RentalWise
Patrick Tunnicliffe

Patrick Tunnicliffe

Founder and President, RentalWise

Patrick spent seventeen years inside rental operations: seven in marine rental, then ten growing a single-location event and equipment rental operation in the Pacific Northwest from nine people to thirty-three. For the last six years he has advised rental operators on running theirs, and he runs the directory that tells them which software is worth buying.

Rental, from the inside

Seven years in marine rental, then a decade growing one event and equipment rental business: headcount from nine to thirty-three, with the revenue and the fleet mix growing alongside. He shopped for rental software, implemented it, and lived with the result. Point of Rental, IntegraRental and MCS are platforms he has implemented himself.

By his own account he ran that business as an engineer: trial and error, measured. It worked. He found peer groups only afterwards, and says he would have learned faster with them all along.

In January 2020 he moved into consulting and technology implementation advisory for rental operators, and has done that work for six years now.

A business operating system, built for rental

He has implemented EOS with rental leadership teams many times, and every time the generic tools needed translating: which numbers belong on a rental scorecard, which processes actually run the counter and the yard, which software the business should run on. The RentalWise System is the business operating system that came out of that work. It is based on EOS principles and leaves nothing of EOS out. What it adds is the rental work, already done:

  • Rental KPIs. 151 defined rental measures, 12 of them the signature numbers every rental business should watch, backed by 62 lines of peer benchmarks.
  • Core processes. 13 rental procedures across 108 steps, each tied to the 57 points where a scorecard number is actually created.
  • Software and technology. The stack decision rests on the directory on this site: facts about every rental platform, not a vendor’s demo.
  • Where AI fits. Every process step is marked for whether AI can run it, help with it, or should stay with a person.

He is also one of the consultants at Peer Executive Groups, where he facilitates peer groups of rental business owners.

Why RentalWise exists

In those peer groups and implementations one question kept coming up: which software should I use? Nobody who knew rental was answering it honestly. The big review sites rank every kind of software for every kind of business. RentalWise covers rental only, with facts read from each vendor’s own site, reviews from operators who run the software, and analyst scores no vendor can buy.

How he scores software

  • Vendor money buys visibility, never a score or a ranking.
  • An unfavourable finding publishes, the same as a favourable one.
  • A vendor whose product has changed can commission a fresh assessment. Nobody can buy a different score.
  • Where RentalWise also advises a vendor it scores, the listing says so beside the score.

Before rental

A mechanical engineering degree, then snowboard cross on the World Cup circuit for Canada, chasing the 2010 Olympic Games while doing engineering work on the side. The Games did not happen. The habits came with him into rental: process, operational efficiency, and the nerve to keep going.

Hear him, or reach him