Ken and Heather de Vries have retired from All Star Rents and John Wooten has taken the reins as CEO. Wooten told RER he is leading the company as CEO although ownership is retained by de Vries and his siblings Don, Nancy and Rick de Vries. The company was founded by their late father Ted de Vries as Vallejo Rent-All in the early 1960s.
Wooten joined All Star Rents in 2001, hired by de Vries to help unify a number of disparate rental locations the company had acquired. Wooten, who had experience on the managerial level for a national company, helped bring cohesive systems to the company, which thereafter changed its name from Vallejo Rent-All, which sounded more like a local company doing business in the small city of Vallejo, to the current All Star Rents as the company expanded throughout northern California.
An RER 100 listee several times, All Star, based in Fairfield, Calif., fell slightly short of the list the past couple of years as a result of California’s recession, but is still a major player in the San Francisco Bay Area and areas to its east and north.
For more information about All Star Rents’ history, processes and philosophies, read RER’s cover story on the company, which ran in its January 2006 issue. The article can be accessed online at: http://rermag.com/mag/equipment_catching_growth_010106/.
