Four or five tools down to one

Booking a single client used to take four or five different tools. RW Elephant handled part of it, and the rest was spread across three or four others that each did only one piece of the job. “Before Goodshuffle Pro, we used RW Elephant, and it was just too much tedious work,” Cameron said. Jumping between the tools cost one to two hours on every order, across about 1,000 events quoted a year. And with two small warehouses, it was hard to tell which piece was in which one.

Goodshuffle Pro put booking in one tool. At one to two hours saved per order, that’s about 1,500 hours a year back, and proposals now take half the time to build. “If you have 40 hours a week, and suddenly 20 hours are given back to you, imagine what you can accomplish,” Cameron says.

How a quote request becomes $4,000

Clients browse Render’s inventory on its website through the Integración de sitios web, add the pieces they want to a wish list, and send it to Render as a quote request.

Wish lists come in nearly every day, with the pieces already picked. “All you have to do is add in the fees and add in the logistics and you’re good to go,” Cameron says.

If a requested piece is already booked, Detección de conflictos shows her a red alert before she replies. She reaches out first: “Hey, I’m so glad you were interested in that piece. That piece is not available, but this one is.”

Then she suggests the pieces that go with what the client asked for. A client who asks for one bar hears about the stage facades and columns that match it. That’s already about $2,500 worth of product instead of one bar. Add a matching back line to cover an awkward venue wall, and the order reaches $3,500 to $4,000.

An event rental warehouse a temp crew can pull from

In busy season Render can have 22 events in one week, and the crew has to find every piece fast. Four habits, all built on Goodshuffle Pro, make that possible.

Every piece carries its own record. Render letters its racks and numbers its shelves. Each item’s attributes in Goodshuffle Pro hold its rack and bay, what it cost, and its size, and they show up on the pull sheet. “We use the crap out of attributes,” Cameron says. A worker from a staffing app can read that pull sheet and find the Brantley stage facade on I2.

Cycle counts run on QR codes. Render tags its pieces with Goodshuffle Pro QR codes, placed where they won’t get painted over or catch a guest’s eye. During cycle counts the crew scans them to confirm every chair is still on the shelf.

Availability is the first screen of the day. Jessica Petty, Render’s projects manager, opens every event on the books for the next four months so the team knows what’s coming. Her favorite part is the big red Conflict Detection alert, “where it tells you if we have it in inventory or not.” Goodshuffle Pro is the first thing the team opens on their computers.

Damaged pieces stay off the shelf. Anything that comes back broken or needing a little TLC goes on set-aside in Goodshuffle Pro before it goes back on a shelf.

Goodshuffle Pro is so built into how Render runs that new hires learn it in their first training course, right alongside the company’s culture.

The $23,000 in rental chairs Render didn’t buy

“If my stuff is sitting on the rack, it’s doing nothing for us,” Cameron says. Her inventory reports in Goodshuffle Pro show how often a piece goes out and when it last rented, so she can see which pieces are earning their spot on the rack and which ones aren’t.

Render’s floral brands rent out candles too, and Cameron moved every one of them into Goodshuffle Pro, so the team can see when each one goes out, when it last went out, who broke it and at which event.

She runs the same test before buying anything new. When she was weighing spending $23,000 on 150 to 200 black dining chairs, she listed them in Goodshuffle Pro, which put them on Render’s website automatically, then ran some Instagram polls on them. Three to six months later, not a single person had asked to rent them.

Her rental data and the listing both lived in Goodshuffle Pro, so trying out a new piece took no extra work.

“And so I saved the company $23,000 and inventory space,” she says.

Advice for other event rental owners

On growing into a new space, Cameron says to “look at what your plans are for the future of your business, not where you’re at right now.”

On software, she speaks from her own switch away from RW Elephant. “The longer we’ve been with Goodshuffle Pro, the more we know we made the right decision,” she said.

“It feels like an extension of our business.”

About Render Events

• Company: Render Events, part of Render Collective
• Location: Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas
• Renting since: 2012
• Rents: bars, stage facades, backdrops, lounge furniture, tables and chairs
• Busy season: 22 events in a week at peak
• Runs on: Goodshuffle Pro, with the Website Integration, Conflict Detection, the Dispatch add-on and the QuickBooks integration