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This month's Rental Management is devoted to planning your future. We're taking a break from our usual style - a cover story on a successful and interesting rental business that others can benefit from reading about - in order to take up this topic properly, which means we have to devote a lot of space to it.

That means we take a risk: the usual RM cover story is entertaining; it's about people and their problems and opportunities and solutions and joys, and readers may opt for the TV or the golfing magazine or the latest best-seller instead of wading through all this stuff about business planning. That's a risk.

But we have a higher calling than entertainment, so we're going to plunge forward, despite the risk. Entertainment is our favorite method of helping rental people, but that's a means to the mission, not an end in itself. The end, always, for Rental Management, is helping rental people manage for success in the rental business. And this month, that means we devote a lot of pages to planning.

There's a business proverb that has been said so much it has become a clich้, but that doesn't diminish its truth: "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

Regular readers of this magazine - more than 17,000 people in the rental industry - know that we frequently call attention to competitive threats and suggest good possibilities for combatting them with merchandising, marketing, advertising, customer service, financial planning, inventory selection, business development, identification of new opportunities, human resource management, risk control, and on and on. The end, always, for Rental Management, is helping rental people manage for success in the rental business. Did I say that already? Well, it bears saying again.

Read these articles on planning. Don't turn on the TV or grab the consumer magazine or the novel. Give this package of articles a fair trial. Then, in four or five years, write and tell us how it worked.

Rental Management has won the 1998 Apex Award for Publication Excellence in the "overall" category for magazines, based on "excellence in graphic design, editorial content and the success of the entry in achieving overall communications effectiveness and excellence," according to the sponsoring authority in Springfield, Va., which informed us of the judges' decision in July. (Last year RM won an Apex Award in the "most improved" category.) There were 4,587 entries this year, compared to 4,198 last year, and 765 of these were magazines. The specific issue examined for the competition was our October 1997 technology issue, which featured the Tolar Rental Store in Mooresville, N.C., on the cover.