Where’s the best place to get lunch in Seaside, OR? You might think the answer can be found in one of the bustling eateries lining the touristy boulevard of Broadway Street. Or maybe inside one of the beachy hotels lining the promenade in this little town that could be the west coast second cousin to Atlantic City. But you would be wrong. The best lunch in town can only be had at a small equipment rental house on the outskirts of town, sometime around noon on weekdays.
Yep, you read that right. Walk through the door at All Rents at the right time on any given day and you will see the immaculately kept showroom temporarily filled with folding tables on which the day’s lunch special is presented. Sitting around the table and behind the counter are every member of the staff, including the patriarch of the business, Frank Orrell, 70, his daughter and right hand Sarah Orrell-Poe, 33, along with a few visitors that might include regular customers who know the drill, colorful local characters hungry for a good meal, and even the lucky unsuspecting renter who just happened to get there at lunch time. All are treated to a full meal – which might be tri tip steak sandwiches, wild game scrambler, moose or elk hunted by Frank himself, or maybe even locally harvested razor clams. The atmosphere is friendly - familial, in fact - as everyone takes a short break from work to sit down to eat together.
The chef, of course, is Frank, who takes obvious pride in his culinary creativity as well as his ability to provide such a benefit to his staff and the community, for in a tiny town like Seaside, a small business owner can’t always offer the highest wages or a full package of benefits, but he can certainly offer lunch with a healthy helping of camaraderie.
“The lunch tradition has been going on since day one,” Frank says. “My mother was a cook in a logging camp and we always enjoyed her cooking. The reason we started this here is because we all spend so many hours away from home. We’re at work more than anywhere else. We want to provide something extra to make everyone feel at home when they’re here. Everyone’s welcome.”
Filling a need
Located about halfway up US Route 101 in Clatsop County, OR, Seaside is a town built on coastal tourism. People come to town on vacation mostly, and business centers primarily on serving those tourists. As a result, the local economy is somewhat depressed, says Frank, even with the activity the visitors bring to the region. There just isn’t a lot of industry in the area. But All Rents has been fortunate to remain the only dedicated equipment rental company within 70 miles, and the Orrells have made a successful go of it for 30 years, capitalizing on their reputation for providing full-service solutions to customers ranging from contractors to homeowners since 1986.
Frank was a plumber in Clatsop County back in the 80s when Sarah and her sister Laura were born. He worked the area, building friendships with customers and his own rental supplier, Erwin Schimmel, who ran Power Rents down the road in Hillsboro.
“That’s when I started thinking about getting into rentals,” Frank recalls. “Any time I needed a special tool I’d drive three hours to see Erwin at Power Rents. I was driving back there one day after renting a trencher, thinking I can’t be the only one going all this way to rent tools. On my way home, I stopped in a restaurant and wrote up a business plan in three hours. Then I went to the bank and got a couple bucks, bought a piece of ground and built a building on the south end of town.”
In the early years, Frank tapped Schimmel’s knowledge time and again and saw his business grow quickly as a result.
“I thought that first location would last four to five years before we outgrew it,” he recalls, “but we started building a new store the very next year.”
Frank credits Schimmel with educating him on the basics of how to run a rental company, but one thing he didn’t need much help with was his business philosophy.
“I was a businessman already and I’ve always taken a very conservative approach,” he explains. “My financial philosophy is simple: I don’t care what we buy as long as the payment is no more than one third of the monthly rental rate. If our monthly payment is a $1,000, then we’ve got to get $3,000 for a month’s rental to justify ownership. One third of every rental should go toward the payment, one third to maintenance and overhead, and one third to replacement cost, or investment in inventory. You never end up over leveraged that way. It’s worked very well for us.”
He adds, “One thing Erwin talked a lot about was listening to the customer. He always said, they’ll tell you what you need to do.”
It’s a family affair
Following its inception, All Rents enjoyed solid success for over a decade, but like many others at the time, Frank sold his company to United Rentals in 1999. After that, he maintained ownership of the property, and kept busy doing contract work while raising his family.
Then something happened in 2011 to shake things up a bit.
“United left town in the middle of the night,” Frank recalls with a chuckle. “I was their landlord, but I actually heard the news in a bar.”
Shortly thereafter, in 2012, Frank decided to get back into the rental game and reopen All Rents, this time with his grown daughters as partners.
“I said hey, this is a good business opportunity. I’ll get it running and you guys can have it. Just pay me rent for the building,” says Frank.
“It was a surprise,” says Sarah, who up until then had been working as a certified dental assistant and front office manager for seven years. “But there was no hesitation on my end. I was excited.”
For her part, Laura, now 34, who up until then had been working construction with her dad, was newly married and had just started her own family when Frank approached her with his proposal.
“I had just had my first baby, so I was pretty crazy,” she recalls, explaining that she now takes a back seat role with the company although she remains part of the All Rents crew in spirit.
Growing up in the business
The Orrell sisters have always worked closely with their dad, from whom they’ve inherited a natural equipment know-how.
“We grew up here,” Sarah says. “We’ve always known a pressure washer from a sewer snake.”
Of course, there are challenges. “So much of this business comes down to life experience,” says Sarah. “There’s a lot to learn and it just has to happen over time. Fortunately, we have a good teacher.”
