MISSISSAUGUA, Ontario — Former Hertz Equipment Rental Corp. executive Willie Swisher recently took over as president of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada-based Stephenson's Rent-All, replacing Chris McKay.
Swisher was HERC's vice president of sales and marketing for four years after serving in several management capacities during a 15-year career at Prime Equipment. He became president of RentOnTheDot, an Internet-based rental reservation system in October 2000, and went on the become president of Texada Software, which was formed after Rent-on-the-Dot acquired Systematic Computer Services. Swisher will continue to serve as president of Texada in addition to Stephenson's.
Swisher said he plans to lead Stephenson's — No. 53 on the RER 100 — in a different direction. “We want to move Stephenson's to more of a hub-and-spoke model in the greater Toronto area and we want to focus on the GTA versus other markets,” Swisher told RER. “Stephenson's has good brand awareness and we want to leverage that in Toronto and become a bigger player in this market. Before the company was spreading out across Canada and developing the big-box strategy which didn't prove successful.” Over the past few years, Stephenson's partnered with several home-improvement chains to develop rental departments within home-improvement and big-box retail outlets. Stephenson's developed about 20 departments in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec in addition to the Toronto area. Swisher said those chains could not compete with Home Depot in attracting the amount of foot traffic necessary to make the rental departments successful with their inventory of small homeowner and light-contractor-oriented tools and machines. Stephenson's has now closed most of the departments and will phase out the rest shortly.
“We'll continue to develop our inventory in the small to medium-size equipment range,” Swisher added. “In terms of size, we'll focus on scissorlifts and skid-steer loaders, but we'll also concentrate on niche products such as heaters, concrete surface preparation equipment and scaffolding. We want to move Stephenson's in the direction of being more like most traditional rental companies, be a strong regional player, with strong relationships with our core customer base.”
After closing most of the rental departments, Stephenson's now has 30 locations, 28 in the Toronto area and two in the Vancouver area. “The stores in the Vancouver area did very well during a slow economic period and we'd like to see how the stores perform now that the economy there is on the upswing,” Swisher said.
Texada Software's core product is a rental management system that facilitates real-time Web-based and wireless transactions, specifically designed for regional, national and multi-national rental companies. It provides rentals, sales, reservations, quotations, work orders, maintenance scheduling, inventory control, purchasing and integrated accounting functionality. RentOnTheDot markets modules that facilitate complete rental transactions to be conducted online using the Internet. Systematic Software is a rental-management package well-known in the rental industry since it came on the market in 1985.
