Tent Revival

Tent Revival

Brian Boyle and his two sons survived some early mistakes in their first family-run

entrepreneurial effort. Now the business is actually growing in a down economy.

companies by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

U.S. Tent Rental should be one of the non-real estate companies burned by the Gulf Coast real estate market inferno.

After all, this was a company that dropped most of its resources into assembling tents for construction and homebuilding companies putting on groundbreaking ceremonies and parties during the boom years.

"That was when construction was actually going on," laments Brian Boyle, chief executive of the Sarasota-based company.

A secondary, yet still lucrative market for the company has also all but dried up, another direct result of the housing market collapse. That would be designing and implementing small tent cities for two of the major annual street festivals in Sarasota -Sarasota Arts Day and the Sarasota Reading Festival. The latest installations of those annual events were recently cancelled due to economic conditions.

But there's Boyle - along with his two sons he runs the company with - fretting about the types of business challenges last seen in these parts in any big way in 2005. These are worries such as managing explosive growth, handling increased workload without diluting the final product and finding and retaining the best employees.

These are also the byproducts of expanding, both into new markets and into a new headquarters. On the new markets side, the company has become a full-fledged party-planning outfit over the past year, putting on events from weddings to corporate events to trade shows. It has a litany of party materials, from high-end tables and chairs to glassware, flatware and silverware.

In the new headquarters domain, the company moved into a $2 million, 20,000-square-foot office/warehouse complex in a Sarasota industrial park late last year. Actually, the building, which was a painstaking two years in the making, was initially 14,500 square feet when U.S. Tent was getting ready to move in last November. But Boyle, anticipating more growth, hired the contractor to build another 5,500 square feet before the company moved in.

U.S. Tent Rental, which won the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce's Small Business of the Year Award in 2008 partially for its annual revenue increases, is projecting even more growth in 2008 and 2009, especially with the Super Bowl being played in Tampa early next year. Overall, U.S. Tent Rental has grown from $375,000 in revenues in 2002, the first full year the Boyles owned it, to a projected $3 million-plus in 2008 revenues. The company had about $2.5 million in revenues in 2007, Boyle says. It has grown revenues at least 30% a year in each of the past five years.

The company's employee count is down to about 17 people for the summer, but Tim Boyle, the company's vice president of sales marketing, expects that number to reach as high as 50 by September. That's the early stages of snowbird season in Greater Sarasota, a time filled with parties and events and weddings.

Good decisions

Brian Boyle, 68, is an unlikely character to be leading the revival of a tent company specializing in glitzy parties and champagne-flowing events. The soft-spoken Detroit native and lifelong entrepreneur grew up in the business world in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, where he owned franchise rights for the now defunct Drug Emporium discount drug store chain.

Boyle moved to Sarasota in 1993 and a short time later he opened his own business brokerage service. In 2001 Boyle turned his attention to his son, Tim Doyle, who had recently been let go from a lucrative mortgage sales job in St. Petersburg. The elder Boyle sought a business for his son to run and he found it in one of his clients, a woman who was looking to sell her small tent preparation business called United States Tent Rental.

It was supposed to be a straight handoff to Tim Boyle - a son Brian Boyle considers a personal hero for maintaining a ridiculously bright and cheery attitude despite being nearly killed in a 1988 car crash that injured his spine, leaving him wheelchair bound.

What Brian Boyle thought of as a favor to his son, however, turned out to be much more. Soon after he bought the business, Brian Boyle's other son, Cliff Boyle, came on board to help assemble the tents.

"We could no longer stay a small business, with three families to support," says Brian Boyle. "We had no choice but to grow."

Brian Boyle says he and his sons met their subsequent growth goals through a combination of good luck and good decision-making.

Nonetheless, two early decisions Brian Boyle made nearly wrecked any ambitious growth plans. First off, he thought it would be a good idea to keep the same name after he bought the business, assuming the company had a good reputation since it had been operating for 20-plus years.

That assumption was wrong. Keeping the name, Brian Boyle says, "was a terrible idea. The company had a bad reputation," which the Boyles found out as they began bidding for jobs and networking in the business community.

So the Boyles shortened the name to U.S. Tent Rental and incorporated the entity, a move that became official on Sept. 11, 2001.

And when the company outgrew its location off U.S. 301 near downtown Sarasota, Brian Boyle looked for a bigger location. He found a spot near U.S. 301 and East Avenue, also near downtown Sarasota - but in a significantly less desirable neighborhood.

The Boyles quickly regretted that move, too. The street was so rough, security and safety became chief concerns. Plus, at 5,000 square feet, it was significantly too small. "We had no place to wash our tents," Boyle says. "It was a real nightmare."