Today, Sarah, who completed the American Rental Association of Oregon’s leadership program in 2015, has established herself as a presence in the local business community as well as the rental industry. In July she was elected to a seat on the board of the ARAOR.
She also attended the ARA Young Professionals Network Conference in Phoenix last fall. Targeted at “40 Under 40,” the event offers opportunities for younger professionals to discuss long-term goals.
“I would like to grow the event rental side of our business,” Sarah says of her long-term plans for the company. “We’ve really grown in the event side this past season but now I would like to offer more. We have a small population that we serve so if we expand in seasonal things we might be able to add growth in that area.”
While not a significant slice of the company’s annual volume yet, events are a promising part of the business.
“It’s only been one year with the canopies, but this will be our biggest year so far for events,” Sarah says. “The word is out.”
Speaking of the word being out, customers know who to go to for help at All Rents.
“You get the customers who come in and automatically go to one of the guys,” Sarah relates. “But most of the time the guys they go to direct them straight to me. Then it’s kind of fun to school them, to be honest.”
Frank has seen it too. “In this business, there is some male dominance. But it only happens once. The next time those customers come in, they know to go straight to Sarah. Her knowledge goes very deep.”
Branching out
All Rents employs six full-timers and two others part time. Sarah runs the day-to-day operations which she balances with raising a family that includes her husband JD, who recently joined the All Rents team full time, and her daughter, Kaylie, 11.
“I’ve had huge support from my husband from day one when this opportunity was presented to me,” she says of JD, who just recently became a co-worker. “Not only has he supported our family with a full-time job of his own, he also always lended a hand at All Rents, even before he came to work here. And he did all this while managing our daughter’s activities too. I couldn’t do it without him.”
Meanwhile, Frank contemplates his eventual retirement. “I’m one of those who will work for a very long time, but I plan to cut back eventually,” he says. “I’d like to spend more time on the golf course and RV-ing. Of course, I’m always just a phone call away.”
A conservative approach
As the only rental game in town, All Rents doesn’t have to work too hard at promoting itself, but the Orrells admit they miss out on some of the bigger jobs in the area because they don’t employ a sales force. “Bigger jobs sometimes stumble upon us,” Sarah says. “They’ve already made connections with their national accounts, and so on, but they’ll use us for something small when they need it quickly.”
Frank says small companies like All Rents need to be careful not to bite off more than they can chew. “If you have a transient contractor that comes in to do a $30-million Wal-Mart or something, for us to be the first one on that site for the job is really like falling on our own sword because if we don’t have the gear, we have to finance that gear, and then what do we do with the gear when that job goes away? You’ve really got to be careful. We don’t have unlimited resources.”
The Orrells are careful with rates too, basing their structure strictly on what their local market can bear.
“We truly believe that if our community is not successful, then we will not be successful,” Frank says. “So we look at the demographics of our community and we base our rates upon what it can support. Our margins are a little lower, but we’re still pretty happy with where we’re at.”
High-end service from a down-home company
The respect for the community that is the backbone of the Orrells’ business is reciprocated by their customers, and you could argue that’s one reason behind the company’s long-term success.
“Our customers come to us because they know we’re going to treat them fairly,” Sarah says. “They know we’re going to rent them working equipment and it’s going to be alright. We always go above and beyond to help our customers, and sometimes that means taking 20 phone calls from someone asking how to start a pressure washer. But that’s what we do.”
Frank adds, “One thing we’ve never lost track of is that if we don’t have a customer, we don’t have a business. So our customers’ thoughts, their safety, how they feel when they come here is number one with us.”
“We have a contractor who has done lots of business with us and he’s really grown to be our friend,” Sarah relates. “He came in one day and said, ‘You know, you guys are like Nordstrom. Everybody knows when you go to Nordstrom, you’re going to get top-notch service, you’re going to feel appreciated, you’re going to be first in line. You guys are the Nordstrom of the rental industry.’”
She adds, “He knows we might not have a certain piece of equipment, but he calls us and he lets us go and get it for him. He says he’d rather write us
the check.”
Building community
The Orrells’ commitment to their community seems to be a family trait that comes down through the generations.
“I guess I have to blame my mother,” says Frank, smiling at the thought. “She was a tireless worker and gave untold hours to the schools, to neighbors, to anyone who needed help. She really instilled the importance of giving without the expectation of return.”
Offering lunch every day is a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of running a business. It doesn’t have anything to do with solving a customer’s problem, it doesn’t necessarily bring in more business, and it really doesn’t add to the bottom line. But it’s a huge gesture that goes a long way toward making employees feel like family while fostering a sense of community among customers.
The Orrells take this very seriously.
“Relationships are everything in a small town like this,” says Frank. “If we don’t treat everyone fairly and we lose even one customer, there aren’t four or five new ones behind him. There are only 35,000 people in Clatsop County and we need every one of them for our business to continue its growth.”
With that in mind, the folks at All Rents work hard to ensure customers always feel good when they leave the store.
As Frank says, “If we do the right things for the right reasons, it will always come out right.”
All Rents By the Numbers
Number of employees: 6 full time and 2 part time
Equipment/fleet value: $1.4 million
Annual business volume: $1.2 million
Annual rental revenue: $960,000
Largest pieces of equipment in fleet: 65-foot boom lift, 8,000-lb. telehandler
Average age of equipment: Mini excavators and smaller – four years or less; large booms and reach forklifts – 6 to 8 years
