CRA PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE: August 2014

With summer sneaking up on us this year, I hope you had some form of lawn-and-garden season to get things rolling in your area. It was a strange transition indeed where winter ended, then someone told me this was summer but I missed the spring somewhere.

Summers are normally relatively quiet in the world of your rental association, but with all of our recent changes at the CRA, things are happening, summer or not. Probably the best news of late is that Nathalie has managed to wrap up a new member benefit some two years in the making: our freshly launched PIP (Print Incentive Program). This program is much more extensive than meets the eye. The focus is always on the Ready2Go tags but these are only a small part of it. Every rental house needs to have printing done, so we have brokered a program which we hope will provide some better pricing for many of your printing requirements throughout your business.  We all need some form of rental contracts and return forms, and perhaps also pick tickets, letterhead, and envelopes.

The program operates quite simply. You can start by reading an overview of the program on our website at crarental.org, or, for more details, call Nathalie at head office at 1-800-486-9899 and she can explain exactly how the program works. The intention is that by pooling our printing needs we can all lower our unit costs on customized as well as standardized forms for each of our individual rental operations.

The R2Go tag program offers you a range of tag quality to meet your specific needs. Why purchase the weather- and/or wind-resistant tags if all of your equipment is stored indoors between rentals? For our French-speaking members in Quebec, New Brunswick and throughout the country, we have a couple of different tag offerings en Francais aussi. Please remember that you are able to customize your tags so your customers know it is your business that stands behind your quality assurance.

As you read this, we at the Canadian Rental Association will be in the middle of relocating our head office from its Manitoba roots to a new location in Stoney Creek, Ont. A suburb of Hamilton, Ont., this new location will put us within rock-tossing distance of Toronto while keeping us accessible to the other regional airports in the region and within a few hours’ drive of the vast majority of our membership.

It has been a challenging year with the transitions we have weathered in our staffing at our Winnipeg office, which was our stalwart for several decades. With the decision made by the board to seek out a bilingual managing director and new horizons for the organization came many other changes.  I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Mandy Wellnitz and Pascale and Gabrielle Lambert for all of their efforts in the past keeping our organization on task and sailing true. It is a tribute to their hard work that we have the organization we have today and we will be forever grateful. Best wishes to all of them in their future endeavours.

Change is always stressful and extremely challenging.  Our hope is that we can rise up to meet the challenges presented and, with your continued support, strengthen our organization and offer increasing value and levels of service to our membership.

We realize this has been a particularly difficult time for all of our staff managing the many transitions but are hoping that once we settle into our new location over the summer months we will be able to focus on members’ needs first and foremost once again. I would like to acknowledge all the support we have received from our members – both rental operators and suppliers – throughout the past year as we have worked our way through this phase of our evolution as an association.

Marc Mandin is COO of 4-Way Equipment Rentals in Edmonton and national president for the Canadian Rental Association.