About Point of Rental

We didn't come to hire.
We came from it.

Point of Rental started as a hire store in 1982. Software available back then didn't understand our industry, so we built a system that did. Forty-plus years later, that's still how we build.

We are global.

Around 400 people work at Point of Rental. We serve more than 5,000 hire businesses in over 80 countries, from single-store independents to national fleets, across plant, general tool, event and marquee, powered access, portable sanitation, dealership, and more.

We do that from three offices: Fort Worth, Texas, is our global HQ and serves the Americas. Our UK office in Reading works with hire businesses throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And our Melbourne team serves the Asia-Pacific region. Hire runs at all hours, and so does Point of Rental.

5,000+ hire businesses served
80+ countries supported
40+ years building hire software
98.4% of support calls resolved first call

Some of that experience is ours. A lot of it is inherited. Between support, consulting, development, and product, we're carrying something close to 1,000 years of hands-on hire experience. People who ran stores, drove the trucks, and fixed the machines came here to build the thing they wished they'd had.

It's also why we run a consulting practice built to help hire businesses run better, and why we've hosted an International Conference for our customers for years. We'd rather be a partner than a vendor.

Index cards and a NASA background.

In 1982, a group of former NASA software engineers opened an equipment hire store in Grand Prairie, Texas.

They looked for software to manage their inventory, but what existed wasn't good enough. So in 1983 they wrote their own: hire and sale contracts, inventory control, reservations, accounts receivable. They built it for one store, their store, because they were the ones standing at the counter when it didn't work.

Other hire businesses started asking if they could buy it. That's the whole origin: Point of Rental exists because hire people needed software that worked for them, and that has never really changed.

My grandparents had a rental store in Oklahoma. It was pen and paper. Little index cards, one for every customer, one for every item. You'd write down the rates, and you'd turn it over, and it would tell you the last time you maintained it. That's what we came from.

Wayne Harris CEO

Two men in early-1990s clothing stand in a dirt lot beside the original Point of Rental store under construction in Grand Prairie, Texas, with a strip mall and parked cars in the background.

Customer number 13.

Wayne Harris started working in his grandparents' hire store when he was 11. When his parents needed a system, they found a small outfit called Point of Rental and bought a license. They were the 13th customer.

Wayne used that software as a teenager, went to college, and came back to write code for it. By then the company was 11 years old and had fewer than 100 customers.

Here's what changed. The original programmer came from NASA. He knew how to make software efficient. He had never stood behind a hire counter, never ordered parts for a broken machine, never marked a unit down as damaged. The functions were all there, but they didn't follow the order a hire business actually works in. Wayne had worked nearly every job in a store. He had the source code, and he knew the job.

Within three years of rebuilding those workflows, the company sold another 100 stores. Two years after that, another 100. That's the inflection point, and it's the reason we recruit the way we do. Hire experience isn't a nice-to-have here. It's the input. Between support, consulting, development, and product, we're carrying something close to 1,000 years of hands-on hire experience. People who ran stores, drove the trucks, and fixed the machines came here to build the thing they wished they'd had. Every feature we ship gets measured against that.

A young Wayne Harris rides a tractor in his parents' hire yard.

What problems does your hire software solve?

Look at where the other systems in this industry came from. An accounting package that bolted hire on. A point-of-sale system that decided hire was just a sale with a return date. A web store that added a booking calendar. One of the biggest platforms still running in North America was written in 1979 and is fundamentally the same product.

If you start from paperwork, the best you can build is faster paperwork.

Going from handwriting contracts to a computer was an enormous leap. It was also 40 years ago. The businesses winning in hire today aren't trying to replace pen and paper. They're asking a different question: how does every process, every customer interaction, every decision get better? That question is the difference between hire management and hire performance.

Two vintage Polaroid photos labeled "Where we started" — a 1983 tool hire storefront and a 1984 employee at a green-screen computer terminal — beside a modern Point of Rental dashboard labeled "Where we are," showing live performance agents automatically moving idle equipment, rebooking overdue returns, and adjusting hire rates.

Tenths of a second, a thousand times over.

Elite racing teams win by taking a tenth of a second out of a pit stop, a fraction of a degree out of a wing angle, a gram out of a component, and doing that everywhere at once. The margin between winning and losing is the sum of hundreds of small gains.

Hire works the same way. How fast can you write a contract? Can your customer book it themselves at 11 p.m.? Does the yard already know it's coming? Is the machine fueled and serviced? Did the invoice go out right and on time? Did the notification reach the driver?

We've spent four decades taking friction out of each of those, one at a time, and the compound effect is the point. A business running Point of Rental properly and a business running a digitised paper system are not doing the same job at different speeds. They're running different businesses.

