CHURCH TIP: micrentals.com

[00:00:00] Today's Church Tech Tip is a company that will let you test mics before you buy them. They have a massive selection to choose from. You'll fall in love with the process and as a result, your event will rock. Plus, you'll save money. That's what we call stewardship. What is the name of this company, you ask? Well, they call themselves MikeReynolds.com. Joining us today to tell us more about MikeReynolds.com is the founder and president, Steven Arruda. Hey, Steven.

[00:00:29] Hey, how are you, David? I'm doing good, man. So, tell us a little bit about how your company works. How does it save people money? Give us the details. Well, it's pretty straightforward. You know, if you can look and find anything that you would normally spend, you know, $700, $8,000, even sometimes more on, and you're not sure exactly how it works other than reading, you know, chat forums and all that stuff.

[00:00:55] It's a good way to find out exactly what a specific microphone or in some case of our other gear like ChoirFlex, what it can do for you, and if it's something your church or organization can actually benefit from in the long term. So, I know the company name is MikeReynolds.com, but you just said something there. It sounds like you rent a little bit more than just mics.

[00:01:16] That is correct. A couple of years ago, we started adding in the ChoirFlex processor. The ChoirFlex processor is, well, kind of, you wonder what it's for, right? It's mainly for choirs to help attenuate the mics so they get more gain for feedback, specifically for choirs.

[00:01:37] And that led us on to other things like Dante preamps, some outboard gear like the Bus Plus and the Fusion to name a couple. Yeah, so we've kind of grown from wireless to wireless in-ears, DIs. Our logo says it all. It's a mic in a box, so we kind of stay within that box. So, we're not the company. You're not going to come to us for a PA or like a console or anything like that.

[00:02:07] But we like our backs in the shape they are right now, so there won't be any heavy lifting going on here. Well, today's episode is on stewardship, and I know MikeReynolds.com was born out of that idea, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But for all those out there looking to save money and feel like rentals is just kind of throwing money away, help them understand how your company does just the opposite.

[00:02:36] Yeah, outside of what I mentioned before, like being used for the discovery process, well, if you have an event coming up at your church and you are needing 12 channels of wireless, well, it doesn't make sense to spend $12,000 for a weekend, especially if there's kind of a one-time thing, or at least that you're aware of it's a one-time thing.

[00:03:00] So, you know, the rental is going to be closer to like a $1,200 thing versus a $12,000 thing. Now, again, if that's going to be a repeat event, then yeah, it might be better to look closer at, you know, a capital expense and an investment into the actual equipment. But I mentioned Quiroflex earlier. That's one in particular because, you know, the units run about $6,500, I believe.

[00:03:30] Well, that's one that has some mystery to it. So, yes, there's the discovery process. But then, like, if you're going to keep it and you're only doing choirs twice a year, that might not justify, you know, the cost of buying one versus renting one. So, it's always a good idea to look and see if that is that going to – are we going to rent this, you know, five times in this year? Then it might be worth just, you know, making the capital expense on this or investment on this.

[00:03:59] Well, you know what I really like about MikeRentals.com is I have singers, they're up on the platform singing, and every single one of them needs a different microphone. And a lot of times, you know, I think I know which mic is going to work best, but I'm not totally sure. So, my executive leadership is like, hey, let's get a microphone that works a little bit better with our lead singer. I'm like, well, it could be this one or it could be that one or it could, you know, I'm not sure which microphone is going to work.

[00:04:27] With MikeRentals.com, you can just, you know, rent all of those heads, test them out, try them before you buy them. Does that kind of summarize some of the process that you offer? Yeah, our friends over at MXU, they kind of coined this phrase, a bucket of capsules is what we called it when we first started doing them. And because I think we only had, we started with like maybe six different options outside of the, you know, normal SM58, Beta58.

[00:04:56] And of course, of course, the majority of the capsules we have are for sure. However, we have a decent amount of Sennheiser options as well. So, the options alone for sure are about up to probably 30 by now. Like last I looked, that's a lot of choices. We help you narrow it down. We try to keep it around like half a dozen. So, it's not just kind of crazy. But we just evaluate like your needs, what's going on, what type of vocalist you have. You have females, males.

[00:05:26] What problems are you getting from them? Do they have high SPL or do they sing super softly? You know, so there's a lot of questions around that. Drumbleed, that's a big one. That's a big, big one. I probably get that more than, you know, any other. So, we talk through like pickup patterns and capsule types because condensers, you're dealing with sensitivities and all this other stuff.

