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The past few years have brought a lot of change at Jim Hanson’s and David Meeks’ Sonoma, Calif., rental business. They have used a planning process that has helped the business more than
double its total sales twice in the last six years.
The plan included a move just up the street for Sonoma Rentals/Wine Country Party Rental & Sales to a remodeled 13,600-square-foot building on the city’s main highway. And the owners also added space to their party branch store, 18 miles east in Napa.
“This has been a huge year with remodeling in Napa and moving and remodeling in Sonoma,” Meeks said. “Now we have the capacity to expand into new markets without adding another facility. We have pretty good access to other places in the [San Francisco] Bay area.”
The Sonoma and Napa Valleys are well-known as
the premier wine-growing areas of the United States. That has helped the business as the number of wineries — and thus tourism — grew during the last decade.
But Sonoma Rentals’ recent growth is mostly a result of the owners’ focus on planning. The company hit $1 million in total revenues in 1994, started the intense planning and reached $2.8 million in 1998. This year, sales may reach the $4 million mark.
“It will be close — it will be up there. But mostly we’ve looked at return on investment as our goal,” Meeks said. “We’re just starting to see change because this building is so much more visible and accessible to the public.”
Hanson was one of the 24-year-old company’s founders, and has seen some big peaks and valleys during those years. Meeks joined Sonoma Rentals in 1986 at its low, and has seen fairly steady growth since then, except for some flat years during the early ’90s recession.
Meeks’ background was in business consulting. “I knew absolutely nothing about the [rental] business or any part of it, so I spent most
of my time at the counter for the first few years,” he said. The owners didn’t immediately divide responsibilities — and still don’t today.
“We are kind of funny in the way we work together,” Meeks said. “We haven’t set the rules very hard and I think it works for us, but I’m not sure it always works for other people. We’re a little too unstructured for some, but as much as we resisted the making-rules sort of thing, we got to where people wanted them.”
And Hanson and Meeks realized that because of all the recent growth, their employees — whose numbers doubled over a three-year period — needed more structure. So they contracted with a human resources counselor early last year.
“We knew we needed a lot of work on the employee manuals and procedures,” Hanson said. “We needed them updated. All of a sudden we had a lot more people.”
The counselor developed a system that is now handled by the managers. In Sonoma, Paul Conway is Wine Country Party’s manager and oversees human resources for all the employees based at the Sonoma location. Hector Carranza manages the equipment side. The Napa party store is managed by Dayne Keating.
The human resources system became a key part of the business planning. For the three previous years, the owners used a plan they learned about through A.R.A. “We saw the presentation at the A.R.A. show,” Meeks said. “We used that model involving the five M’s: mission, management, marketing, money and monitoring.
So that’s where we came up with our business mission and started working on that.”
During the planning processes of the past few years, Hanson and Meeks also hired a “graphic facilitator.” All the employees were invited to a meeting where the facilitator “drew” the history with input from those who had been there. Then the process continued by “evaluating where we are now and where we want to go and putting together a plan to get there,” Meeks said.
“For the most part, people had no idea why something happened, when it happened, where it happened and who some of those people were,” Hanson said. “Some of the employees thought it was always like this.”
The facilitator also worked with smaller groups to discuss different aspects of the company, but all the employees were invited to the “history” meeting.
“One of the things we’ve learned is to include everybody. Don’t keep any secrets,” Hanson said. “For example, with buying inventory, we look at the utilization and we get input from the employees — everybody is involved in that process.”
Meeks and Hanson both say they have been “blessed” with good employees, who now number 70-plus including part-timers.
“We have high standards and I think that that’s shown particularly in the party area,” Meeks said. “I can go out confidently and say, ‘If you want the whitest white wood chairs available for your wedding, get them from us.’ Now, to deliver on that takes a lot of labor and that’s what we’ve been trying to balance. We certainly built a great reputation for service and for the condition of equipment. Now we have to maintain that and balance all the other things around it. So that’s been our most recent thing — it takes
a big commitment and it’s a financial commitment to support that kind of quality that we want to maintain.
“Training is a huge thing that we’ve identified consistently in our annual goal-setting business planning. It grows in importance in our eyes all the time in different areas: customer service, equipment training and safety.”
Hanson and Meeks credit part of their success on the work ethic of their Spanish-speaking employees. About a decade ago, they had made it a goal to have a bilingual business.
“We couldn’t talk to our Spanish customers. It was becoming an issue because more and more [Spanish-speaking] guys were working for vineyards and in construction. They would come in to rent and we couldn’t communicate or give them instructions,” Meeks said. Today the business has many bilingual employees.
“I think we’ve been an attractive employer,” Meeks said. “We have a lot of fun, but we can be intense here, too, because it’s still business and we’re personally invested in it and depend on it, and we want to make it better for the employees and for everybody. I think people like to work here, and I think we have a good reputation in the community.”
Sonoma and Napa are separated by the Mayacamus Mountains, and to most wine-tasting tourists, it is a physical separation only.
The residents don’t necessarily see it that way. The valleys compete with each other for the tourism dollar, and now against the new and popular wine-growing Carneros region, which is at the south end of both Sonoma and Napa Counties. Sonoma Rentals/Wine Country Party benefits from all of the tourism growth.
