Photos by Vandalia Rental

RER: Can you tell us about how the company was founded and a bit about its history?

Barney: Vandalia Rental was founded in 1961 as a United Rent-All franchise by my grandfather, Jack Barney, along with Carl Nickel and John Durnbaugh. A few years after the company was started, Carl and John exited the business, the United Rent-All franchise was dropped, and my grandfather became the sole owner. My father, Randy, purchased the business in 1986 and led it for roughly 25 years. During that period the company continued to evolve from what was a more traditional local tool and homeowner-oriented rental business into a larger commercial equipment rental company. In 2011, I purchased the business from my father.

Other than the brief period at the beginning when my grandfather had two business partners, Vandalia Rental has been and remains a 100-percent family-owned, privately held business. Doing so gives us the ability to focus on building amazing teams, think long term, reinvest through cycles, and make decisions that we believe are right for our team, customers, and the business alike without being overly focused on the next quarter. We target 20-percent-plus annual growth and have achieved a combined annual growth rate of more than 20 percent over the past 15 years.

How long have you been with Vandalia? Can you tell us about your history with the company and did you do something other before coming to the company? 

I joined Vandalia Rental full time in early 2005. Before that, like a lot of people in family businesses, I grew up around the business. I cleaned equipment, worked around the yard, manned the counter, learned how the equipment operated and even spent time working for my uncle’s homebuilding business so I could see the business from the customer side as well. After graduating, I worked for a finance company in Cincinnati for a little less than a year. My family’s rule was that I needed to go work somewhere else before coming back into the business full time. I am glad I did, too. It gave me a different perspective and helped me see the value of what good and bad teams can do to an organization’s culture firsthand.

You started the trench shoring services portion of your business a couple of years ago? How successful has it been for you and what inspired you to start that segment? 

We launched Specialized Onsite Services, or SOS, in the Cincinnati market in early 2025 to focus on trench safety, shoring and related jobsite solutions. We opened our second SOS location in Columbus approximately a year later. The response has been very encouraging, and we intend to continue expanding SOS. Before the end of 2026, we plan to open two additional SOS locations in both the greater Indianapolis and Toledo markets.

We weren’t necessarily “inspired” to start SOS; it was more of a combination of things coming together at the right time that made it a reality. We had an opportunity to onboard strong, experienced leadership, a gen-rent location we were relocating to another site, and customers that were increasingly asking us to enter this space. All combined, we saw an opportunity to bring the same local market approach we use in general rental into a more specialized category, leveraging our existing general rental customers to do so. We felt specialty rental required more of a consultancy approach whereas general rental was more transactional. To ensure we had the right knowledge, people, inventory, and focus, we created SOS instead of combining it within our existing fleet offerings. It’s been a great decision thus far and we believe SOS will become a meaningful part of Vandalia’s long-term growth strategy.

Just from looking at your website, it appears you have a lot of general rental items, is the focus primarily small contractor customers? Do you do corporate type business and large projects as well? 

The strongest majority of our business is B2B. We work with organizations of many sizes, including large corporations and national companies, but our primary focus is local and regionally based businesses. That’s been our strategy for a long time and where we feel we can best add value. We don’t need to be the largest rental company but absolutely must be positioned to meet the ongoing and evolving needs of our ideal customer profile in all markets we serve.

It seems in much of the U.S. now, “mega’ projects are where a lot of the growth is. Do you work much on data centers or other types of big projects, or do you focus more on the smaller and mid-sized types of projects? 

We participate in projects of all sizes, including data centers, larger infrastructure projects, and a host of other major commercial and industrial developments. But, we compete to be on the smaller, more local sites too. We understand the competitive landscape of the industry and where we best fit. Mega-projects can create a tremendous tailwind, but we do not want our long-term strategy to depend on one project, one customer or one end market. We deliberately diversify across customers, fleet offerings and geography to ensure we don’t develop too much concentration risk across any one part of our business. We build durable relationships with local and regional contractors, industrial customers, government entities, and supporting trades across a broad base of projects. We go where they are.

Your company had a big revenue increase in 2025. What do you mostly attribute that to? 

2025 rental revenue increased by nearly 30 percent. I would not attribute that to any one thing per se. It was a combination of strategic planning, healthy end-market demand, continued market-share gains, branch maturation, expansion of our fleet and footprint, and most importantly, focused execution by our team. Organizationally, we target 20-percent-plus year-over year growth. It’s an ambitious target, but we believe customers ultimately vote with their business. And we love aligning the business in a way that allows our team to compete for it each year. It keeps it fun!

