On the fence about where to rent the best temporary fences, toilets, waste bins and handwashing stations for your construction site or outdoor event? The answer is FenceLine Rentals Ltd. Since 1998, this agile company has been growing to serve the needs of Alberta’s construction companies, residential homes and outdoor event planners.
“FenceLine is centred around an amazing team of people that work very hard to surpass the customers’ expectations, and that is what differentiates us from our competitors,” says Jasen Robalo, founder and CEO. “We built our company around a set of core values that informs our proactive decision making. We provide our main services to as far a range as we are competitive; we have bins and toilets offered within a two-hour radius of Edmonton and fence on rent all across Alberta. We have sold fence products all across Canada. Our mission is to be employee focused and customer centric; our long-term vision is to be the company recognized for providing the best customer experience of any business throughout Canada.”
The brand is certainly achieving those goals. From the early days of the start up to 25 years later, the team has grown to 44 employees and increasingly notable projects.
Jasen describes one of the milestone projects, saying, “In 2022 we were on site for the Pope’s visit. During our busiest summer to date, dealing with post COVID supply chain issues and low inventory, we secured, set up and removed over 50,000 linear feet of temporary fence at three locations across Alberta to support the Pope’s visit. This involved having all hands on deck, multiple third party partners helping us out, as well as me happily rolling up my sleeves and setting up fences alongside the team.”
“We are proud,” he continues, “to have been a part of many iconic construction projects in the Edmonton area, including Amazon warehouses, the Valley Line LRT, the Fort Edmonton Park renovation, the ongoing Hawrelak Park renovations and many of the recent additions to the Edmonton skyline in the form of high-rise towers downtown and in the University and Whyte Ave areas. Recently, we had the privilege of helping the Canadian Armed Forces as they housed evacuees from the fires in the Northwest Territories.”
Another notable event was Do North Events’ Canadian Road Cycling Championships.
Jasen explains, “The Cycle Championships consisted of four consecutive days and thousands of linear feet of fence, with crews starting work Friday night at 12:00 a.m. and ending with a crew of 15 starting at Monday night at 11:00 p.m. to take down 4,250 linear feet within a one-hour window on one of Edmonton’s busiest streets. We received great reviews from this customer.”
He adds, “It is easy to provide great customer service when you are a small company; the bigger you get the harder it becomes. However, our entire team is dedicated to maintaining ‘small company’ customer service, no matter how big we get. Pride and accountability are at our core. We pride ourselves on the jobs we do, and we hold ourselves accountable through consistent customer feedback.”
When COVID hit Alberta, hand hygiene took centre focus. FenceLine reacted by adding to its fleet of sinks, including multiple sizes of sinks for many different applications. FenceLine also expanded its customer base, helping out from construction sites to Edmonton Public Schools.
“We are happy to see that hand hygiene has stayed a priority for our industry since and we have taken steps to add sinks to several versions of our portable toilets at the request of our customers,” Jasen adds.
“Being an entrepreneur,” he continues, “provides great challenges and the opportunity for great successes. It’s a lot of hard work but we have built a well-respected organization with great people. The growth we have had in the past 10 years is an achievement and I am proud that our staff and leadership team get the credit for building the business. We have so many long-term staff that bring years of experience and dedication. We also see our staff leveling up and growing each day/month to further their careers and skills.”
Jasen and his team could not be happier to be achieving this level of success with the Capital City as the home base.
“Edmonton is our home. We are from here and we love to support the community as a whole. Our business is built around helping our customers succeed and we love it when we can be successful with this. To this end, we support the Zebra Child & Youth Advocacy Centre (through the RunWild Marathon) each year. We also support many non-profit organizations’ events behind the scenes with fence and toilet rentals so those charities can keep their costs down. Examples include Kids with Cancer events, Terry Fox runs and many more.”
Jasen took the company from conception to the success it is today, but he didn’t do it alone. He thanks many people who have been instrumental in the journey every step of the way. This includes the leadership team, the staff, clients, vendors, suppliers and “Rob Sherrard with his dedication to customer centricity and employee focus, along with Matthew Williams leading our sales team and really growing the business in a tough market.”
He reflects on the journey, noting that FenceLine started as a snow removal company that pivoted into fence fabrication. The first temporary fences were built in Jasen’s garage. Today the company is pleased to be, increasingly, a leading supplier of its kind for rentals and wholesale across Canada.
“FenceLine is focussed on becoming a scalable business, taking what we do best and figuring out how to do it in more places for more customers,” Jasen concludes. “We have immediate expansion plans to open a facility in Calgary and would like to expand our geographical coverage of our base services across Western Canada. It’s an honour, it’s a privilege and it’s a huge responsibility. Our customers rely on us to have what they need when they need it, and we expect ourselves to come through for them.”
#112, 9871-279 Street, Acheson, AB T7X 6J4
Local: 780 720 6300 | Toll Free: +1 866 922 7368
fenceline.ca