Why We Built RecHQ
We run three rental companies in Tampa. Nothing we could buy knew that a boat with a bad bilge pump shouldn't be on Saturday's schedule. So we built it.
If you run a rental business you know the feeling. It’s 7 a.m. The fleet needs to be on the water by nine. The information you need is in a spreadsheet, two apps, a group text, and a clipboard by the door.
None of those tools is the problem. The gaps between them are.
Downtime is the enemy
Boats, jet skis, sleds, bikes. Rental gear gets used hard and it breaks. Every hour a boat spends waiting on a part, an overdue inspection, or an untrained crew member is an hour it isn’t earning. The margin in this business is uptime, and uptime is an operations problem.
Most operators run that operation on software that was never built for it. Field-service tools made for plumbers. Point solutions that each do one slice. A scheduling app here, a maintenance system there, a chat subscription, each with its own login and its own bill, and none of them aware the others exist.
Two sides of the same business
We split RecHQ down the middle, the way the work splits.
The boats. A dock hand reports a problem with a photo and it lands in the Ops Hub with a priority. The 300 hour service opens its own ticket when the hours come round, with the checklist and the parts already on it. Anything below target on the shelf shows up on the Supplies buy list under the vendor that sells it.
The crew. The schedule is a grid you drag shifts onto. The time clock is one button on the home screen, and it works with no signal. Chat channels fill themselves from who’s working today. Training is a course a new hire finishes in a week, and a retake reminder six months later.
Because both halves live in the same app, they talk. Overdue training opens a ticket. Closing a ticket takes the parts out of stock. An expiring captain’s license opens a ticket thirty days out.
Built on our own docks
We didn’t design this in a conference room. We run Riverwalk Boating Company, eBoats Tampa and Paddle Pub Tampa on the Riverwalk, and RecHQ runs them every day. We are the first customer of everything we ship, and the first to find out when something is wrong.
What’s next
We’re building it alongside operators who live this every day. If that’s you, tell us how your operation runs and where the gaps are.