Doug Haas, your ARA regional director, talks cyber vigilance

Doug Haas

Hello American Rental Association (ARA) Region Six members. I hope everyone has had a great summer!

As usual, I spent a lot of time over the summer on the road visiting with members and dropping in on some ARA state chapter gatherings:

• In mid-July, I was able to attend the ARA of Missouri’s event in Lake of the Ozarks. Hosted at the Margaritaville Lake Resort, it was a wonderful event with great speakers discussing company culture and employee engagement. There was also plenty of interaction with other rental stores and vendors.
• Soon after Missouri’s event was our annual ARA of Minnesota Summer Cruise, which took us through the twists and turns of central Minnesota. We all had a great time socializing and touring the Floe International manufacturing facility.
• I was unable to attend the ARA of Iowa’s Iowa Cubs-Toledo Mudhens baseball social in early August due to my annual visit to South Dakota, but I’m sure it was a great time.

The approach to our slower season is always a good time to look at improving our businesses — especially in the area of cybersecurity due to all the risks that go along with that. Recently at our company we implemented dual authentication and email training. We luckily have not had any issues, but I wanted to make sure that we were being proactive. It was easy to implement, and the staff has adapted well.

We also carry cybertheft insurance through ARA Insurance. I constantly hear horror stories of other businesses that have been hacked and the time and money they have to spend to get everything back up and running is unbelievable.

Speaking of cybertheft, I encourage you to take a moment to read the feature story in this month’s In Your Region. It’s a terrific interview with Emmett Long, an ARA Insurance agent based in Georgia who serves many rental operators throughout that region. Emmett has some interesting and helpful takes on preventing cybercrime in a rental business.

As always, I hope to see you all at The ARA Show™ in New Orleans in February. Registration opening is just around the corner, on Oct. 17, so save that date!

Doug Haas, ARA Region Six director
Crown Rental
Burnsville, Minn.
952-894-7368
doug@crownrent.com