Shoptechs Buying Gear
The first thing to remember when you want to start buying your own gear is you are going to be your first/only client for a while. So If you are not at the point where you are renting gear yet or if all of your jobs you are hired by another crew member and the gear is provided it may not be the most appropriate time to start buying gear.
If you are at a point where you feel you may want to start buying some of your own equipment:
- Start Small
Don't buy something in the hopes that you are going to subrent it out to Bolt or another rental house, If we are at a point where we are always subrenting something from you we may end up buying our own eventually. Buy something small that you will use on your jobs or in your personal work, I have seen people have great success with specialty grip gear that does not get rented out alot but is small and handy to have like personal bolt kits or specific boom arms.
- Try and buy things that are newer
The Bay area rentals market is pretty slow on adopting the cool new thing in terms of lights. The rental houses would prefer to invest in lights that have established market value so there is usally time when a light comes out and when rental houses finally buy it. If you time it right you could end up being the first person to the market with a interesting new light and you may get more rentals up front. My example of this is Marc Lenahan being one of the first to buy the Aputure units.
- Think about size vs. return
Buying a Porta Jib for example is not the best idea as it requires a lot of space and is not rented out very often. You want something that goes out very often and is very small, the more large items you get means more expenses as you have to find somewhere to store them plus it requires more work to rent it out.
- Barrier to Entry
Important to think why a rental house or someone has not purchased this item already. For example if you buy something that is very expensive, your chances that other people will buy one are low. Therefore you should get more rentals if the item is in demand. If you buy a cheap item, everyone is already going to have it and it will not rent out for very much or very often.
- Think about your goals
Why do you want to buy gear and what is your end goal with buying it. Do you want to have a rental house? Do you want to just own a small lighting package? Where does it end? If your goal is to make money with minimal amount of work, maybe other options are better.
- Owning gear is a lot of work and does cost money
You will have to negotiate with the client, you'll need their insurance, you'll have to maintain the equipment and sell them at the appropriate time. You will also have to find space to store the equipment.
Some other ways that you can work your gear rentals.
- Can put your gear on through Bolt - we will get the insurance and negotiate the deal for you, the issue with this is we often times have to discount greatly and you will be bound by that discount. On the plus side, you won't have to deal with the client as much. This only works if you're renting other gear from us.
- Commission - Instead of owning equipment, you can just get a commission on your jobs which requires no investment from you, all you have to do is get the job and put in the order.
- Consignment - If you have something that is wanted, you may be able to consign the gear where you keep it with us and we rent it out for you. The issue here is if your gear starts making a considerable amount of money, the chances that we will buy it is high.