If you’re like me, you hate to shop. At least I hate to shop IRL (In Real Life). However, I don’t mind online shopping. My dislike of shopping included shopping for the things I needed to run my business. I dreaded trips to The Home Depot, Office Depot, Five Below and the party store to buy supplies and game pieces. I finally realized a few years back that I could do all of this on Amazon and in many cases save not just time, but money.

I recently sold Boing! Bounce Rentals, the inflatable rental business I started way back in 2002. Seventeen years is a long time. I would have never guessed when I purchased those first two bounce houses that I was starting a 17 year journey with plenty of ups and downs. Here are 8 somewhat random observations on owning and selling an inflatable rental business.

Back in 2014 I decided I wanted an inflatable Tiki bar for my rental inventory. I love going on tropical vacations during our off-seasons, and I wanted to recreate the feeling of the beachside Tiki bar in inflatable form. But the only one I could find was this sad thing. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I don’t think the designer of this inflatable understands the essence of Tiki bars. In no way does it give off the tropical vibe I was looking for.

Would you like to offer your customers the ability to chat with you through your Bounce Rental Solutions website? Well, there is a free and easy solution for that. It's called tawk.to. Tawk.to is a free messaging app that lets you monitor and chat with visitors on your website. awesome! As their website says, "it is super easy to get started".

There are so many factors that go into getting found by your potential customers online. Some of those factors take a lot of time to develop, for example domain authority and quality backlinks to your website. Other factors are within your control and easy to do, such as good website content. But you get so much information about all the things you need to do to improve your search engine results it just becomes overwhelming. When things become overwhelming, the normal reaction is procrastination.

I admit, I'm a bit of a software geek. I enjoy learning about and trying out new applications to find that perfect software stack (a group of applications that work together) on which to run my party rental business. Currently there are seven cloud-based software applications that I use on a daily basis to run my business. Here they are, listed in no particular order.