It’s exhilarating when you’re running a successful rental business, and you may find yourself considering another location. Not only will this mean more profits, but it also means your rental company can expand into a new market. However, there are several things you need to consider before opening a second location for your rental business.
It can be a fantastic thing to expand your rental business, but you need to make sure you can do it without sacrificing your primary location. This means you need to be already making a steady income and have staff that can handle the running of your rental business while you work on launching the second location. You also need to duplicate your rental business and find a partner to manage it because you can’t be in two places at once.
There is a lot of hard work that goes into launching a second location, but thankfully your inventory management can be easy. Booqable has support for multiple locations so that you can manage both from one account. For example, locations can share an inventory, or you can set different stock levels per location. In addition, our rental software is flexible and works around your needs and requirements, so you don’t have a headache to deal with when opening a second store.
What can a second location bring to your business?
The most important thing a second location can bring to your business is more customers! Opening a new location in a different city means you are visible to a whole new population of people that can rent from you. Of course, it is essential to research which city is correct for you where your rental products are in demand and the competition is low.
Secondly, it means that the return on your investment in inventory can be much more significant. Locations can share stock, so if someone in one city isn’t renting your products, they can be rented by someone in another. This means you never have stock just laying about and can make more off one product than you would if you only had one location.
Finally, it will allow you to grow your business and can be the first step in building a rental empire. This results from the increased traffic the new location will bring, as well as additional revenue, and can be a test to see how viable expanding your business beyond your primary location would be. It also means you can expand your inventory quicker and provide more value to your customers.
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What are your options for opening a second location?
There are many options when it comes to opening a second location for your rental business. You could buy or lease a shop in another city and have a permanent location set up for your business. You could partner with another company that doesn’t compete with your own and offer a “store in store” set up to provide a pick-up and drop-off location. Or you could set up a locker location where people can pick up and drop off items without any people needed on site.
Buy or lease a shop
This is perhaps the most expensive of the options you can choose from and require quite a significant initial investment. However, it can be the safest of the three options we have laid out for you. It means your rental store has a permanent physical location in another city that the right amount of people can staff.
Partner with another company
Partnering with another company has three benefits for your rental business.
- It establishes your brand in another city.
- You can benefit from the foot traffic of an existing business.
- It has significantly fewer costs involved. Many other rental businesses have found success in opening locations with this method.
Set up a locker location
Much like Amazon and other delivery companies, you can set up a locker location where people can collect their rental products without dealing with a person. They can be secured with codes given to customers before pick-up and can’t be accessed by anyone without a code. This means your products are safe, and your staffing costs are reduced while establishing your brand in another city.
How can Booqable help you open a second location?
Booqable enables you to manage stock and take orders from multiple locations within the inventory management interface. You can set different stock levels for each location or manage them as a cluster. The second option means you need to arrange transport between locations to ensure products are available for the times customers have booked them.
This allows you to effectively manage both locations of your business from one central system and share stock between them. As mentioned previously, you can then rent products out between two different stores and reduce the downtime or your inventory. This not only serves more customers but also increases the return you see from each item.
