Booked every weekend, and still asking where the money went?
Hi y’all,
Rebecca Warnick told the User Summit crowd the sentence she hears most from rental owners: “We’re booked every weekend. Where is all the money?”
She’s a CPA whose firm only works with rental companies. Booked, profitable, and money in the bank are three different things, and your calendar looks the same in all three.
Booked is right there on the calendar. Profit is what’s left after every cost of putting that event on. Cash is what’s in the account on the 15th when the credit card bill hits. You can be booked solid and losing money on every job.
Watch Rebecca run the math on a $100 chair:
Three things I’d take from her session:
The chair is the smallest thing your customer is paying for. They’re renting the chair, the warehouse space it sits in, the person who cleans it, the truck, and your team’s time. A $5,000 event has to cover delivery labor, setup and strike, fuel, card processing, cleaning, damaged items, subrentals, wear and tear, storage, insurance, marketing. Then taxes.
A $100 chair should earn $200 in twelve months. That’s her benchmark for event inventory. Competitor pricing tells you what the market will bear, and nothing about whether you make money. Price times frequency answers that: if the chair goes out 20 times a year, $10 a rental gets you there. If it only goes out 10 times, you need $20. It’s the math behind whether your inventory earns its keep.
Ask two questions before you buy anything. What can I rent it for, and how often can I realistically rent it? Rebecca’s example was the plain white stacking chair. Nobody posts it on Instagram, but it works in almost any setup and goes out every week. Your rental history in Goodshuffle Pro shows how often each item has actually gone out, so the how-often half comes from your own numbers.
So pull up the one item you were proudest to buy. What did it cost you, and what has it earned back since?
See you next Monday,
Mallory Mullen
Goodshuffle
