Karri: Today, we are talking about this dreamlike rental business and how you can achieve it. Let's focus more on the data and insights and how they can help you. And maybe it's good to kind of go over the most important metrics for a rental business to look for.

Tuomo: I'd say for the rental business, the top ones that come to mind is your kind of the profitability on an item level. So just looking at how much every item in your inventory has earned in terms of revenue. So being out there with customers and what has been that item's share of those earnings.

At the same time, in order to understand the profitability, you need to understand the expenses per item. And the expenses usually come from the purchase price and then potential repair costs that you kind of connected to it. And if you want, you can also try to calculate like a shelf value or deprecation costs for the item and then log that also as a cost. And then just try to follow the profitability of your items because that then helps you understand which part of your inventory are the revenue drivers.

Then looking at things like looking at your inventory on like who are the revenue leaders and who are the expense leaders might help you out a little bit. So understanding that, all right, these items are driving a lot of revenue. So they are good top line performers. Are there something in their operation that I can improve in terms of them occurring less costs, which would mean that the profitability in general improves.

And then also looking at your cost leaders might be a good way of understanding where is maturity of your time and effort being spent. And that is something that you can solve via better purchasing or sourcing of your supply or maybe an operational improvement or just like better guidance to your customers in how to treat your products while they're out there. So profitability is one key thing.

And then I would look into just like the average length of your bookings and other insights into your kind of offering and commercialization layer in that what does your customers actually buy? They rarely actually buy a booking for a specific stock item. You've always packaged it into some kind of a listing. So is there something that connects all of your well-performing listings, whether it's the pricing that they use, whether it's the descriptions or the images that you use on that listing or the way of buying? So are there variant light, variant heavy in that way? So all of these things are extremely good insights.

And finally, kind of analyzing your customer base also probably makes sense looking at your top performing customers and maybe lowest performing customers. Are there anything that connects these individuals and how much you'd be able to replicate the successes and maybe avoid the losses that you've had? So these are maybe top of mind things that I would look into.

And all of this is data that twice-commerce automatically gathers. So it's a great example of the automation that we discussed earlier, that this is something that the system automatically kind of gathers for you so that you can focus on the inside collection and then the actions based on those insights rather than having to log all of this information manually after every booking or so.

Karri: I think those are really the key metrics to look into your business and how it's performing and where you have room to improve. And maybe just to mention a couple others, some of these we went through in detail, but for example, utilization rate, like chosen period, it can be a day, week, month, year. How often has these items actually been in use, been out of there and how much time they are sitting in your inventory, not generating any revenue and how much they are out there and actually generating revenue for you.

And then also related to this is maybe time in maintenance, which is interesting to see as like a data point that some of these items have a lot of reservations, but most of them are actually maintenance. And those are, of course, more cost driving than revenue driving.

A couple other metrics that I know that twice is allowing you to quickly view is like, are there any ghost items? So items that are actually just sitting in your inventory and might be kind of invisible. So they are not part of the listings that are sold or booked quite often. And related to that is also this kind of last scene metric, which is the last time that something happened to this item. So that can be any type of reservation, ideally booking, but it can be maintenance, inspection, anything like that. And when you are quickly able to just check what are the inventory articles that have not been used in a long time, you can kind of maybe start to understand and optimize once again, like, should I create better listings or is this whole product category something that is just not fitting to my whole business? And so start improving your business once again.

Tuomo: Exactly. And many of those last things that you mentioned, I think on a simple level, it's kind of, again, what you mentioned earlier, it's kind of identifying, do I have idle stock or dead stock kind of. Just understanding the turnover or the speed in which your items are flowing is a great signal on where things are happening and where things are not happening.

And like I said, usually the items where things are happening are a signal of business being made. And if you have a lot of items that are idle and the, you know, last seen or last used metric is six, 12 months ago, it's probably a good time to start thinking, is this really something that I want to tie my capital into? Or should I be looking to resell this item for someone else in order to free that capital for those items that have a lot of things going on and that are earning actively for me?