Member profile: All for the sake of great customer service
By Connie Lannan
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Member profile: All for the sake of great customer service

Philip Gottula, owner, Flexx Productions, Fort Collins, Colo., has always been passionate about great customer service.

It started when he was just beginning in the event rental industry while in high school. He continued on this path while in college working toward an IT degree. After graduating, he stayed in the field, noting that “IT and rental are completely different games. This industry sticks with you. It is like a bug that gets you,” he says.

Then the company he was working for changed leadership. That switch was the impetus for going out on his own with a buddy and starting Flexx Productions from his garage.

“The operation I had been working for became very corporate. I felt that customer service started lacking, everything from having a simple conversation with the customer to giving a quote in a timely manner or doing general site checks. Going in-person for face-to-face interactions with clients speaks volumes of customer service,” he says. “We wanted to do better, so we decided to do this on our own. We started with a few tables and chairs out of my garage and built the organization from there.”

That was in 2003. “It was full-time from the beginning. We jumped out of the other organization and right into this one. We wanted to take care of our clients and offer great customer service,” Gottula says.

He joined the American Rental Association (ARA) the following year. “I knew about ARA from the other organizations that I had worked for in the past. I also had been to The ARA Show™ in Anaheim in 2003. I believe you always want to be part of your association, all the way down from the products they offer and the insurance to any of the educational products, the connections you can make with other players in the industry, etc. There are many reasons why we wanted to be part of the association,” he says.

Over the years, the business grew. “You start off with a few tables and chairs and then acquire your first pop-up tents and then your first 20-ft.-high peaks. We just added year after year. We also formed partnerships. We sublet from organizations I had worked with and other small operations. I hustled,” he says.

As the business grew, Gottula needed more space to hold his expanding inventory. “We moved out of my garage around 2006. At first we moved into a 2,000-sq.-ft.-warehouse. Then we went to 8,000 sq. ft., then 12,000 sq. ft. and are now at 16,000 sq. ft. and bursting at the seams,” he says.

His partner left the business in 2011. “His goal from the beginning was to be in the business initially and then leave.” Gottula says.

To make sure his operation stayed true to its founding principle of offering excellent customer service, Gottula implemented a culture where everyone helps each other, as well as a mission and core values that drive the culture, which are:

How we make a difference:

“While the destination of each event is unique, we strive to understand every client’s vision to create an unforgettable experience. Our culture focuses on quality of life, inclusion, life education and professional growth, giving us passion and purpose on every event.”

Our core values:

  • “Do the right thing with honesty, integrity and trustworthiness.”
  • “Succeed and fail together. We are a team.”
  • “Ability to adjust, adapt and provide solutions.”
  • “Accountability to ourselves, to our team and to our clients.”

“Our employees have each other’s back,” Gottula says. “When push comes to shove and you have to work 14-hour days, they are with you. One of our core values is ‘Do the right thing.’ That has been big for us as a company — to our employees and to our customers too.”  

He reinforces those concepts through redundant systems. “It starts with training. At orientation we have our employees look at videos. We have created custom videos just for how we do things at our organization. They watch the video first and then do the application by working with a training technician. If they watch the videos and hear the terminology, employees begin to know what to call pieces of equipment. We are big on processes. We start on step 1 and go to step 10,” Gottula says.

The company has come a long way since its founding in Gottula’s garage. “We are now a full rental house. We have everything from 100-ft.-wide tents up to 25-meter structures with glass or hard walls. We will team up with partners to work on 30- and 40-meter projects. It is all about having good partnerships. It doesn’t make sense to own 20 air conditioners if you only use them once a year,” Gottula says.

Throughout this time the company built its clientele around the wedding, festival and corporate areas. “We are good at festivals. We use a lot of high-peak tents. We have good concrete weighting systems and are good at setting up quickly, such as university events or street festivals,” he says.

Like other event rental operations, all that business came to a standstill during the worst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

“I think every rental operation had to look at its costs — burn rate — what goes out vs. what is coming in. April of 2020 was the worst income in company history that we have had. You start to look at what you can cut. We had to scale down to 13 of us. That was enough where we could still get some projects up and then hire up from there. There is a certain amount of knowledge you need in the industry, such as trained technicians, to execute. We got as skinny as we could expense-wise and personnel-wise that was reasonable for the size and scale we could execute. We pivoted like every rental operation. We put up tents for testing sites and then vaccination distribution sites. We also did outdoor school classrooms through the fall,” Gottula says.

“This past year was much better, thankfully. 2022 Our numbers exceeded our projections,” he says, adding that at first he didn’t know how the year would go.

“How could you predict what would happen? As we scaled up in April through October, they were just starting to rollout vaccines in April/May. Was there any way to predict what would come online this past year? That was one of the most interesting shots in the dark as we tried to scale up. It made challenges with the labor shortages that are going on nationally right now to how much we took on. We learned a lot about ourselves this year,” Gottula says.

He plans to scale up even more this year. “I think 2022 will surpass 2021. The events that didn’t come online this year are usually annual. I believe they will come back online this year, but I do think there will be a bandwidth issue within the industry due to labor challenges,” he says.

For Gottula, there is great satisfaction in owning his event rental operation. It is a business that offers tremendous challenge, but it also allows him the ability to provide not only the customer service he believes is needed but also the chance to turn his clients’ dreams into reality.

“Rental businesses are incredibly complex. With this type of business, you have to customize something for your clients with the product that you have in stock at a specific location and within a specific time, and then after you execute the event you have to recover your product and reprocess it. It is one of those more complex industries, but I like the fact that we go and deploy this infrastructure and create these events in the middle of nothing — in the middle of a cornfield and build out a 1,000-person gala. A week or two later, everything is gone again. That is super-cool that we can go to all these different locations and everything is super-unique about what we do and how we deploy to help people create their dreams. There are so many advantages to doing this,” he says.

Connie Lannan

Connie LannanConnie Lannan

Connie Lannan is special projects editor for Rental Management. She helps plan, coordinate, write and edit ARA’s quarterly regional newsletters, In Your Region. She also researches, writes and edits news and feature articles for Rental Management, Rental Pulse, supplements, special reports and other special projects. Outside of work, she loves to bake for others, go for walks with her husband and volunteer for her church and causes she believes in.

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