Some of the larger wineries — mostly in Napa County — have existed for a long time. The smaller wineries started to spring up in the ’70s when the state offered agricultural tax credits.
“Our business grew up with it — in Sonoma Valley particularly,” Hanson said. “Even in Napa Valley, where it was more established and much bigger — even in relationship to that, it’s grown in the last 10 years.”
Some of the bigger facilities have turned into event venues. One of Wine Country Party’s biggest customers is the Culinary
Institute of America, the former Christian Brothers Winery, in Napa. When the institute hired an event manager, Napa store employee Jess Silvey made the initial contact that led to a lucrative relationship.
“We’re there many times a week for events, weddings, corporate dinners, sales things,” Meeks said. “On the party side, there has been a movement [by the wineries] to utilize their facilities more and make them available for special events, so that’s developed. Some of them have an exclusive arrangement with a caterer and so we just go in there every week and do whatever wedding they’re doing.
“We make the distinction between customers and clients. The clients are those we do business with regularly like the CIA [culinary institute] or a local caterer. Now if you look at our top-dollar clients for our business, probably the first five are caterers and the next ones may be wineries or facilities. Occasionally we’ll do a big account with a contractor one year for a big project, but nothing like we’ve seen from caterers. So the wineries are responsible for a lot of that — the things that spring up because of
the wineries and tourism.”
Wine Country Party also gets a lot of ancillary business for parties that go on alongside a major event, such as a NASCAR race at the area’s Sears Point Raceway. And the wineries do create some business for the tool side with facility construction and remodeling.
At the Sonoma store, the mix is about 50-50 party and tool, while the Napa store does party only. The tool side focuses on small contractor/ homeowner items because there is plenty of competition for the larger equipment. Hertz, NationsRent and United Rentals all have stores in the greater Napa/Sonoma area. Hanson and Meeks said they have good relationships with them and their party competitors as well.
The stores’ advertising has mostly been through the Yellow Pages and newspapers, but Meeks said probably the “best thing we do — and I think it’s a cumulative effect — is the number of community events that we’re involved in.
“Just by the nature of our business and by the nature of the community, we’re involved in almost everything in the way of community events. People know us as part of the community now. We’ve built that as a business.”
The charity requests can be so overwhelming and often that the company now gives a set discount. This was also decided for fairness reasons, and Hanson and Meeks think it’s better for the groups that make the requests.
“I think we realized that giving it [the rentals] away free may not be in their best interests,” Meeks said. “I think it’s better for organizations to develop and pay their expenses instead of counting on getting things for free, because at some point you may have to say no to them. But I think it’s [the charity work] been a big part of our marketing. Also Jim’s been involved — he was the president of the chamber of commerce, on the board of the boys and girls club, and a tutor. And I’ve been on the boards at the church and school. We both consider it personally satisfying and important.”
A
couple of years ago, the Sonoma Ford dealership started building a new location. One of its owners suggested to Hanson and Meeks that his former location might work well for their business.
“We were working inside an unworkable space that we had outgrown,” Meeks said. “We were trying to work towards some kind of separation between party and tools. But in an old building, you still have phones and computers that come to one place so you just have one counter.”
When the dealership owner approached them, Hanson and Meeks realized that despite the fact they had just remodeled in 1996, they did need to move. But Sonoma Rentals was on such a growth spurt that neither of them had time to think about it. Only when Hanson drove down the street and saw the “for lease” sign were they spurred to action.
The move was originally scheduled for April 1999, but the dealership took longer than expected to get into its new place, and the new Sonoma Rentals location’s remodeling “got bigger and bigger,” Meeks said. “It started out as a little remodeling project, but then you start to visit other stores and talk about all the things, it’s too big an opportunity
not to do it all.”
The party rental division moved last January, and the equipment followed the next month. “It was a nightmarish project — we had to transfer the computer back and forth and be able to dial in from the other location. And we were open the whole time,” Hanson said.
Hanson and Meeks worked with an architect and incorporated ideas from A.R.A. convention seminars and their store visits. One of the architect’s ideas, which the owners originally thought was strange but turned out well, was to put dishwashing and small party items in the 3,000-square-foot upstairs. Orders for these items are put together there and sent down on a vertical conveyor.
The downstairs, which includes the showroom, offices and warehouse, is 10,000 square feet. The total square footage is double the size of the former location.
Outside, Sonoma Rentals added a covered drive-through area for equipment returns, constructed covered and level loading docks, and added a service building with a covered wash pad.
The party showroom was put in the front, and the equipment entrance is on the side by the equipment-return area. All the employees worked in both tools and party at the former location — now they work for one or the other. The owners saw how a separation worked well for employees when they bought the inventory and lease of U.S. Rentals’ Napa party branch in 1995.
Last year, while the new Sonoma location was being remodeled, planning was under way to expand the Napa branch. The addition included installation of laundry facilities — which the business could have used earlier, but there was no place for it.
“So we were operating from two inefficient buildings, we were really busy and didn’t have enough space,” Meeks said. “We were trying to get that [Napa] business enlarged and reorganized and to get this new place built about the same time. So the equipment and party business has been very good these last few years — our economy is great here and we have a lot of stuff going on.”
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