the fall of 2020 by leaning into its online process and taking some time to recoup, the Marshall Music team began to look at ways to fine-tune their online process. “We thought, ‘I bet we could do this a lot better. I bet we could really do something with this if we improve our processes, if we improve our software and if we better train our staff. What if we could do the whole process like this?’” Edwards said. “Even if the delivery methods are different with ship to the home, pick up at the school or pick up at the store, what if all the rentals came through the same pipeline? What if we didn’t have to spread inventory among seven loca- tions in anticipation of new rentals? What if we didn’t have to speculate how much we’d rent at each school and then send maybe 10 flutes here and four flutes here and hope and pray that we’re going to have enough, you know? What if we could get away with not having rental nights at schools?” FROM 10% TO 100% As Marshall Music prepared for the 2021 rental season, it began floating the idea of a completely online system to teachers and directors. “It took a little time and some coaxing —
change is tricky,” Edwards said. “An educa- tor has been doing things the same way for 20 years, and then you say, ‘We’re going to throw that out the window and do things totally different.’ That can be tough. We had to be sensitive to that. We didn’t want any lapse in customer service, but we were able to convince just about everybody that we could do online without a sort of chaotic rental event. The rental process could all happen from the comfort of someone’s home, and the process approved by the educator.” Edwards said his team of some 14 ed reps worked with music directors to create a process that worked for each school. If a director was comfortable with a student receiving an instrument delivered to their home, Marshall Music organized this. For directors who didn’t want the new student to be the first one to put their clarinet together, Marshall Music orchestrated the rentals be shipped to the school. “Educators usually don’t want the students to be the first ones to ever touch the instru- ment,” Edwards said. “Usually, it’s better that the teacher shows them how to put together a clarinet, so we had to work through some of those preferences.” Edwards added that word traveled fast as
local directors shared the positives of online rentals with each other. “A lot started talking and saying, ‘I tried this at my school, and I’m never going back to a rental night. It was chaotic. The parents can get it themselves, and the student shows up on Monday with the trumpet, and it’s great,’” Edwards explained. “So, we had advocates, and we were building up that number of advocates in the districts we served. And when one di- rector hears that it’s working for one school district they start thinking, ‘I think I’ll try it.’” Throughout the fall of 2021 and 2022, Mar- shall Music fine-tuned its process by enacting better software and better internal processes. “We went from writing up different name tags and things like that to having the software do it for us automatically,” he said. “Now, the order comes right out of our point-of-sale system into our UPS shipping software. So, we were able to do it quicker and better. We were able to use our resources and instead of some of the labor-intensive processes like writing or typing, we could let the software take care of that and focus on quality control.” By 2022, Marshall Music had shifted to do 100% of its rentals online. “I’ve really fine-tuned the process to where it’s a marvel to me that we can run 10,000
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