Member profile: Renting under big skies
By Brock Huffstutler
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Member profile: Renting under big skies

It’s a long way from the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia, but the Sneed family — owners of Big Sky Rents in Kalispell, Mont. — has managed to successfully make a rental footprint in both regions.

The Big Sky Rents brand was established in Kalispell 2012 by native North Carolinian Chuck Sneed. The enterprise was launched two decades after he relocated his family to Montana and following many years of experience in the rental business.

“My dad, Chuck, moved us to Montana when I was 18 months old and my brother, Adam, was three,” says Carson Sneed, who today co-owns Big Sky Rents alongside Chuck, his mother, Becky, and Adam. “He wanted to bring us out here to raise us in the place where he came to hunt all the time. He loved the openness, the people, the surroundings and the mountains.”

Chuck was familiar with the advantages of renting equipment for projects, and he and Becky had considered starting an equipment rental business of their own. In 1999, while Chuck was working on a forest trail construction project in Yogo Creek, an opportunity to take a test drive in the rental business came along through Wayne Shirey, who owned United Tool Rental (UTR) locations in Kalispell and in Duluth, Ga.

“My dad got to know Wayne, who said, ‘Why don't you come work for me and see if you like it before you jump into this?’ So, Chuck worked for Wayne for a couple of months. Then, Wayne's son, Joe, passed away in a tragic accident, and Wayne gave my dad an opportunity to buy the store. He started on a small scale and ran it for a couple of years as UTR. Then he moved into a new location and bought out a rental company called Sun Rental that was in Kalispell and in Polson. My mom and dad ran that up until the crash of 2008, then sold out to API Supply out of Minneapolis. API shut the doors in 2011, and we ended up buying it back,” Carson says.

The Sneeds’ reclamation of full ownership presented the opportunity to rebrand the rental business in a fashion that was entirely their own.

“They reopened as Big Sky Rents and Events in 2012 to say, ‘We're back. This is new. This is us,’” Carson says. “My dad had always wanted a brand; a Montana kind of livestock brand was what he was looking for, and that is in our emblem — that’s where the ‘RE’ in our logo came from.”

Having grown up working in UTR, Carson and Adam were well-versed in the operations of a rental business. When their racing pursuits led them back East, this time to Virginia, an opportunity to establish their own business cropped up and to them, a rental store was the obvious choice.

“I graduated high school and was racing motocross. You can't really ride in Montana in the wintertime. So, I went down to Virginia to race. I bought a house there, and I had rented a wallpaper steamer from a local rental company in Danville, Va. It was broken and didn't work — I had to fix it with my brother. That led to an opportunity. I started a rental store there kind of on a whim. I said, ‘I grew up in this. I know what to do. Let's start a store down here and see where it goes.’ So, my brother and I jumped in the truck, drove back to Montana, loaded up a bunch of equipment that we had and brought it to Virginia. A gentleman gave us an opportunity on a building down there and it just kind of started from that,” Carson says.

Carson and Adam always had a five-year plan to return to Montana. Although they remained in Virginia a little longer than that due to the success of their rental venture, the allure of the Big Sky Country brought them back soon enough.

“Montana is home,” Carson says. “It is where I want to raise my kids. You can't beat it.”

Returning home to Montana also has enabled the Sneeds to give back to their community through another favorite pastime with a local flavor — rodeos.

“A big thing in Montana is rodeos, so we sponsor a bunch of the rodeos around here. We have a farm in Bigfork where we help out the kids who are getting into it, the future generation of rodeo kids. We like to help out the community when we can,” Carson says.

Today, Big Sky Rents focuses exclusively on equipment rentals, having jettisoned the event rental portion of their offerings. “Party is super labor intensive and very fine-detailed. When you're dealing with napkins, forks and all of that, it becomes a lot of work on the backside. We've always been gearheads, and when Adam and I came back to Montana, we just wanted to focus on the equipment side and grow that as big as we can,” Carson says.

The influx of people moving into Montana’s Flathead Valley has been a boon to Big Sky Rents. Its fleet of aerial and earthmoving equipment are just what contractors and DIY homeowners are looking for to meet their residential construction and improvement needs.

“The general contractors are so busy they cannot keep up with what's going on, and we've done very well with the homeowner side as well. A bunch of homeowners are renting mini excavators or skid steers. They're digging in their water lines by themselves and doing as much as they can, which has really benefited us. Our minis are our niche in the summertime, and in the wintertime the ground freezes to about 6 ft. thick, so you can't really dig in the wintertime. Then, we have a big aerial fleet: scissor lifts, boom lifts, forklifts — pretty much the basics. There's really not anything that we don't have,” Carson says.

Although Big Sky Rents occupies a brand-new, 10,000-sq.-ft. facility on 10 acres with 14 employees, the core of the business’ operations remains a tight-knit family affair.

“Becky does the books for us. I run more of the office stuff and Adam is over the service side. Dad kind of hangs out and has fun. He has backed off a little bit in the last couple of years since we came back to Montana, but if you have a question, you ask, and he's been through it. He knows. He's a great leader,” Carson says.

As he looks to the future, Carson is quick to count Big Sky Rents’ blessings when he considers the reputation of reliability that preceded the company and the team comprised of family and trusted local friends that is leading the organization forward.

“We've been lucky,” he says. “With UTR, our names were kind of known around here as the ones who take care of the customer, who has good equipment and stays on top of it. We haven't really had too many struggles besides growth. And we haven't really struggled with labor shortages. With me and my brother being as young as we are — I will be 31 in May — pretty much everybody here is somebody that I grew up with from Flathead Valley. I have one of the best crews that we've ever had in the 20 years that we've been in this, and they are people we grew up with as kids. We all get along and hang out on weekends. It's more of a family, truly. We've been very fortunate.”

Brock Huffstutler

Brock HuffstutlerBrock Huffstutler

Brock Huffstutler is the regional news editor for Rental Management. He writes and edits articles for ARA’s In Your Region quarterly regional newsletters, Rental Management, Rental Pulse and other special projects. Outside of work, he enjoys biking and spending time at the few remaining vintage record stores in the region.

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