Is business as good in 2026 as it was in 2025? 

2026 rental revenue will be a bit softer than 2025, but still above our 20-percent-plus annual target. Some of that is by design though. We can’t just chase revenue, we have to grow the entire business alongside it, ensuring the right talent, support systems, balance sheet health, a host of other items scale alongside that growth. Each year brings about different challenges, and the team has done a phenomenal job meeting those head-on.

You were voted “Best Company to Work for” a few years in a row! What can you tell me about that, where did that recognition come from? What makes the company a great place to work? 

The recognition comes from the Dayton Business Journal’s Best Places to Work initiative, which is based on blind survey feedback from existing team members. I’m honored that Vandalia Rental has now been recognized as a “Best Place to Work” for five consecutive years, and that means a great deal to us because it is ultimately our team evaluating the environment we’ve all played a part in creating. We try to create a place where competitive people can build a career, learn how both the business and equipment rental industry works, have a voice, make decisions, grow their income and position themselves to take on larger opportunities as the company grows. We work hard and expect a lot from each other, so having fun together and celebrating the wins are what keeps us all motivated to keep stretching our goals forward every year. We truly have an amazing team, and I’m humbled by everything they do.

Do you have any particular philosophy about how to treat employees that makes Vandalia a good place to work? 

A big part of our philosophy is to hire capable, competitive people, make expectations as clear as possible, give them the information, tools, training, and resources they need, and trust them to make decisions. I have said for years that you cannot write a standard operating procedure for every customer situation that will arise. If you tried, by the time you did, it would probably be obsolete anyhow. What we can do is teach our values, help team members understand the economics of the business and the outcome we are trying to create, and give them the reasonable autonomy to act. If a decision turns out to be wrong, we learn from it, support the person and make it right for the customer. Regardless of the circumstances, we always try and do the right thing, for the right reasons.

About how many employees do you have? 

Vandalia Rental and Specialized Onsite Services combined should finish 2026 with approximately 250 team members on the active roster.

About how many employees in each branch approximately? How much autonomy do branch managers and sales staff have?

Staffing varies quite a bit by location, depending on the density of the market, branch maturity, size, and focus. There’s really not a ‘per branch’ average that scales across all our locations. We give all team members a reasonable amount of decision-making autonomy so they can move at the pace of the business.

Vandalia debuted on the RER 100 in 2020 at about $20 million. It appears the company quadrupled in rental volume in the past five or six years. That’s pretty extraordinary growth! Any particular cause for such significant growth in this decade?

The numbers sound significant when you say “quadrupled”, but our growth story really began in 2010 when we were a single-store operation with less than $4 million in annual rental revenue. We concluded the equipment rental industry was continuing to develop economies of scale. It was all rolling up. Consolidation had taken hold. We believed we had a choice: remain a smaller local operator and accept the limitations that came with that or deliberately build the capabilities to compete as a larger regional company. We chose to grow. Since then, we have consistently focused our investments around four areas: talent, fleet, footprint and technology.

To catch up with larger regional competitors we knew we’d need to grow at approximately three times the overall market. We opened our second location in 2016 and should finish 2026 with 13 locations. We continue to expand our fleet, align our value proposition to our ideal customer profile, focusing exclusively on rent-to-rent solutions, and aggressively use data to optimize our collective efforts. Each year we ‘throw the stick’ further, targeting 20-percent-plus annual growth, communicate with transparency, and build support as necessary to get there. And we believe our team is well positioned to continue doing so.

Any particular staff or managers that you’d like to mention that have been instrumental in the company’s success? 

I would rather recognize the broader team than single out a handful of individuals. There are certainly people who have made enormous contributions over many years, but one of the things I am most proud of is our ‘one team’ culture. We have a deep leadership group and a growing number of people throughout the organization who treat the business as if it were their own. Some have been with Vandalia for a long time and helped build the foundation; others joined more recently and brought experience that’s helped us scale.

Do you do any particular kind of marketing or advertising? 

In the B2B customer space we target, we find our best marketing is still the experience a customer has after the order is placed. If the equipment is right, it arrives when promised, it performs as expected, and we respond quickly when something changes, that creates another opportunity. We don’t target the masses; we target a defined customer profile where volume exceeds $25,000 annually. This provides us with enough repetitions for our value-added services to differentiate beyond just the price quoted for the transaction. We have several outside sales representatives who work directly with these customers on a regular basis to ensure communication, value, and ultimately trust remains strong.

