In his farewell column as president of the American Rental Association (ARA) in the February 2000 issue of Rental Management, Richard Paquette, then-president of Pyramide Rental Centers, Chateauguay, Quebec, Canada, made some prescient observations:
- “We will be using [technology] even more and in virtually every corner of our businesses in the future.
- “As owners and managers, we have a responsibility to know what advances in technology could be used to our advantage. Granted, not every bell and whistle is useful or needed, but if we don’t know it exists, how can we make sound decisions about it?
- “We will never go back to doing things the old way — forward is the only way to be facing.”
22 years later — in a time where fleet telematics, GPS, Bluetooth tags and online, contactless customer portals have become must-haves for many equipment rental operations — it is clear Paquette was a visionary concerning the direction the industry was heading.
Today, as he caps off a 50-year career and moves into retirement, Paquette bids farewell to the industry with words of a similar tone: “You’ve got to be looking forward and not backwards.”
On October 1, 2021, Paquette sold Pyramide Rental Centers’ three locations to Simplex, a multi-location equipment rental company headquartered in Montreal. After five years of semi-retirement, Paquette was ready to make the full transition to “past owner,” having been approached by an eager buyer offering a win-win proposition.
“At the age of 70, it was time to retire. I wasn’t looking for a buyer, but I had often said, ‘If someone wants to buy my business, let's talk about it.’ I found a buyer, and we both walked away very happy,” Paquette says.
Pyramide Rental Centers was bought and owned by Paquette’s father, H. Cam Paquette, in 1972. “I started working part time in 1972 while going to university. After a few years as a computer programmer and systems analyst for a national newspaper chain, I joined the family business. I worked my way up to president, then owner after my father’s death in 2007,” Paquette says.
Paquette lists computerization and rolling with consolidation trends as the biggest shifts the industry has had to contend with during his rental career.
“I was a witness to and a part of the computerization of the industry. When I first went to [ARA headquarters in] Moline in the early 1980s, I helped the ARA start a bulletin board system — and that was the birth of electronic communication to members. Obviously, it's grown by leaps and bounds to the sophisticated email and communication network ARA has now. Computerization was the biggest thing to happen to our industry over that period of time. It allowed for all sorts of what we have and take for granted today in terms of the way we communicate to the members and from the members, and it allowed the staff to modernize and keep up with the industry at the same time,” Paquette says.
As for rental company consolidations, Paquette is pragmatic in terms of how they ultimately made the industry more diverse.
“The other major thing that happened during my career was consolidation. Companies like United Rentals and NationsRent came in and started buying up stores, turning the industry from basically a mom-and-pop one to multi-branch companies doing business on a national basis. That gave the ARA, as a national trade organization, the opportunity to be the leader in the rental industry and represent everybody. It was a tough adjustment to accept the fact that these [large companies] were going to take over lots of little members and we were going to lose membership. But in reality, it just grew the industry in more ways than you can think of,” he says.
Over the years, Paquette became well-known and respected among his industry peers as a tireless volunteer leader within ARA. His service resume includes involvement on more than 20 committees, a short list of which includes the CEO Search Committee (2000), the General Tool & Equipment Shared Interest Group, the Long-Range Planning Committee and the Rental Excellence Committee. In 1999, Paquette began his term as ARA president — the fourth Canadian to serve in that role.
Paquette looks back fondly on his volunteerism and reflects on the benefit that kind of involvement can have on anyone building a career in rental.
“It was key, because volunteering allows you to associate with people who are smarter than you,” he says, adding that at the ARA work group meetings “you not only promote the industry and the association, but you also learn from those people. The after-hours discussions and dinners were a learning process and were just as important as the work you did during the day. Volunteering is critical, in my mind. If people volunteer, they will reap untold benefits from it.”
Among his many contributions to the rental industry, Paquette singles out one as dearest to him: the creation of the Rental Hall of Fame in 1999.
“The Rental Hall of Fame was one of the things I wanted to do when I was president, to leave a heritage moment that I could be tagged with,” Paquette says. “I proposed it to the board, saying, ‘Football, baseball, hockey, basketball — they've all got a Hall of Fame. Why can't the rental industry have one?’ It got approved and it's been very successful.”
That legacy continues. As of 2022, 55 industry leaders have been inducted into the Rental Hall of Fame, and the distinction has become the most prestigious honor offered by the ARA to those who have made outstanding lifetime contributions to the industry.
Having recently handed off his company to an organization that will continue to service the rental needs of the customers he catered to for so many years, Paquette is eager to pursue other passions.
“I’m going to go to Florida, relax and not do very much. I'm still very active in things like my sports cars and travel, and I can't really say that I was suffering the last 10 years, because I regularly played golf. I had a great team of people that ran the business for me successfully,” he says.
It is the interaction in the trenches with those team members that Paquette says he will miss the most about the rental game.
“I’m going to miss the day-to-day contact with the employees, the action of things going on that you have to make decisions about and the fun of renting and selling equipment to people to help them succeed in their businesses or home projects,” he says. “When you put it all together, there's nothing like being an independent business owner, where you call your own shots and make your own mistakes. My philosophy was always to work hard, but more importantly, work smart. Success is then inevitable.”