[00:05:51] But then, you know, by now we've heard of a lot of them ourselves through whether it's on the PA side of things or on the broadcast side of things. So, yeah, we try to narrow that down so you're not, you know, spending, you know, you could go nuts and rent all, you know, all 30 for like two grand or something like that. And that's not good stewardship either. So, we try to whittle that down to like, hey, it'd be great if you tried these, you know, these six.

[00:06:17] And the end range of those as far as purchase wise ends up being from, you know, less than $200 capsule to just less than $1,000 capsule. So, there's a range there. That way you can decide like is, do I hear an $800 difference between these two capsules?

[00:06:39] Yeah, it just allows you to have real-time A, B so you can, you know, track the vocals, go back and listen and compare them and things like that. Play them back in the room. Yeah, listen for that drum bleed that you're trying to get out and all that stuff. So, I love it because it's kind of like a little, you know, you get to have like a little discovery lab with microphones. It's fantastic. Yeah, so I know you have Shure, you have Sennheiser.

[00:07:06] I saw that you have Earthworks on there as well and DPA. You got DPA, so there's a lot of different, and I saw some headsets on there as well. So, if the pastor is kind of looking for a headset as well. So, it sounds like you offer a lot of options and a lot of choices for people to go and, you know, rent and kind of narrow things down before you spend a lot of money on a microphone. And you're like, hmm, you know what?

[00:07:31] I did not hear that much of an $800 difference between, you know, the Earthworks 3117, which is, I think, like 200 bucks or something like that. 150, I can't remember. Versus, say. Yeah, just under. Yeah, versus a DP. Yeah, matter of fact, let me get that right. I think it's 100 and, looks like it's 170. 170. Yeah, something like that. 170, 180, somewhere in there. We just threw out 25 numbers. Go look it up. Earthworksaudio.com. But, yeah, you can test these out. It's like we were bidding on these.

[00:08:01] Yeah, I know. I'm going once, I'm going twice. You can test the microphone out. Find the right mic for the person that's singing. So, your website. I went to your website, Stephen, and it's super simple, super efficient. But, I'd like you to jump on and kind of show everyone how it works so they can see a little bit of the process at MikeRentals.com. Yeah, here's just the homepage. So, it's pretty simple.

[00:08:26] All these carousel images you can click on, and it'll go straight to that item or even event like this MXU event. Down here, we have our most popular departures. It's kind of a neat little thing, Dave. It kind of shows you what people have been renting from us lately. As you can see, DPA is a hot topic with us. So, it's the five of the top six there. Then we have new arrivals, which is kind of neat. These are things we recently added to the site.

[00:08:56] We may or may not have had these for a long time before we added them to the site. So, sometimes we get overwhelmed with just new equipment requests. We add them to our physical inventory before you see them up online. But, anyway, the renting process. Let's just jump into something as easy as this Earthworks DM6, which this actually just came out last week. So, good timing.

[00:09:21] You'll see straight right from the gate, we give you a price that says $72 for five days. So, where a lot of people get that confused about that is they think that that means every five days it's going to be $72. Well, that's not true, and I'll show you right now. So, you're going to pick your arrival date. That's the day that you want to receive it. We recommend that not be the day of your event, just for preparation and preference sake.

[00:09:52] But that's the day we try to get it there on or before that day. And if it arrives early, hey, you don't pay more for that. It's just our scheduling buffers to – because FedEx ain't perfect. I think we all know FedEx and UPS are definitely not perfect. The return date is similar. It's the day you're able to actually bring that back to FedEx or if you have like a daily pickup that they're coming to, they're going to come pick it up.

[00:10:18] And those return dates are typically – and arrival dates, those are usually Mondays through Fridays. We do have certain circumstances where we have to like air cargo something and get it there on the same day. That's not going to happen through our website. You're going to have to reach out to us for that. Anyway, I could pick 10 days from the 21st, which looks like that's going to be on a weekend. So, I'm going to move that to – let's see – Monday the 4th here.

[00:10:48] And you notice that price didn't double. A lot of people thought that price would just double. It doesn't. I always guess we have this formula that gradually just tapers off as the longer and longer and longer your rental period is. Because the biggest thing is you're – you know, we're – we want to give you ability to try these mics out.

[00:11:15] But obviously, there's going to be a tipping point where it's going to probably make more sense to buy these. If – I have never tried this, but let's say you put the dates in for a year. I bet the rental rate is probably going to be more than what it costs to actually buy the thing. So, if you need a year to figure this thing out, it's probably worth just buying one. Let me stop you there for a second, Stephen. You just – you went past something there on the shipping that I think is very important. This is production-friendly shipping.

