08/25/2024
Never Say No and Dynamic Pricing
Before I even owned my first table I called some out of state SUCCESSFUL rental companies (if my goal is to be a $10-million company one day - why would I take advice from a guy that’s been in business 8-years and still doing less than $1-million??? ). BEFORE I go on let me say there is ABSOLUTELY nothing wrong with that guy as he is probably making a nice living for his family but I wanted more than that - I wanted to build something I could sell one day and retire comfortably)…
The Best Piece Of Advice I received (and I can’t remember who I spoke with) was from either the owner or manager of Town and Country Rentals In Southern California (I believe that’s where they were located - it was 2004): “Never Say No”
We built our company with this mantra - our company culture was to Never Say No. I am amazed at how many posts I see about how owners/managers almost chastise people who call at the last minute. Call our company on a Friday afternoon for tent(s) 200-miles away - we made it happen (at 3X our normal pricing). Call us on a Saturday morning because your wedding is at 4:00 outside and it’s raining? No problem we will get a tent set up (at 3X price). Sometimes people paid sometimes they didn’t but it was their choice - we would do it on our end but we were going to get paid for it….
Fast forward a few years…..
It’s September 10th and we are SLAMMED the entire month of October….We copied the hotel, car rental, airline, etc industry by using dynamic pricing… We looked at our workload in our weekly sales meeting and put a multiplier of 25, 75, 100 percent OR MORE. For any orders on certain dates. I recently got back from Alaska where the same rental car I could have rented in October for $25/day cost me $175/day. When I went to pick up the vehicle at the airport the rental lot was bare….Booked a flight on December 24th lately??? How about a hotel in Las Vegas on a weekend….
As time went on we just made certain months “dynamically priced” automatic. For Instance we knew that every May was busy (not crazy - but busy) so we automatically put in a 20% increase on all orders for that month (as we got closer and our schedule got busier we increased from there - so if someone called mid April for a tent mid May they may have paid 50% or more dynamically price. October was by far our busier month so we started at a 50% dynamic price and increased from there…
Trying to keep this as succinct as possible: bottom line is NEVER SAY NO - put a price on the service that you will make it happen! Also share the love with the guys setting the event up - I have never gone to a hurricane without a couple thousand dollars in 100 dollar bills to hand out to our installers when they had worked 15 hours and we still had to work another 5 - you be surprised what a lift a $100 bill gives people!