The things we're doing let a rental store owner have dinner with their family. In the pen and paper days, that meant Dad wasn't home for dinner, because he was at the store. So we write software so people are home.

Wayne Harris CEO

Dashboard chart titled "Where the seconds go," comparing before-and-after median time for each hire cycle step and showing total contract time dropping from 57 minutes 50 seconds to 7 minutes 55 seconds, alongside a stat card reading 1,175 hours saved a month across 1,412 contracts.

The performance era.

Hire businesses have always run on gut feel. Someone, usually the owner, has a feeling they should buy three more lifts. Usually they're right, because they've done this for 30 years. But no one person can hold a whole fleet in their head, and the bigger you get, the more that gut has to cover.

The data to answer those questions has existed in your system the whole time. What it's always needed is a human who knows how to run the right report, at the right moment, and read the right row. That's a lot to ask of someone who's already running a business.

The Rental Intelligence Suite closes that gap. Not a dashboard you have to remember to open. A layer that watches, predicts, and acts. Say you own 10 lifts returning 60% ROI. Gut says buy three more. The data says the 11th returns 25%, and in fact you'd make more money owning seven. That's a shift from 60% to 75% ROI on a $10 million fleet, worth $1.5 million straight to the bottom line, on equipment you already own.

That's the shift from a Hire Management System to a Hire Performance System.

Cluster of Point of Rental dashboard screens: a fleet overview with revenue and equipment-status metrics, a category revenue chart, upcoming deliveries, an asset location map with an e-signed pickup, a hire bundle checkout card, and a contract detail panel.

Timeline

44 years of it.

1982
Former NASA software engineers open an equipment hire store in Grand Prairie, Texas.
1983
Frustrated by the software available, they write their own. Point of Rental is born.
1993
Wayne Harris joins as a developer. He rebuilds the software around how hire actually works.
2004
Point of Rental splits from Rental Stop, allowing POR to focus 100% on software.
2011
Founders Bob Shaffer and Steve Husbands retire; head developer Wayne Harris becomes CEO.
2015
Melbourne office opens, serving APAC.
2016
Syrinx joins Point of Rental, establishing our UK and European base.
2016
Elite and Essentials launch.
2019
New global HQ opens in Fort Worth, Texas.
2024
Record360 joins, bringing best-in-class inspection and condition documentation.
2026
Point of Rental launches the Rental Intelligence Suite and Hire Performance, turning fleet data into faster, more confident decisions.

EPIC

What we hold ourselves to.

Pointers strive to be EPIC in everything that they do, from serving customers to developing software to scheduling meetings to balancing our books (and so on). These are the values we're built on, and it's our promise to you to deliver an EPIC experience, day in and day out:

Empowering Principled Innovative Caring

Empowering

We equip teammates, customers, and communities to reach their full potential through education, encouragement, and trust.

Principled

We're committed to authenticity, honesty, and openness, and we show it in how reliably we turn up.

Innovative

We're trailblazers. We keep looking for the opportunity and the next problem worth solving, before anyone asks us to.

Caring

We genuinely care about our teammates, our customers, and our communities, and we act like it.

Point the Way.

Point the Way is our employee-led community program. It puts our people, time, and money behind causes our teams care about, in the places we work. Hire has been good to us. This is part of paying that back.

Start performing.

Forty-plus years ago, the leap was index cards to a computer. Most of this industry never took the next one. Software that doesn't just record what your business did, but tells it what to do next, and does it. We came from hire. We're taking it with us.

Get a Demo Explore the Rental Intelligence Suite

Works with the tools you already run.

Real stories from hire businesses like yours

Scale across locations without losing control

Point of Rental celebrates giving with the cowshed

Works with the tools you already run.

Real stories from hire businesses like yours

Scale across locations without losing control

Point of Rental celebrates giving with the cowshed

We didn't come to hire.
We came from it.

We are global.

Index cards and a NASA background.

Customer number 13.

What problems does your hire software solve?

Tenths of a second, a thousand times over.

The performance era.

44 years of it.

What we hold ourselves to.

Empowering

Principled

Innovative

Caring

Point the Way.

Start performing.

Works with the tools you already run.

Real stories from hire businesses like yours

Scale across locations without losing control

Point of Rental celebrates giving with the cowshed

We didn't come to hire.We came from it.

We are global.

Index cards and a NASA background.

Customer number 13.

What problems does your hire software solve?

Tenths of a second, a thousand times over.

The performance era.

44 years of it.

What we hold ourselves to.

Empowering

Principled

Innovative

Caring

Point the Way.

Start performing.

We didn't come to hire.
We came from it.