Every rental software company claims to understand your business. Turnaround was built by someone who actually ran one—and nearly lost it to a spreadsheet.
The 4am spreadsheet moment
I ran a camera rental shop for seven years. Not a big operation—just me, a part-timer on weekends, and a warehouse space that smelled permanently of gaffer tape and coffee. We served local productions, wedding videographers, content creators. The usual mix.
The business ran on spreadsheets. A master inventory sheet. A booking calendar synced (loosely) with Google Calendar. A separate sheet for maintenance tracking. Another for customer notes. It worked, mostly. Until it didn't.
It was wedding season. I'd been running on four hours of sleep for a week. A customer picked up a cinema camera package at 7am for a three-day shoot. Standard booking. Except when I checked the spreadsheet at 4am the next morning—couldn't sleep—I realized I'd double-booked it.
The call I had to make:
"Hi, I know you're shooting a wedding in twelve hours, but I don't actually have the camera I confirmed three weeks ago. Can we figure something out?"
We figured it out. I drove two hours to borrow gear from a friend's shop. The wedding happened. The customer never rented from me again. I sat in my warehouse that night and stared at the spreadsheet, trying to understand how I'd made such a basic mistake.
The answer was obvious: I hadn't. The spreadsheet had. Or more precisely, the gap between what I'd booked and what was actually available had grown invisibly over months of small errors, late returns, and maintenance delays that no one was tracking properly.
The software that didn't fit
After the wedding disaster, I tried every rental software I could find. I spent weeks on demos, trials, and implementations. They all had the same problems:
What I Found
Built for enterprise
Hundred-person rental houses with dedicated IT staff. Features I'd never use, complexity I couldn't justify, pricing that assumed I had a CFO.
Treated availability as binary
An item was either "available" or "rented." Nothing about the time needed between rentals—cleaning, testing, charging, maintenance. The actual work of running a rental shop.
Designed for the back office
Dashboards and reports and analytics. What I needed was something that worked at the counter, when a customer was standing in front of me asking if I had a 70-200mm available next Tuesday.
I went back to the spreadsheets. Added more formulas. Color-coded more cells. Built a Frankenstein system of Google Sheets, Calendar, and reminder apps that mostly worked until it didn't.
The gap between rentals
The insight came from a conversation with another rental shop owner at a trade show. We were comparing war stories—everyone has a double-booking story—and she said something that stuck:
"The rental is easy. It's the turnaround that kills you."
Rentals fail at the gaps—the time between when one customer returns gear and the next one picks it up. If you don't protect that time, everything else breaks.
That was the problem no software was solving. Every system tracked what was rented and what wasn't. None of them understood that availability isn't binary—it's a timeline with built-in buffers, maintenance windows, and prep time that varies by item, by customer, by season.
A cinema camera that comes back from a dusty outdoor shoot needs more turnaround than a tripod from a studio interview. A new customer picking up for the first time needs demo time that a regular doesn't. These aren't edge cases—they're every single transaction.
Building what I actually needed
I started building Turnaround as a side project. Not because I wanted to run a software company, but because I needed something that actually worked for my shop.
The design principles came from running the counter:
Clarity Over Features
If I can't understand what the screen is telling me in two seconds, it's useless at the counter. No feature is worth adding if it makes the core experience harder to read.
Buffer Time Is Sacred
The system should protect prep windows automatically. If I've told it that cinema cameras need 4 hours between rentals, it shouldn't let me book them back-to-back.
Built for the Counter
The most important screen is the one I see when a customer walks in. What's available? What's coming back? What's in the shop but needs work? Answer those instantly.
Small Shop Economics
Pricing that makes sense for a one-person operation. No "contact sales" for basic features. No enterprise minimums. Software that pays for itself from day one.
Who Turnaround is for
I built this for shops like mine was. Small-to-medium rental operations that have outgrown spreadsheets but don't need enterprise software. The owner who's also the counter person, the inventory manager, and the delivery driver.
If you recognize any of this, Turnaround might be what you've been looking for:
- You've double-booked something because your tracking system has gaps
- You've had gear sit unavailable because no one knew it was ready
- You've lost rental days to maintenance that should have been scheduled
- You've tried other software and found it built for a different kind of business
- You've built increasingly complex spreadsheet systems that still surprise you
The rental industry doesn't need more features. It needs software that understands what it's actually like to run a shop—the 4am worries, the counter chaos, the constant juggling of what's out, what's coming back, and what needs attention in between.
The turnaround
I eventually sold my rental shop. Not because it failed—because it finally ran smoothly enough that someone else wanted to buy it. The systems worked. The double-bookings stopped. I had my evenings back.
Now I'm building the tool I wish I'd had from day one. Not because rental software is glamorous, but because I remember what it felt like to make that 4am phone call. No one should have to.
That's why we built Turnaround.