Rental Center -- Serving the "underserved"
Northside Tool Rental aims for relentless execution to help this 73-year-old company thrive in the next 75 years.
 |
|
Owner Jeff Lignugaris, CEO Josh Nickell and owner Steffen Lignugaris, Northside Tool Rental, Atlanta Georgia area. |
 |
|
The Northside Tool Rental staff at its Buckhead branch: Will Tillman, Jeremy Johnson, Israel Garcia, Dan Cruz, Ralph Baugh, Steffen Lignugaris, Travis Smith, Josh Nickell, Jeff Lignugaris. |
 |
| Northside Tool Rental’s core equipment fleet is made up of mid-sized equipment: skid steers, mini excavators and stand-on mini track loaders. It also rents scissor lifts and small boom lifts most often used by landscapers, plumbers or electricians |
Turn back the clock to 1953. The Atlanta metropolitan area was home to only 581,000 people. Suburbs were springing up all around the city. which was quickly becoming recognized as an economic powerhouse in the Southeast.
It’s also when Roy E. Milling, Jr. opened Northside Tool Rental in Buckhead, which was then a rural community not far from Atlanta. He got the idea from a tool and equipment rental house he saw in California, and thought it was something he’d like to start in Georgia.
Roy worked and built the business well into his 80s and over the years, his son James ‘Jim’ Milling and daughter Joanne Lignugaris worked with him. When he retired in 2002, his grandsons, Steffen and Jeff, who had been working in the business for 10 or more years, took over the operations.
Today, more than 6.3 million people call Atlanta home, and projections call for the population to grow to almost 8 million by 2050. Northside Tool Rental has grown to four locations: its original Buckhead store, and branches in Doraville, Gwinnet and Cobb, Georgia. It has about 30 employees.
Today’s customer mix
Today, Northside Tool Rental’s customer base is a mix of several types of contractors. “It’s a mix of landscapers, subcontractors, and electrical and mechanical contractors who are typically underserved by larger rental houses,” says Josh Nickell, CEO at Northside Tool Rental. “Our customers often run a crew or a couple of crews. Many of them run their business out of their houses. They are a small family business just like our business, and they’re looking for a different type of relationship.”
“We rent big stuff to small guys and small stuff to big guys,” Steffen says. “While it’s not really feasible for bigger rental outfits to rent a skid steer or track loader for a day and a half, but for us, those rentals are right in our wheelhouse. We’re good at renting urgently needed equipment and tools.”
“Our competency is local contractors. We’re good with that type of relationship, serving that type of need for short-term rental. Structurally, we can support that,” Nickell says.
Another important customer segment are new contractors who have yet to establish credit. “There are new contractors popping up all the time. It’s hard to build credit, and they find it’s difficult to fill out a complicated charge application that they don’t even really understand. It puts some of them off,” says Jeff. He estimates that over the 73 years of being in the rental business, Northside Tool Rental has worked with tens of thousands of contractors who were starting their businesses.
Equipment fleet
“I would define our core equipment fleet as mid-sized equipment you’d find at any equipment rental company. It’s skid steers, mini excavators and stand-on mini track loaders. We also rent scissor lifts and small boom lifts. It’s really a balance of all that equipment used by a landscaper, plumber or electrician,” says Jeff. “We also have some 45-foot articulated lifts that we often target for shorter-term rentals. We’re a resource for contractors who need a very special item for a short period of time.”
Northside Tool Rental is known for bringing in new equipment types that help contractors work more efficiently. “I remember when we had just acquired a ride-on aerator. When the renter dropped off the aerator, he kept talking about how amazing that piece of equipment was to use,” Steffen says, “I think we were the first place in Atlanta that rented one.”
Northside Tool Rental also carries equipment that many rental companies don’t want to deal with, such as dump trailers or 12-inch chippers. “If a contractor needs something special, we’re always trying to find ways that we can support that. We’re an early adopter of niche items. A good example is the battery-powered cutoff saw. We had some contractors asking for them and we bought a couple of them. We were the first in the area to offer them,” Jeff says.
“The size of our business allows us to act quickly. We don’t fill out 15 different forms to request to add a new item to our fleet. We can go out tomorrow and buy something and try it,” adds Steffen.
Relentless execution
Size and flexibility are important, but Nickell says that increasing focus on execution helps as well. “Our motto this year is ‘relentless execution’. One of the things that I’ve seen throughout my career from my previous rental company and working with other rental companies is they have a very good relationship with local customers, but they have a hard time executing it consistently. They get kind of good at sales for a little while and then their sales will increase, but then they sit back a little bit and enjoy that increase. Then six months later, the sales decrease because they weren’t doing the same things that they did six months ago. That’s when they refocus on sales and marketing again.”
Another area Northside Tool Rental is concentrating on is ongoing employee development. “Onboarding, recruiting, training, all of those things add to the complexity of business,” says Nickell. “We’re building a relentless focus on those things. We do a full day review of each branch every three months, and we have weekly sales meetings to talk about our customers and how we can do things better. We are taking those things that are proven to work in the industry but making sure that we’re relentless about executing on all of those all the time. We want to build those skills into our habits and our processes.”
