As you’ve clicked through to this guide, there’s a strong chance you’re planning to start a medical equipment rental business, or that you’re at least interested in the industry. That’s fantastic; it really is a vibrant industry with huge potential for small start-ups and larger businesses alike. For instance, according to Grand View Research’s recent study, the global market size value in 2020 was USD 50.73 billion and is predicted to grow to USD 64.07 billion by 2025. As Rentrax has created especially powerful cloud-based equipment rental software, we are well placed to offer some business advice — especially given that we have many medical equipment clients at the moment who really appreciate the flexibility and features our software offers. Keep reading to learn how to start a medical equipment rental business, and please feel free to schedule a free demo if you’d like to see how our software works.
Consider your Medical Rental Niche Carefully
First things first: you’ll need to think carefully about your medical niche. If you don’t already have a clear idea about which medical niche you’d like to operate within, then you have the freedom to select either the easiest or most profitable option for you. Perhaps you can consider whether to operate within one of the following industries: hospital, care home, dentistry, veterinary medicine. Then, once you’ve decided which of these areas to focus on, you can specialize further. Consider the area you work within — or at least the area your rental business can feasibly service. Is there a dearth of good medical equipment within certain medical services? If so, perhaps this is the obvious choice for your business.
If you’re in any doubt about which medical niche to base your medical equipment rental business on, then don’t be afraid to pick up the phone and talk to some people in the industry. Don’t expect busy professionals to have lots of free time, but no one will mind answering a few questions. Ask them about the pain points in their practice and if there is any equipment they regularly need from a rental business. If you stay organized as you record your research, your notes will begin to paint a picture of the specific niche you ought to focus on. Now that you’ve made this decision, it will positively impact every level of your business.
Find the Right Premises for Your Medical Rental Inventory
The next thing to consider is your premises. The good news is that few medical or wheelchair rental businesses require actual shops that rely on footfall. This means that you can avoid the high property rental costs associated with these properties; instead, you will be able to rent a great-value warehouse property that prioritizes space over the location or the aesthetics of your shop front.
Note: depending on your products/inventory, you may need some special features fitted into your warehouse. For instance, if you rent out equipment that needs to be absolutely sterile, you will need to follow regulations, creating a safe environment in which to hold this stock. Some medical equipment businesses also double up as medical supplies retailers, if just for a few products relevant to their rental equipment. If this applies to your niche, consider whether you may need additional fridge space or some other feature when you’re weighing up which potential premises is right for your business.
Incentivize Medical Practices to Work with Your Rental Business
Few business owners need to be reminded to watch their competition, but this step is especially relevant in the medical equipment rental industry. Not only will looking to your competition help you ascertain whether or not your USP is more appealing than your competitors’, it will also let you learn about the industry — especially if they have been operating for longer. Perhaps the most useful thing you can learn about your competition relates to marketing, as most aspects of a business’s marketing efforts are necessarily public, making them easy to find and then analyze. Look at how your competitors do business and how they market their medical equipment rentals; you can learn just as much from your competition when they’re doing things wrong as when they’re doing things right.
Assess Your Competition
Few business owners need to be reminded to watch their competition, but this step is especially relevant in the medical equipment rental industry. Not only will looking to your competition help you ascertain whether or not your USP is more appealing than your competitors’, it will also let you learn about the industry — especially if they have been operating for longer. Perhaps the most useful thing you can learn about your competition relates to marketing, as most aspects of a business’s marketing efforts are necessarily public, making them easy to find and then analyze. Look at how your competitors do business and how they market their medical equipment rentals; you can learn just as much from your competition when they’re doing things wrong as when they’re doing things right.
Marketing Your Medical Equipment Rental Business
Marketing your medical equipment rental business doesn’t have to be stressful. And marketing isn’t nearly as difficult as many marketing agencies would have you believe. Above anything else, you need to figure out where your potential customers are; after all, there’s no point putting a lot of time and money into marketing if your potential customers aren’t there.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do is search engine optimization (SEO) — and it’s the one kind of marketing that all businesses will want to carry out, as pretty much everyone uses Google (and to a lesser extent Bing and Yahoo) to find what they’re looking for. Even if someone sees your company through a different marketing channel, chances are they’ll google your company to find you, rather than entering in your website’s full address and hitting enter.
Spend a little time on Google’s free-to-use Keyword Planner tool to find out exactly what people are typing into Google when they’re looking for your products. This can help you slightly change the wording throughout your website as it allows you to work out exactly what language your target audience is using to describe your products, as opposed to the words and phrases you suspect they’re using. Some quick-and-easy SEO tips:
- Always use the most important keyword on your webpage’s title tag and H1.
- Google rewards expertise, so write well and with a high degree of detail, using specific expert-level vocabulary.
- Google wants to point users to fast, responsive websites, so make sure your website’s images are all optimized, maintaining most of the quality while radically reducing their file size, making them faster to load.
Use the Right Medical Equipment Rental Software for Your Business
No two rental businesses run exactly the same but there are a lot of the same needs and the same pain points. This is why companies like Rentrax have gone to such lengths to develop specialist medical equipment rental software — as opposed to the majority of software options out there which are merely sales or inventory systems resold as “rental software”. Not all rental software is created equal and we recommend you work out exactly what you will use your software for. Be very selective and if a company’s software doesn’t have the full functionality you’re looking for, keep on looking.
At Rentrax, we are very confident about our diverse range of software features, all of which benefit medical rental companies. Here is a small list of some of our best features:
- Our inventory management system can be as customized as you need it to be, allowing you to change how your customers browse through your products online, giving them as much choice (or as little) as you like. Well set up with care and accuracy, a good SKU-based inventory management system can be a great asset, allowing you to offer more specific product choices than your competitors.
- Our medical rental software also allows you to track how much revenue each of your rental assets has generated. This allows you to gain a nuanced understanding of which assets are earning more money and it also allows you to sell stock once it has more than paid for itself, replacing it with newer, refreshed models. Depending on your medical niche, this has the potential to radically improve revenue as it allows you to sell stock while it still has value.
- We have built sales features into our rental software to allow rental businesses to also sell some products when necessary. This removes the need to pay for additional sales software. It also means that all revenue streams, whether from equipment rentals or sales, will all be collected together as part of the same system.
- We offer a fully supported service designed to help you get the most of your rental software. We’re the software specialists — not you! And we don’t expect you to to learn every single aspect of our software. However, we dedicate resources and time to make sure that you have access to our software experts. They will teach you how to use your software, how to customize it to your business’s needs, and they will answer any and all questions you have.
- We’re adding a new solution to rentrax soon. This new module will serve property rental managers, allowing them to manage their apartment rental business in one streamlined platform. This future-proof software solution will enable property managers to create and edit listings, collect rent payments, generate maintenance requests, process applications, and much more. Our mission is to provide an efficient way for apartment rental managers of all sizes to successfully manage their businesses.
There are, of course, more software features, but we won’t list everything here. If you’d like to learn more about Rentrax, and if you have any specific questions for our experts, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Medical equipment rental can be a vibrant and rewarding industry and we hope this short guide has helped you.