit physically arriving back in the yard.
Dated condition capture at delivery and at return, attached to the contract rather than to a driver's phone, so a damage conversation starts from a record both sides can see.
The hard part is making capture fast enough that a driver with a trailer to drop actually does it, every time, including on a Friday in the rain. If it costs more than a few seconds it will not survive contact with the route.
On-rent share, availability and revenue per unit by class and branch, built from the rental system and the records the yard already keeps rather than from a new round of data entry.
The hard part is agreeing what a unit is. Serialised assets, bulk items and attachments are counted differently in most yards, and a utilization number that mixes them tells nobody anything.
THE TEST
Without asking anyone, in under a minute:
Most rental companies can answer three or four, and the first one only approximately. That gap is the audit, and it is usually worth more than the next five machines.
HOW WE START
Which customer gets the last machine, what a damage claim is worth pursuing, and which account has quietly been given a permanent discount usually live in two or three heads. We start by finding out whose, and what happens to the week when one of them is away.
Submit your info and book a call ↗COMMON QUESTIONS
Usually not. Most rental systems hold contracts and billing perfectly well; what they were never set up to do is show the yard and the office the same picture at the same time. TMI starts by connecting what you already run and only recommends replacing something when the system is genuinely blocking the work.
No. Telematics tells you where a machine is and how hard it is working, which is useful and which many fleets already have. This is about the record around the machine — the contract, the condition, the rate, the close — which is where the billable days go.
It is the normal case, and it is one of the reasons the record matters. A unit that moves between the rental fleet, the demo fleet and the used sales line has to carry its history with it, or the margin on the sale is a guess.
The opposite is the test. If capturing condition or closing a contract adds steps to a busy counter, it will not be done, and a system nobody uses is a failed build. We follow the work first and build around how the yard actually runs.
We can build the evidence and the process that make damage recoverable — dated condition records, a clear assessment step, and claims that do not age quietly. What a given customer agrees to is a commercial conversation and TMI does not publish numbers for it.
Both. A single yard is usually a faster engagement because there is one way of doing things. Multi-branch work takes longer because the first job is finding out how many different ways of doing things there are.
The audit comes first and it is a fixed $25,000. What follows is scoped from the roadmap the audit produces, because the honest answer depends on what we find between the yard and the record.
No. The trade belongs to the people doing it. TMI builds the system that tells them which unit is due, what it is booked on next, and what the last three contracts did to it.
That is the usual starting point and it is what the Data Foundation stage is for. Nothing useful gets built on a record nobody trusts, so connecting and cleaning comes before anything is built on top of it.
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