Creating an Optimal Rental Experience | Elizabeth Loge

She has been a pioneer in launching the Women Leaders of CBS Rentals program, whose mission is to Encourage, Educate, and Empower others, creating a path for women leaders. “Sparking a belief that the world can change, and women are leading the change. We provide a wide variety of equipment and innovative solutions similar to our competition. Why not change lives, make dreams come true and have fun all while growing with your team?” says Elizabeth.

CBS Rentals was originally founded in 1965 and is a 3rd generation family-owned business. There was a major rebranding and vision shift in 2015 when Jason Herin purchased the business. “We saw that our industry had some major pain points that were not being addressed because of the organic growth occurring,” explains Elizabeth. “The rental industry had seen a decade long organic growth outpacing the country’s GDP. This was a result of contractors and equipment end users shift to renting instead of owning equipment.” Due to organic growth, businesses saw year-over-year growth with little changes in their business practices. This inevitably led to the industry becoming a laggard in technology and process improvement. CBS Rentals has invested heavily in reducing waste, increasing efficiency, and developing innovative new solutions through technology to create an optimal rental experience for their customers. Some of these solutions included partnerships with telematics providers, data integrators, and equipment manufacturers. “We are now able to provide our customers reporting, API integrations, real time insights into their rental equipment from all their job sites, and many more innovative solutions,” says Elizabeth.

The company’s solution CBS 360 was built to give customers an all-in-one rental experience that allowed them to control their rental equipment like never before. Via the solution, the customers can track their current rentals, rent more equipment, call equipment off rent, monitor telematics data like fuel levels and working utilization, schedule maintenance, download custom reporting, and much more. “As our clients are focused on growing their business, we want to give them every advantage possible from the rental side of their procurement. We strive to be their strategic partner and not just a vendor, and CBS 360 allows us to achieve that,” explains Elizabeth.

For Elizabeth and her team, CBS’s biggest achievement has been leading the business with “our Why first and developing our teams according to our Values.” She says, “The benefit of technology and innovation would not be impactful if we did not live and operate by Our Why and Values based leadership.” CBS Rentals prides itself on Integrity, Service, Innovation, and Performance and its team of experts. “We believe that our team is our greatest achievement, organizations that put value in their values will be the ones that transform the future.”  With the advent of Covid-19, Elizabeth ensured that the team was safe, and their families were taken care of and made sure that their customers have everything they need to continue their business, as the industry has been listed as essential during this time. “As CEO, I wanted to make sure that the entire team heard from me directly. Once the pandemic became widespread throughout the United States, we held a virtual town hall for all employees to join,” says Elizabeth. “In this meeting, we addressed safety, our company’s status, and what our plans were to navigate this unprecedented time.” As a team, they were able to be flexible and work together to continue their pursuit of keeping the team healthy and business going. “I am proud of what we have been able to accomplish this year in terms of our team staying together and our continued growth as a business.”

For the days to come, CBS’s goal is to be a strategic advisor for their customer. They want to give customers the equipment needed and the data that comes with it to make the best business decisions possible. “Currently, a big project in the works is the service platform that will be used for remote diagnostics on our equipment,” adds Elizabeth. “This will allow us the capability to diagnose a down machine, from our office. We are also working towards mitigating wasted time, ensuring precise service dispatching, quicker turnaround and minimal downtime for the customer.”