Big L Rentals sits at the center of the action in many ways: Its home base of Garden City, Kan., is only a few hours from the U.S. geographic center of Lebanon, Kan.; it sits relatively equidistant between major markets like Denver, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo.; and because of its geography, Big L Rentals is positioned to be the central source for rental equipment to meet the needs of Southwest Kansas’ agriculture-based economy.
“We cover about a 200-mile radius from Garden City,” says Ben Blood, Big L Rentals vice president. “The region is very ag dependent: grain and cattle production, grain handling facilities, flour mills, dairies and dairy processing plants. We have more feed yards than any other region in the country, so there are a lot of beef packing plants, which are fantastic industrial customers. Almost everything that happens in this area can be traced back to agriculture in some way or another.”
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| Ben Blood |
Blood himself is a product of that agricultural economy, and he might have stayed on the farm if a career in rental had not been so appealing.
“I'm from a farming background. When I got into high school, I commuted back and forth to the farm every day, three times a day. It wasn't very convenient. My neighbor worked for Big L Rentals, and I asked him if they wanted summer help. They did, so I started and what was just a summer job blossomed into a career. That was 2008, and here I am, 14 years later. I fell in love with the industry and the concept,” he says.
While its current incarnation was established in 2017, the genealogy of Big L Rentals actually traces back decades earlier.
“Jack Beery, who is still our owner today, worked in banking in the early '90s. One of his customers had a small homeowner rental shop — lawn and garden, small tools and things like that — and was looking for an exit. Jack had always been entrepreneurial-minded and he saw a good opportunity. They were able to put a deal together, and in 1996 he bought what at the time was B&L Rentals. The ‘B&L’ was for Bob and Lou Baker, the previous owners of a business that had been serving southwest Kansas since 1947,” Blood says.
The “Big L” name was introduced in 2000 to communicate to customers the change in ownership as well as a shift in focus toward contractor business with the addition of inventory like skid steers, rough-terrain forklifts and aerial equipment.
Regional construction booms over the next decade-plus meant consistent growth for Big L Rentals, but then in 2012 significant change hit as a revolving door of new owners surfaced.
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| Jack Beery |
“Jack sold the business to the Volvo Group in 2012. Then, Volvo went through the transition to BlueLine Rentals, which sold to Platinum (Equity), and then Platinum spun that off to United Rentals. Immediately before the sale to United, BlueLine left our local market. Our old location in Garden City was a store that got cut,” Blood says.
Stakeholders who, like Blood, had been with the business for years sensed an opportunity after BlueLine Rentals quit the community.
“We still had all of our old customers, the demand was still there and all of a sudden we had folks reaching out to us. So, after taking five years off, we decided in January 2017 that we still knew what we were doing, and we started buying fleet, hiring folks and jumped back in,” he says.
Beery, Blood and team launched a new rental endeavor — once again carrying the Big L moniker — and brought the business full circle back to what it knew best: a heavy emphasis on commercial construction and industrial work.
Today, Big L Rentals markets itself as a general rental center. “but in all reality our fleet is 80 percent aerial and material handling equipment, so we consider ourselves to be telehandler specialists,” Blood says. “And, being a large distance between metro areas, we stock a lot of really large aerial. We keep a good variety of unusual scissors and specialty aerial gear. We do skid steers, trenchers and small tools, but really the bulk of our efforts are on aerial and material handling equipment. Our customers are pretty evenly split: We are about 60 percent nonresidential construction and 40 percent industrial end users and contractors.”
Reflecting on Big L Rentals’ independently owned history, both pre-2012 and post-2017, Blood considers that the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been his company’s greatest challenge to overcome; however, his biggest takeaways from the event are the lessons learned and the innovations it forced upon rental operators across the industry.
“March 2020 was the first time we really sat down and said, ‘This [pandemic] is a huge hurdle.’ Up to that point, our hurdles had been buying more fleet and getting more people. Now there was this concern about, ‘Is there going to be enough work and are we going to be able to generate the revenue we need to operate?’ Now that we're through that initial shock and looking back at lessons learned, I think that, in all honesty, it's going to turn out to be a positive thing. There are a ton of things that we changed about the way we operate that have made us more efficient, like moving from physical signatures to e-signatures. Even just having a lapse in demand is when we made the decision to really dive headfirst into a telematics program and partner with Trackunit. At the time, we had service techs sitting and a ton of fleet in the yard — it was perfect timing to jump into something like that. There are just all these benefits that, at the time, were terrifying and seemed like a struggle. In reality, they have put us in a much better position for the next five years than we would have been if it had been business as usual,” Blood says.
While the ability to adapt and innovate has been important for Big L Rentals, Blood maintains that the company’s dedication to empowering its staff — which is the basis of its culture — is the main ingredient to
its overall success.
“That is the biggest thing that sets us apart from a lot of other rental companies,” Blood says. “We try to empower everybody, whether it is a yard person, a rental coordinator or a driver. We make sure they understand that they have the authority to make things right with the customer and to do what they think the best thing is in any situation. We've been incredibly fortunate that most of the hires we've made have been through current employees bringing friends or former co-workers to us. We've tried to do a really good job of hiring people, then staying out of their way and letting them do what they know. And we've gotten incredible feedback from customers. We have the same 19-ft. Skyjack scissors that everybody else does, but I think we have better people in place than most folks do, and we have tried to do a good job of empowering them to be able to do anything they think needs done. I think that has been the biggest key to our success.”