Do you mostly focus on visiting contractors on jobsites or are there other particular methods or philosophies of outreach?

Yes, face-to-face contact remains extremely important. While we may serve the B2B space, we’re really in the P2P (People 2 People) business. Our account managers spend a lot of time at jobsites, offices, and customer facilities. But we do not want activity for activity’s sake. The objective is not to see how many calls someone can log; it is to understand the customer’s business well enough to ensure ongoing value creation.

We want our salespeople to be relationship managers and problem solvers. That means understanding what work the customer is pursuing, where their projects are located, what equipment they own, what they prefer to rent, where downtime hurts them, and where we can make their business easier. Technology and data help us guide those conversations, but they do not replace them. Rental is — and we feel always will be — a relationship business.

How has the company adapted to its growth – i.e., adding different levels of management, etc? 

To keep pace, we’ve added district operations and sales leadership, as well as district safety and training roles. We’ve strengthened centralized capabilities in areas such as fleet, finance, training, HR, recruiting, technology and other shared services. We have also become much more disciplined about systems, data, communication, and accountability. We’re not perfect, we’ve made some mistakes and had to recalibrate, but we’re learning forward and improving each year.

Are there major differences in the major markets Vandalia is in? 

There are a lot of differences between major markets. Customer density, logistics mix, rental fleet mix/depth, pricing, customer expectations, politics, and a host of other items. What is interesting though is how consistent the overall customer expectation is. No matter what market we’re in, customers generally want the same basic deliverables: dependable equipment, availability, fair pricing, quick answers and a rental partner that solves problems rather than creates them. So, while they can be different in how business is conducted, the overall expectations are largely the same.

Anything you can share about your IT systems? 

Our ERP partner is RentalMan, supported by several connected ancillary applications— some proprietary and some 3rd party. We have invested heavily over the years in IT infrastructure, data management, telematics, and systems that connect the different parts of the business. While historically our industry has been slow to adopt and invest in technology, those that continue to resist or rely solely on their rental software provider to solve it for them will likely find themselves in a difficult situation moving forward. Technology is no longer a separate department initiative; it is part of how every function in the business operates. Our ability to connect data, reduce friction, and increase speed to customers and team members, across all interactions, has become critical in our ability to scale. And will become even more so as AI continues to grow and evolve.

Are you planning to expand to other markets or within the markets you’re already in anytime soon? 

Yes. In the fourth quarter of 2026, we plan to open a combined Vandalia Rental general rental and SOS location in the greater Indianapolis market. We also plan to open a dedicated SOS location in the greater Toledo market during the fourth quarter. Beyond those openings, we’re continuing to work towards additional plans in 2027 for both combined general rental/SOS locations and standalone operations. We’re also open to acquiring other independent equipment rental operations too.

As an independent, our goal has always been to find ways to help keep the independent equipment rental market healthy and strong. While traditionally we’ve focused on greenfield expansion, we believe the lessons we’ve learned, the infrastructure we’ve built, and the scale required to compete in today’s market make us a great fit for adopting other independent rental operators into the Vandalia family too. Increasingly there are fewer options for small to mid-size independents to go where the culture the owner has built can be sustained; we think we’re a great fit for the independents that prioritize that in their succession planning.

Do you use AI in any of your applications? 

Yes, although we are trying to be thoughtful about it rather than using AI simply because it is a popular topic. We are leveraging our experience with data and connected systems to design and partner with AI tools that can improve the efficiency of the business and deliver greater value to customers. We expect to roll out several larger AI initiatives in 2027 that we are excited about.

A couple of companies I’ve spoken to lately said there are concerns among smaller contractors particularly about things like fuel prices, rising cost of equipment, effects of tariffs, etc. Any thoughts on any of these issues?

 I think there’s almost the same K-shaped economy within the equipment rental industry as we hear about for the overall U.S. market: there are geographies that are mega-project rich and there are those that aren’t. The areas where the mega-project activity is strong are typically doing well. Equipment demand for these projects is so robust that it props up the overall market demand, allowing for a healthy environment. But, if the mega-projects aren’t there, it can be more difficult. Fortunately, in the Midwest, where we operate, we’ve seen a healthy mega-project pipeline that has created a stable demand environment. What I will say though, is that higher fuel costs, increasing equipment acquisition prices, tariffs, interest rates and general economic uncertainty all affect confidence and the cost of doing business. While it can be painful in the near-term, long-term many of those same pressures strengthen the case for equipment rental over ownership too.