New digs

By 2005, with the company growing mostly through setting up tents for construction sites, Brian Boyle began to look into finding a new headquarters. Not only was the current location subpar, he saw an eventual end to the construction work and wanted to be able to capitalize on entering new markets, such as weddings and charity events.

Boyle joined the American Rental Association to get an idea of what kind of building he wanted to build. Through the ARA, Boyle took bus tours in several cities to see how other tent and party supply rental business were doing it.

Boyle settled on the idea to build a one-stop shop, a central home for all the parts and accessories needed to put on a great party.

In concept, Boyle's headquarters idea was similar to a move recently made by George Ghanem, owner of Fort Myers-based Creative Events. Sensing the same type of growth potential as Boyle, Ghanem moved his company into an $8 million, 60,000-square-foot building earlier this summer.

Even though U.S. Tent Rental's contractor went out of business before the new headquarters was finished, the Boyles are happy with the final product. "There is nothing like this around here," Brian Boyle says. "When you see a facility like this, you are really impressed."

Features of the new facility include a large showroom, double docks for loading trucks and state-of-the art dishwashing and laundry machines. And the new headquarters is also home to U.S. Tent Rental's pièce de resistance, a custom-made tent washing and drying center that reaches 25 feet high and cost $25,000 to build. Designed by a structural engineer, the wash-and-dry complex is built three feet into the ground.

The Boyles showed off their new digs at a heavily attended grand opening earlier this summer. The event was so successful that it has led to more orders than the Boyles thought they could handle for the upcoming high season - not that anyone's complaining.

"A poor economy tends to shake out the weak," says Tim Boyle. "We've seen some of the smaller players go by the wayside."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Businesses. U.S. Tent Rental, Sarasota

Industry. Party and events planning

Key. Company is looking to expand its customer reach after recently moving into a $2 million headquarters.

Party Time

For an industry that would seem to be on the losing end of the economic downturn, event planning on the Gulf Coast sure has some ambitious players.

Brian Boyle hopes to continue growing his Sarasota-based event supplies and tent rental firm, U.S. Tent Rental, partially by booking some Super Bowl-related events in and around

Tampa next year. Boyle's backing up his bet with a $2 million 20,000-square-foot facility he built in a Sarasota industrial park. The $3 million company, which has grown annual revenues at least 30% in each of the last five years, moved into the building late last year.

Meanwhile, George Ghanem has even bigger plans for his Fort Myers-based party supplies rental company, Creative Events. Ghanem, one the Review's Entrepreneurs to Watch for 2008, also recently moved his company into a new facility, an $8 million 60,000-square-foot complex.

And like Boyle, Ghanem hopes to capitalize on Super Bowl related events and parties. He's actually already begun looking for work in the Tampa/St. Petersburg market, which he hopes will spill over to jobs in Sarasota and Bradenton.

"We are looking forward to growing in those markets," says Ghanem, adding that his biggest challenge will be to get the company's name known to potential clients north of Fort Myers.

The secondary challenge, that of how many - and if - people will need the services of a high-end party rental service doesn't faze Ghanem as much. Even though he has seen a small slowdown with repeat clients in Greater Fort Myers the past few months, he still sees a bright future for the industry, and his company.

"People still get married and still celebrate," says Ghanem. "People still need to be entertained."

Employee

empowerment

Brian Boyle backs up the term employee empowerment with some serious power.

The chief executive of U.S. Tent Rental, a Sarasota-based event supplies rental company, has developed a quarterly bonus plan for his company's 17 full-time employees that provides more than an extra paycheck bump. The system also puts an emphasis on allowing senior employees to have a big say in how many people the company will hire, as well as who it will bring on board. Says Boyle: "We try to do things a little differently here."

The program, says Boyle, starts with the quarterly pool bonuses that are paid out based on a proprietary formula made up of both objective and subjective criteria, beginning with a fixed percentage of the company's net income for the quarter. 

Then, when business gets good, as it has for the past three years, Boyle opens up the hiring calls to the senior employees. "We fill staff positions that will be included in the pool," says Boyle, "only if they can pay for themselves."

Not only that, but the senior employees, from sales personnel to tent installers can choose two options: Allow new employees that could potentially dilute the pool and the bonus to be hired or spread the extra work among current employees, thus increasing the per capita payout.

The bonus program, which doesn't have any affect on an employee's base salary, is something Boyle has thought about doing for more than 30 years, going back to when he saw a variation of it used in an Ohio steel company for which he worked.