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Serial Entrepreneur Went Big With Equipment Rentals

Starting BigRentz.com was a no-brainer for Chief Executive Dallas Imbimbo.

“It’s very easy—you just have to get people to call you, and you have to get the equipment,” Imbimbo said of the Irvine-based company’s brokerage-like business model.

“It was like Travelocity, but no one was doing it in equipment rental. And we didn’t have to invest much.”

Whatever he and his partners, Nick Kovacevic and Stephen Jesson, put in—he won’t say—it’s paying off.

BigRentz.com topped the Business Journal’s list of the fastest growing small private companies with a 1,268% two-year growth spurt and $6.7 million in revenue for the 12-month period ending June 30. The company is on track to close the year with $15 million in sales, Imbimbo said.

BigRentz leases heavy equipment, such as scissorlifts, forklifts, boomlifts, excavators and backhoes to customers ranging from weekend warriors working through a “honey-do” list to Fox Sports and ESPN. It has secured contracts with about 900 suppliers, which deliver equipment from 6,000 locations nationally.

Imbimbo said everyone benefits from the setup: His company gets discounted rates, suppliers add rental volume; and customers enjoy one-stop shopping.

“They call one person, and we can get them the equipment” from anywhere in the country, he said, adding his supplier rates are 20% to 30% cheaper, so by the time a customer rents from him they get the same price as going to the supplier directly.

The company rents 1,500 to 2,000 pieces of equipment each month.

It’s only lost one piece of equipment—a forklift taken to Mexico—and only 20 pieces have been damaged. Imbimbo said BigRentz pays for wrecked equipment, then gets reimbursed by their customer.

“That’s why suppliers like us,” he said. “They know they have a big company that will take care of [it].”

PackMyDorm

Kovacevic and Imbimbo road tested Big

Rentz’ business idea during their senior year in college—they had earlier founded PackMyDorm.com, which stored students’ belongings during summer breaks.

But as with their current venture, the duo was not packing or carrying anyone’s stuff. They sent cardboard boxes to schools such as Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley that students packed, then left out for a moving company to pick up and store for the summer.

“Really, we were just a broker … and that’s BigRentz,” said Imbimbo. “We sold the company at the end of the school year to one of the moving companies we were working with,” then set about developing the next idea.

Kush Bottles

In 2010, they started Kush Bottles Inc., which now ships more than 4,000 cases of marijuana dispenser bottles a month from warehouses at its Santa Ana headquarters, in Denver and outside Seattle.

Kush Bottles relies on an Erie, Penn., manufacturer to churn out bottles to hold as little as a gram to as much as a half-ounce of buds. The company is preparing to go public, Imbimbo said.

It was one of Kush Bottles’ dispensary clients who connected the duo with Jesson, the idea man behind BigRentz.

“We met Steve for lunch, and the next day he pitched it to us. We set up a couple of desks at [Kush Bottles’] office in Santa Ana and just started,” Imbimbo said.

At first, it was impossible to negotiate good rates with big suppliers, such as Hertz Equipment Rental Corp. and Sunbelt Rentals Inc. because rental volume was too low.

“It took us a year to do enough [volume] where they finally said, ‘OK,’ ” he said.

The volume also brought the need to rebrand as BigRentz.com. Up to that point, the company operated via several equipment-specific website names.

BigRentz moved into its current Irvine headquarters five months later and hired 45 people, for a total of 75.

Next on Imbimbo’s to-do list?

“We are focusing on taking [BigRentz] internationally,” he said. “We already have suppliers in Canada and Mexico. We’ll get that equipment back.”

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