[00:11:42] If you go to a normal rental house, the date is when it's received or when it leaves their building to when it comes back to their building. And they are going to charge you a whole lot more than $107.40 for 12 days. But that is – what you just said, hey, we ship it to you. And if it comes in early, you know, we don't charge you for that. It's just according to your day.

[00:12:07] And then you ship it back to us on the day, and if it takes two days to get there, we're not charging you for those additional days. That's production-friendly shipping. You don't find that at every rental house. And I just wanted to point that out, that what you guys are doing are really helping the church or any production do better in terms of their money that they're spending.

[00:12:30] Because if that was a regular rental house, and if it left on Monday to be shipped to you, you're renting it from that Monday on. So I think that's a really, really awesome thing that you guys do. Yeah, something, too, that I kind of blew past by is like right on the front page, right on the carousels of the site, it says free ground shipping. Well, we actually don't ground anything or very rarely ground ship stuff.

[00:12:58] It just has to be something that we're very, very sure of, and it probably leaves like super early. Just again, we're trying to create those buffers. But it's free shipping. Like if you book this within three days, so if this was needed on a Friday of this week, when you go to the cart side, because if I add this to my cart right now, it's going to add like a $35 overnight fee because today's the 20th and that's the 21st.

[00:13:28] Well, if that was – I already forgot what day's Friday. Oh, the 1st. Yeah, so if that's the 1st, then you won't get charge shipping. That's all on us. And return shipping is also on us. Wow. Wow. We put a return label in the box. The whole idea was just to get mics in the hands of people for them to try them, to see if they like them long term and all that stuff.

[00:13:58] And a lot of times people come right back to us for the ownership of these mics because we're – obviously, we buy all these mics for ourselves, but we – all of the lines that we rent, we also sell them as well. So – and most of the time, we're able to give the – pretty much give the rental right back to you on a quote for purchasing this stuff too.

[00:14:21] So we just kind of – we kind of built for that, you know, that test environment, that discovery environment, if you will. So, Stephen, it sounds like you get free shipping. Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. If you place your order within three business days of arrival, it's always going to be free. Both directions, to and from us. That's awesome, man. And I heard there's a little trick to get a bigger discount. Yeah. We just keep giving and giving.

[00:14:49] As you can see, when I go into my cart, I'm going to change these dates. That way it gets rid of the overnight shipping because that part's not free. So I changed these dates to the 28th to the 4th. But then down in this apply coupon section, I'm going to type in rent15. That's R-E-N-T 1-5. And hit apply. And that's going to take 15% off your rental.

[00:15:11] So we may have even – made it even more easy to do and even more affordable just by saving a little bit more money. And anybody who's listening to this podcast can totally use that coupon. The site that I got inspired by, believe it or not, was lensrentals.com. A lot of people have used them. And I was just like, this is great. And, of course, when I looked for mikerentals.com at the time in 2014, no one had it. It was just parked.

[00:15:40] So it wasn't until like eight months later that I realized it was something I needed to actually do. And thankfully, the domain was still around. And so here we are. This is our version four of our site, which we had to launch actually in an emergency a week before Christmas because the other one crashed. But thank the Lord we had one being built in the background for six months. And we had to basically launch it and just immediately start debugging.

[00:16:08] So right now we're looking at Mike Reynolds 4.3. And it's doing everything we want it to do. And it's faster. It just makes things so much more efficient for our customers. Because if I get annoyed looking at it, you're going to get annoyed looking at it. So that's kind of our approach. Everybody in this building is production people. So we're kind of our own worst critic. Yeah, it sounds like it's kind of a one-stop shop.

[00:16:36] You can go there, rent the microphone, test it out, come back to you and say, Hey, I really like it, wrap it into a purchase and boom, you're good to go. Yeah, we stock a lot of stuff. We did that back in like 2020. And I still just keep putting stuff on the shelves. When something's new like this DM6, that's one we'll put extras on the shelves. Because, again, people want to try it. And that mic's funny enough, I'd pick this one.

[00:17:00] That one's been really interesting as far as people liking it a lot. Going away from their two mic solution and all that stuff. So it's, yeah, it's just, I love it. Hey, I couldn't, there's no way I was going to be able to convince my wife to own all this inventory. I had to start a business in order to make that actually happen. To get your hands on a mic before you buy it, make sure it works for your singers,

[00:17:29] or just expand your needs for Easter or Christmas, go to MikeRentals.com. Their tagline is like it, love it, rock it. And I think that sums this company up. To find out more about them, go to MikeRentals.com.