He's held every job in this building.
Chris Sater started in the family rental business washing dishes. Four decades later, he's franchising the company he built on everything those jobs taught him.
A rental family since 1983.
The Sater family has been in the rental business in Shreveport since 1983, operating a franchised Taylor Rental Center. Chris grew up inside it, literally. His first job was washing dishes in the store's kitchen, young enough that someone had to remind him to roll up his sleeves.
From there, the jobs got bigger as he did. Washing tents after school and through every summer. Driving delivery trucks the year he got his license. Moving into sales, then into managing parts of the operation. By the time most people take their first job in this industry, Chris had already worked nearly all of them.
Encore, 2011
After the warehouse came Austin: Chris left for the University of Texas, earned his bachelor’s degree, and got his first taste of building things on his own. When the family sold the broader Taylor Rental business in 2007, it kept the part it knew best: the tents. Chris moved home in 2008 to help run the family business, and eventually, to take it over. In 2011, the operation relaunched under a new name: Encore Event Rentals.
Chris owns and leads Encore today, and the decade in between is the reason this page exists: a regional rental company turned into a documented, measurable operating system.
Even with a lifetime in the industry, shaping Encore into a modern, full-service event rental company meant reinventing wheels he already knew how to turn. Pricing. Routing. Inventory decisions. Crew structure. There was no playbook, so he wrote one, system by system, season by season, while growing Encore into the region's most trusted event rental operation, serving everything from backyard barbecues to 400-guest weddings under multi-tent installations.
The broker's vantage point
Here is where Chris's background diverges from nearly every franchise founder you'll meet. Since 2018, alongside running Encore, he has worked as a business broker and M&A advisor, valuing, analyzing, and selling privately held companies. He holds an MBA and earned both the Certified Business Intermediary and Certified Management Accountant certifications along the way.
That work means he has seen inside hundreds of small businesses: the ones that thrive, the ones that stall, and the precise operational reasons why. It is an unusual vantage point for a franchisor, and it shaped how Encore's systems were built: around the numbers that actually determine whether a rental company makes money: equipment utilization, route density, quote conversion, and return on every asset in the warehouse.
Why franchise, why now
"Most capable operators never get a clean shot at ownership," Chris says. "That's the problem Encore exists to solve: a working business model, a written playbook, an exclusive territory, and someone in your corner who has done every job in the building. The right operator can run this from day one."
"Operating a business teaches you things you can't pick up from a textbook. I've spent my whole life learning them in this industry. That's what a franchisee is actually buying." Chris Sater · Founder
Four decades, one industry.
- 1983Sater family begins operating a Taylor Rental Center franchise in Shreveport, Louisiana.
- 1984 to 2000Dishwasher, tent washer, truck driver, salesman, operations manager: every job in the building, in order.
- 2000Moves to Austin; earns his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas.
- 2007Family sells the broader rental business; keeps and continues the tent operation.
- 2008Chris returns to Shreveport to help run, and eventually take over, the family business.
- 2011The business relaunches as Encore Event Rentals. Chris earns his MBA (Centenary College of Louisiana).
- 2018Becomes a business broker and M&A advisor, earning the Certified Business Intermediary designation.
- 2025Begins the work of franchising Encore: documenting the systems, building the disclosure, defining the territories.
- 2026Launches Sater Advisory, helping rental-industry owners with exit planning and M&A advisory. Encore begins actively awarding franchises.
Who he wants across the table.
"I'm looking for people who already know how to manage and operate a business. They just don't have one of their own yet. People who've run crews, trucks, schedules, budgets. People who want to control their own destiny and are willing to follow a system that works.
This is a partnership in the real sense. We have their back, and they have ours. If that's you, I'd like to talk."
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