How Empire Trailer Hire grew from a front lawn to 200 trailers and 30 locations with Lockii

Tied to the driveway

The early days had one obvious problem. Matt had to be there for every rental. Someone needed a trailer at 7am? He had to be there. Saturday afternoon? Same story. He was physically tied to that driveway.

It felt less like a business and more like a second job with worse hours. Every rental still depended on Matt's calendar, his sleep, and whether he happened to be home when a customer needed the gear.

Trailer rental had to work whether Matt was standing in the yard or not. If customers still needed him at the lock, Empire was never getting out of West Mackay.

Trying coded padlocks

So Matt got creative. He bought a second trailer, then a third, and started trying coded padlocks. Customers got a code before pickup and could collect the trailer themselves. It was rough. Codes went out by message, and the process depended on Matt remembering every detail. But it worked. People could rent a trailer anytime, whether he was there or not.

By the time five trailers were sitting on that West Mackay front yard, he decided it was time to find a proper system.

Building the first system

Matt worked with Bodhi, the founder of Lockii, to build an early system that connected online bookings to trailer access. It started as a simple text messaging setup on top of a legacy rental platform's API. There were plenty of bugs: expiring codes, and rentals that still needed a manual nudge to finish.

Even with the rough edges, it was a real step forward, and the base of what Empire Trailer Hire is today. Customers could book online, get a PIN, unlock the keybox, and go, without a call, a wait, or Matt in the driveway.

The product that later became Lockii was shaped by the same operator problems Empire hit first: how do you take payment, issue access, and keep a rental moving without someone standing at the trailer?

The first real base

With a working system in place, Matt needed somewhere to grow from. Five trailers on a residential front lawn had a ceiling. Around the same time, he met a bloke who was retiring from his trucking company and had a block of land sitting unused. Matt struck a deal, and that yard at Paget became Empire's first real base.

The fleet grew from five trailers to twenty-five in that yard. Then Matt started to feel the limits of a single location. Foot traffic was mostly whoever drove past, and Google traffic skewed toward people closest to the yard over everyone else.

One to four locations

Empire's first big breakthrough came from a cold walk-in. Matt walked into a Mackay City store, spoke to the manager on the floor, and within weeks had trailers across four hardware store locations.

The offer to partners was simple. Empire places trailers at an established business. That business earns monthly passive revenue without touching the operation: no staff involvement, customer calls, or maintenance. Empire handles equipment, smart locks, bookings, payments, and support. Partners also get branded signage and the foot traffic that comes with being a listed rental location.

Once businesses saw how it worked, the conversation got easier. Shopping centres, service stations, hardware stores, sporting clubs, air conditioning companies, bathroom suppliers, landscape suppliers. The playbook stayed the same in each new town: open a headline yard, then open satellite locations to pull traffic and customers toward it.

Statewide expansion

Expansion sped up across Central and North Queensland: Whitsundays, Moranbah, Ayr, Townsville, Emerald, Gladstone, Bowen. The fleet moved into remote mining towns as well as coastal centres. The model worked on more than one kind of main street.

Midway through that growth, one thing was clear: trailer rental did not need a giant depot in every town. It needed trailers in the right places, partners who saw the value, and systems that could keep each site running without Matt flying between them.

The software had to grow with it. Emails and text messages were no longer enough. Bookings and lock access still mattered, but fleet tracking, maintenance scheduling, and customer communications needed to live in the same operation.

Scaling the operation

From the outside, Empire looks simple. Book in about a minute, collect it yourself, return when you are done, day or night. No calls, check-ins, or fuss.

Behind that sit hundreds of trailers across dozens of locations that all need to stay road-ready, clean, and compliant. Tyres, lights, hitches, brakes, tie-down points. Every component gets checked on a schedule. One poorly maintained trailer at 6am lands on a customer who did everything right, and that is not acceptable.

Empire put a lot into systems and processes to stay on top of a spread-out fleet. Alongside booking and access, they built maintenance workflows to track inspections, servicing, repairs, and compliance. Third-party maintenance crews work across the regions. When a trailer is due, the team knows before the customer does.

The customer side stays simple because the back end is not. Fleet tracking, scheduled maintenance, and smart locks at every location are how a front-yard idea holds up at any hour.

From three systems to one platform

The early build with Bodhi was never meant to stay a side project. As Empire grew, Matt was still juggling three different systems to keep the network running. The fleet and location count climbed, and the stack became the bottleneck. The old self-serve workaround had to become proper infrastructure for a regional operation.

Lockii became that platform. Booking, payments, access, and the day-to-day work of running rentals moved into one place instead of living across tools that did not talk to each other. Matt got time back. The business stopped depending on him stitching every rental together by hand.

For a trailer network spread across the region, that mattered more than a cleaner interface. It was the difference between managing a single yard and running locations across half of Queensland, on software shaped by the same partnership that got Empire self-serve in the first place.

Matt is clear about what changed. Things got much easier. The platform is easy to use, and support actually listens. For the first time in a long stretch of growth, he could focus on running the business again instead of holding the systems together.

200 trailers, 30 locations, and still growing

Empire now runs 200 trailers and 30 locations, from Mackay to Townsville, Emerald to Gladstone, with partner sites still coming online. The customer flow stays plain on purpose: book online, collect with a smart lock, hitch up, and return when done. The operation behind it is a lot more involved.

Each town on the map is a relationship with a partner who saw the value, and a community that needed a trailer when nowhere else was open. Empire was built in regional Queensland by someone who lives there and knows what it is like to need gear on a weekend with no depot open and no staff to call.

Matt's take on Lockii is that the value keeps adding up. Every month the platform takes more off his plate, which is what a growing multi-location rental business needs if the next town is going to feel familiar instead of starting from scratch.

Since switching to Lockii, things have gotten so much easier. I was juggling three different systems before, and now it's all in one place. It's saved me a heap of time and stress, and I can actually focus on running the business again. The platform's really user-friendly, and the support has been unreal, the team genuinely cares and listens.

Matt Cole, Empire Trailer Hire

What comes next for Empire Trailer Hire

Empire got here one location at a time, not through a franchise kit or a giant depot strategy. Find a site with space and traffic, place the trailers, automate the rental, keep the fleet road-ready. New partners still come online the same way the Porters Group conversation started: a model that is easy to explain because the operation does not land on the partner's staff.

Matt puts the operating philosophy simply. The business gets better one step at a time. Every location, every trailer, every system is repetition, refinement, and showing up. Repetition is the mother of skill. They are not done yet.

With Lockii taking more operational load each month, Empire has room to keep doing that: open the next town, place the next trailers, and keep 24/7 rental feeling as simple as it did when the whole business still fit on a front lawn.