To further develop employees, Northside Tool Rental does phone training, using real live recorded calls. “We do it every two weeks with every person who answers the phone. It’s like clockwork. No one gets in trouble if have had a bad call. Instead, we want to develop great habits that improve the customer experience,” Nickell says.
Nickell contrasts and compares Northside Tool Rentals’ call system to what people experience with cellular phone services or banks. “If you’ve ever called AT&T or Verizon or your bank, you go through seven different people and you must re-explain your story seven different times. You finally get that one person who says, ‘I can help you with that.’ It makes you happy. So, one of the first things we say when we get somebody on the phone is ‘I can help you with that.’ Our employees are empowered to make decisions. Then, we follow with, ‘Tell me about your project. I’m a consultant. I’m here to support you.’”
The next step is consistently asking for the business. “Rental is a demand-based business. When somebody calls you, you’re going to get the business 30 percent of the time. But if you ask one question, ‘When can I reserve that for you?’ you increase your close rate to 60 percent!” Nickell says.
Employees are rewarded for consistent behavior. “We want to create those habits so that every time we’re on the phone we ask, ‘When can I reserve that for you?’ We explain that by doing so, we are creating a great customer experience. We are encouraging and supporting that behavior by making it fun. Our team right now has a goal when they hit a certain number of high-quality calls in a row, they get a free weekend vacation for two to the beach or the mountains,” Nickell says.
The staff also does warm hand-offs of customers getting transferred to other employees or branches, Jeff says. “If you call us and the call must be transferred to another branch, it’s a warm handoff. As you initiate the transfer, you say, ‘Hey, you know what? We’ve got that at one of our other branches. Hold on, let me get you in touch with them.’ That employee calls the other branch and explains who the is customer on hold and what that person is looking for. Then the phone call gets transferred so the customer isn’t having to repeat themselves all the way from the beginning, which is so frustrating.”
Thanking customers
The Northside Tool Rental team takes the time to call customers who have spent more than $500 on rentals in the last week. Each customer gets a courtesy thank-you-for-your-business call. “I’m amazed at how many rental companies don’t take the time to do that. It’s a simple call and a call that anyone can make. It’s not a cold call. It’s not even really a sales call, although I would argue that that it eventually becomes a sales call. It’s a relationship-building call. We have created a process where every week we run the report, we talk about them and then we assign those thank-you calls. Assigning them is critical. If you don’t assign them, nobody does it,” Nickell says
Complex equipment challenge
As Northside Tool Rental expands its rental fleet, it’s finding newer models have increasingly complex systems. “Equipment is getting more complicated. Trying to figure out what is wrong with a track loader, for example, means looking through 62 pages of codes. Machines email me daily with this joystick stuck, or this air filter is clogged. It’s crazy,” says Steffen. “I think that’s getting to be a challenge to have technicians that are schooled up on this sophisticated equipment. This isn’t if you can do one engine, you can do another engine. That’s not going to be the case in the near future.”
Nickell agrees that finding and keeping skilled technicians is a very real challenge facing equipment rental houses. “Technicians and drivers are a generational issue. There’s not enough of them right now, and there’s not enough in the pipeline for the next five or 10 years. We’re going to have to solve that, just like every other equipment rental company and equipment dealership that’s out there. We want to keep these challenges from affecting our relationships with our customers.”
“Relationships are critical to what we do, and we need to use technology to skip steps be more effective and more efficient. We’re already testing things with AI and how it can help us with fleet proficiency and to manage customer information. We are figuring that out,” Nickell says.
“There’s going to be a huge difference in the people who know how to do that and have that skill in the next five years and the people who don’t. For example, we have a new branch manager who has been able to skip a ton of steps because pretty much with any question, he doesn’t have to wait for an expert on our team to respond. He simply puts it in Chat GPT with kind of a custom version he’s made that understands Northside and our equipment and then can check what’s available in our fleet online,” Nickell says.
Northside Tool Rental is also gathering information about customers to assist in offering even better suggestions and guidance to help customers. “It can help us know what jobs they are working on, what type of contractor they are and how we can best serve them. It helps us improve our email communications and helps us understand what pieces of equipment we need to add to our fleet, where we need to grow and where we need to support and what new markets that we need to look at,” Nickell says.
Nickell, Steffen and Jeff see this as building a solid foundation of market intelligence. “For the next few years, we want to build this foundation, then look for opportunities to springboard into more locations. We want to move into markets that don’t have that local independent rental center and has small contractors who are underserved. Some of that could be through new locations. Some of that could be through acquiring other great independents. When we move into a market, our goal is to just do that better and do that with systems, not necessarily change the business and chase the next big customer out there,” says Nickell.
This article originally appeared in the September-October 2025 issue of Pro Contractor Rentals magazine ©2025 Urbain Communications LLC. All rights reserved.
PRO CONTRACTOR RENTALS MAGAZINE
Pro Contractor Rentals provides information of value to rental centers who focus time, resources and attention on meeting the demands of construction contractors and other equipment rental customers.
