The Main Event: Town & Country Is Growing

Even though the Super Bowl was played in Glendale, Arizona, this year, one Valley company got some work from it – again.

Town & Country Event Rentals, in Van Nuys, had a team of people in place a week and a half before the big game, said Tom Siciliano, the company’s chief executive.

Among the events that it handled last year was the Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Rams — a Town & Country client — and the Cincinnati Bengals at SoFi Stadium

“We were able to provide structures — tents — as well as tables and chairs and a variety of things underneath the tents, as well as outside equipment to help the people at the Super Bowl have fun,” Siciliano said.

The company carried out the same planning and work for this years’s Super Bowl, which was played at State Farm Stadium in Arizona.

Town & Country says it is the one company in the event rental industry that won’t say no to a scheduled event.

On average, the event rental firm provides its products for 10,000 to 12,000 events a year, Siciliano said.

That includes thousands of tables, tents large and small and fancy place settings that can accommodate a dinner for hundreds of people. There are ice buckets, podiums, swaths of fabric made into tablecloths and table skirts, couches, coffee pots, and miles and miles of carpeting.

With all the boxes and containers stacked nearly to the ceiling, the Town & Country warehouse, which is adjacent to the Van Nuys Airport, resembles Xanadu — if Charles Foster Kane had collected the supplies for a dinner party instead of great works of art. 

Town & Country was founded in 2005 by Richard LoGuercio, who had previously launched Classic Party Rentals and grown it into the largest event rental company in the country. LoGuercio left Classic in 1998 after it was acquired by a private investment group; he didn’t like the new direction the group was taking the company. At the young age of 45, LoGuercio found himself retired, with lots of time on his hands.

He took up woodworking, and volunteering at his daughters’ schools and helping out with fundraising events while waiting out a noncompete agreement.

Big splash

Then, in 2005, he reentered the rental business with Town & Country. He wanted to make a big splash with the new company, to let it be known that T&C would be a major player.

To achieve that, LoGuercio went on buying sprees to amass a depth of inventory that others couldn’t compete with. This was a drastic change from the conservative buying style he used at Classic. 

When LoGuercio stepped down from Town & Country last year – he remains on the company’s board of directors – he retired from a company with more than 700 employees, a fleet of 130 trucks, four locations in Van Nuys, and additional outlets in Pasadena and Santa Barbara. The company occupies a total of 190,000 square feet space among its six locations.

Siciliano said that Town & Country’s service area goes as far south as San Diego and up into the high desert. “We have done jobs as far away as Michigan and Idaho,” he added.

As for LoGuercio, Siciliano called him one of the “premier inventors of the event rental space.” In 2017, LoGuercio was honored with Special Events magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

LoGuercio was himself responsible for bringing Siciliano — who took over as chief executive about a year ago — on board. He did it primarily as a way to secure a deal with Shadow Lake Partners, the North Carolina-based private equity firm that recapitalized Town & Country in December.

“They saw this as a trophy purchase,” Siciliano said. “They could take the company and their portfolio … to the next level.”

“I was determined to find the right group of people that would be a good fit to carry on the culture and legacy of Town and Country,” LoGuercio said in a statement. “Shadow Lake Partners is eager to build upon our foundation with an emphasis on growth, improving operations and management.”

“We are delighted to be able to partner with the incredible cast of managers and employees at Town & Country as the firm prepares to make large investments in the best equipment, technology, and design / engineering capabilities in the market,” Devaunt LeClaire, managing partner at Shadow Lake, added in a statement.

Reinvesting

The investment being made by Shadow Lake is a substantial one, Siciliano said, and will go toward new equipment. The company is buying tables, chairs, tents and other items, to increase the quality of its offerings, he added.

There are a variety of other companies in the greater Los Angeles area that offer similar equipment, but “what is going to make Town & Country different is the amount of money we are going to focus on to bring changes to the marketplace in keeping with what the market is looking for,” Siciliano said.

Another thing that makes Town & Country different from competitors is its strategy of actually asking customers what should be purchased.

“Our company is much different from other companies in this space in that it is not a top-down management (style) that says we are going to buy this,” Siciliano said. “It is from the bottom up, and our salespeople who are on the streets talking with our customers, we are taking their opinion to decide what we are going to buy. That is what we are going to be focused on.”

The Covid-19 pandemic had an impact on the business, as events all but stopped overnight nearly three years ago. But while the company had to lay off employees, it managed to keep going by providing tents used by companies and agencies conducting virus testing and vaccinations, Sicliano said. The company has hired back all the employees who had been laid off, he added.

“Covid hit everyone in 2021, but in 2022 we came back bigger and better than we have ever been and had the best year of our history,” Siciliano said.