On this episode of The Rental Roundtable, I sat down with Joe Besdin, Cofounder and CEO of Hapn. His company didn’t start in rental. It began installing surveillance systems in New York hotels, pivoted a few times, and landed on something needed by the rental industry: GPS tracking and telematics built for equipment.
We got into theft prevention, real-time fleet visibility, and why the smartest first move with AI has almost nothing to do with AI at all. If you run a few yards and you’re tired of guessing where your machines are, this one’s for you.
How the Ghost Tracker Catches Equipment Thieves
Theft is the problem that never goes away. When I had Ed Craddock on a few episodes back, he told me it’s been the number one topic in the rental world for the last ten years. So I wanted to hear how Joe’s team is fighting it.
Here’s the trap a lot of operators fall into. You wire a telematics device into a machine and you feel safe. The problem is, thieves aren’t dumb. They show up, rip the tracker out, and drive off. You did everything right, and you still can’t find your equipment.
Joe’s team built the Ghost Tracker to flip that around. It’s a small, battery-powered tracker you hide somewhere on the machine. It stays asleep the whole time, and it can’t be found with a GPS detector. It only wakes up when the main wired tracker gets pulled out. The second a thief yanks the obvious device, the hidden one comes to life and starts reporting where your machine is going.
“The thief is the one with the false sense of security. They think they’re home free, but really, they’re being tracked.” Joe Besdin, CEO of Hapn (14:08)
That’s the part I love. The thief thinks he beat you, and the whole time he’s leading you right to your equipment. Joe told me operators have used this to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in machines. For an independent who can’t afford to lose a unit for months while waiting on a replacement, that kind of protection changes the math completely.
Why Technology Helps Small Shops the Most
Something Joe said surprised me, and it’s worth sitting with. He doesn’t think adopting technology automatically makes a business successful. He’s seen large, sharp companies still running on whiteboards, and small shops with every tool dialed in. Discipline and organization show up with or without software. But here’s the catch he pointed out for the big players.
“If you have a much bigger organization, you don’t need technology as much, because you’re just throwing people at problems. The smaller a rental shop is, the more they benefit from using technology to automate and paper over the gaps that they have.” (Besdin, 8:00)
That explanation says everything about where independents have an edge. A national organization can solve a problem by hiring three more people. You can’t, and you shouldn’t have to. When you’ve got three locations and 14 people, software and automation are how you punch above your weight. Joe and I both think AI is going to widen that opening. As the cost of these tools keeps dropping, the small operator gets the biggest lift of all.
AI Only Works If Your Data Is Clean
Before you go chasing the shiniest AI tool at the next trade show, Joe had a warning every operator needs to hear. AI is only as good as the data you feed it. When the data is full of holes, the tool doesn’t tell you something is missing. It just guesses.
“If you don’t have clean data coming in to your business, we all know what AI does in that situation. It hallucinates. So if a rental shop has 60% of the data, AI is going to fill in the other 40%. (Besdin, 19:15)
That filled-in 40 percent is what people mean when they say AI hallucinates. If your numbers live on a whiteboard, in three different spreadsheets, and in your manager’s head, the tool will invent the rest and hand it back to you like it’s fact. So the real first step isn’t buying AI. It’s getting your house in order.
“The first step with adopting AI is: do I have good clean data, and a repeatable process for getting it? So whether that’s using Quipli for your scheduling and invoicing and having the data all in one place, after that, you can start layering on AI.” (Besdin, 19:30)
The repeatable part is what most people skip. Clean data once is easy. Clean data every day, automatically, is what makes AI useful. That means having one place where your scheduling, invoicing, and equipment data all live and stay accurate.
And if you feel behind, don’t let that stop you. As Joe put it, if you’re still on a whiteboard, just start now, because it’s not too late.
We’re in the early innings of all this. Nobody has it fully figured out yet, and the operators who clean up their data now will be ready when these tools really take off.
Getting Real-Time Eyes on Every Machine
One of the biggest headaches Joe hears about is something most operators know well: you can’t always say exactly where a piece of equipment is, which version it is, or whether it’s even on a job right now. Most shops quietly accept this. They’ll have solid visibility on 60 to 80 percent of the fleet and just live with the rest.
That gets even harder with attachments and smaller gear that doesn’t get serialized. Joe’s team at Hapn is building a sensor and gateway system to fix it, so you get true real-time visibility across all your yards instead of a guess based on a monthly count.
Why Connected Data Changes Everything
Right now, most shops run their software in silos. Your rental system holds one set of data. Your GPS and telematics hold another. Your analysis might live in a spreadsheet or a meeting. None of it talks to each other, and the numbers rarely line up.
“This data should be together. It shouldn’t be separated. They’re not different things. They’re all part of one rental shop’s operation.” (Besdin, 25:07)
Joe’s view on siloed systems is the same reason I built Quipli. And it’s why we built the Quipli and Hapn integration. Hapn GPS tracking and hour meter data now flow directly into Quipli, so your team has the full picture in one place: location, rental contract, customer info, service history. When data flows freely between your tools, you stop doing the translation work manually and start getting real work done.
That’s when automation becomes possible. When a machine goes off rent, the right setup can grab the hour meter, bill the customer based on actual usage, send them a clean breakdown of how the equipment was run, and schedule a driver to bring it back. Billing, communication, and dispatch stitched together without anyone touching a keyboard. We also talked about proactive maintenance, where telematics data triggers a mechanic before a machine breaks down.
None of this is complicated. It’s basic work that nobody has time to do by hand.
You Don’t Need Old Tech to Get Acquired
One more story worth clearing up. There’s talk floating around that if you want a national to buy you someday, you should stay on old legacy software because that’s what they run. I’ve heard it, and Joe has too. It’s just not true. When I talked to a national recently, they said the opposite. They want to see you leaning into modern tools. Being on current, connected technology is a sign you run a sharp organization. They’ll move you onto their systems later anyway. Nobody is hunting for the most old-fashioned company they can find.
Joe’s Parting Advice: The Value of Focus
I’ll leave you with the best advice Joe gave me. He said he’s learned almost everything by making mistakes, and the one lesson he keeps relearning is the value of focus.
“When you’re doing well, focus gets harder. You have more opportunities, and you stop saying no.” (Besdin, 29:32)
That one hit home. When business is good, it’s tempting to chase every new tool and every shiny idea. That’s exactly when you spread yourself too thin. The operators who win aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones who pick the few problems that matter and go deep on them.
Bringing It All Together
If there’s one thread running through this whole conversation, it’s that clean, connected data is the foundation everything else is built on: theft recovery, real-time visibility, automation, and AI that actually helps.
That’s why we built Quipli to be your all-in-one platform, so your scheduling, invoicing, equipment, and customer data all live in one place. It’s also why we integrate directly with Hapn, so you can see your tracking data right inside Quipli instead of jumping between systems. And it’s the thinking behind Quinn, our team of AI agents built to grow your revenue once that data foundation is in place. You don’t have to fix everything at once. You just have to start.
