For many, discovering the rental industry is a lightbulb moment where their entire perspective on business operations changes. Adam Maxey experienced this when he realized he could rent out the custom tables he made for weddings. Being new to the industry, there was a learning curve, but Booqable helped him solve many early teething problems he faced.
APMweddings
In 2015, Adam created his custom woodworking business, where he would create custom wooden tables for customers. After doing this for a few years, he discovered he could rent the tables he made for weddings. In 2019, his business model changed completely, and he rented a 5 foot x 10 foot storage unit to store his tables while customers were not renting them.
Over the past few years, he has added many different products to his rental catalog and now offers a wide range of wedding decor and furnishings. Of course, this growth meant that his storage unit was no longer big enough, and he upgraded to a 40 foot x 45 foot warehouse to store his furnishings. He has also expanded the range of custom woodwork products he can offer.
Alongside rentals, he offers custom woodwork for customers with more specific requirements that his current inventory doesn’t provide. He then maintains these products as additional inventory. Combined with the other skills he has experience in, he can offer an almost endless number of products. This has helped his rental business to grow massively over the past few years.
More products, more challenges
As with any rental business, it was easy to track inventory when he only offered a few items and had few customers. However, as his business began to grow, it became more and more challenging to keep track. This made it difficult to manage inventory as he didn’t have a centralized system to monitor who had booked what and when they needed it to be delivered.
A side effect of not having a proper rental system was that managing the availability of products was difficult. If a customer reached out to rent something from him. he would need to consult all his orders to determine if the product was available on the date requested. This was very time-consuming and almost led to items becoming double-booked.
In addition, all the work he was doing up to this point to manage his rental business was done manually. As you can imagine, taking bookings, managing inventory, chasing payments, and sorting deliveries became a challenge. Especially when you consider he was also taking custom woodwork requests simultaneously, leading to long hours spent on admin.
Tremendous inventory management
Eventually, this caught up with Adam, who started looking for a software solution, and he decided Booqable was perfect for his needs. He has created an overview of all his rental products and can easily add and remove them from his inventory. This has given him much greater insight into his inventory as it has grown over the months since implementing Booqable.
This insight has also improved his insight into the availability of his inventory, allowing him to see exactly what’s available. Combining this with customers seeing the availability on this website, he has seen a significant increase in the clarity of communicating this information. Thanks to being able to integrate Booqable with his existing Squarespace website easily.
Another benefit of adding online bookings to his website has been the ability to automate a large part of the rental process. Customers can now browse all of his furnishings online, check their availability, make a booking, and pay a security deposit without Adam’s input. This has saved him a significant amount of time when it comes to managing requests and reservations.
A lifesaver
Since implementing Booqable, Adam has been able to reclaim a significant amount of time that used to be spent on admin tasks. He especially loves that he can control when customers can book and block off specific dates in just a few clicks. He says this has genuinely been a lifesaving feature and meant that he no longer has to worry about planning around these dates manually.
In the coming year, Adam hopes to be able to increase the frequency of rental booking and build a big team to become more efficient. He is also looking to outsource his storage facilities to allow APMweddings to offer a broader range of inventory for customers to choose from. He expects to grow the business massively over the next couple of years.
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