daugen
Epic Contributor
I liked the fact that LS made their US corp office here in NC. Not the only company to do so.
LS has been top ranked by dealers as to their relationship with the manufacturer, support, quality of product, parts availability; it's as if they took a page
from Kubota and decided to do it in blue...enormous corporate backing, half of our appliances seem to be made by parent LG under some label anyway.
TYM did very poorly while Branson did well.
I was all set to start a local JD dealership, lawn mowers, UTV's etc only, not ag tractors, about 20 years ago. JD said they would approve me but closest dealer appealed and
it seemed I was 23 miles away and not 25 and they had given out protected territories. I had it all planned down to the minutiae and JD said my proposal was excellent.
Why did I pick JD? Because Kubota was big in the next big town over, the county seat, and in fact that's where I bought my L. Wonderful dealership, in hindsight would not have wanted to compete with them but would have done so in a heatbeat. Instead I bought the town's Radio Shack, tiny little business and built that into something bigger than most
Tandy corporate stores. Why? For the same reason my JD garden tractors and zturns would have sold. The area was way upmarket, folks drove luxury foreign cars and they wanted luxury
JD green machines on their front lawn. The area is saturated now with one and two million dollar five acre "farmettes" where each retired stockbroker feels obliged to get a SCUT or CUT
to play with.
You have to know your area and your market cold. It's irrelevant if you like it if it won't sell. Items have to turn multiple times each year or you'll usually lose money.
And all the hidden costs with loaner mowers, loaner tractors. You can't charge a first class price without first class service. And in my home town in PA folks buying equipment clearly typified the more money than brains concept. Except they were really very smart folks, phd's, brokers, but a lot of them came from the city and had no idea what they were doing.
A tractor was like a small Jeep that did tractor things...
I would have made a killing for JD, and instead the other dealer that soured the deal for me went bankrupt five years later and JD had no representation for almost 40 miles.
Water under the dam. So I did my other hobby, electronics, instead. Inevitably I wound back in insurance and finance to pay the bills, but I always wondered how that dealership would
have done. Probably would have worked myself to the bone. And have the same problem Messick's has trying to provide good service to most folks coming in the door. You just can't stock
everything for sure and you can't help everyone. But you try to be broad, and stock lines that can really be a problem.
For example, just today, my local Kubota dealer Service Manager was so frustrated with techs tied up fixing Cub Cadet lawn mowers and garden tractors that he
muttered under his breath he'd like to pile them all up on a barge and ship them somewhere. His background was ag tractor and dealing with price point MTD
equipment is a big switch. But you have to have a two thousand dollar mower in a store. You don't have to have the awful 999 clearanced every year at 899 Husky/MTD mower
that was probably wholesaled for 700 bucks. But it's shiny and new even if only cost 400 bucks to build and the dealer has to fix it under the warranty.
So important to pick the right company to get in bed with. And if you can buy it on Amazon, maybe pick another brand...
I sold my Radio Shack two years before Circuit City came to town. They would have put me out business. Timing can be important if you can get established before all the
late arrivers show up.
LS has been top ranked by dealers as to their relationship with the manufacturer, support, quality of product, parts availability; it's as if they took a page
from Kubota and decided to do it in blue...enormous corporate backing, half of our appliances seem to be made by parent LG under some label anyway.
TYM did very poorly while Branson did well.
I was all set to start a local JD dealership, lawn mowers, UTV's etc only, not ag tractors, about 20 years ago. JD said they would approve me but closest dealer appealed and
it seemed I was 23 miles away and not 25 and they had given out protected territories. I had it all planned down to the minutiae and JD said my proposal was excellent.
Why did I pick JD? Because Kubota was big in the next big town over, the county seat, and in fact that's where I bought my L. Wonderful dealership, in hindsight would not have wanted to compete with them but would have done so in a heatbeat. Instead I bought the town's Radio Shack, tiny little business and built that into something bigger than most
Tandy corporate stores. Why? For the same reason my JD garden tractors and zturns would have sold. The area was way upmarket, folks drove luxury foreign cars and they wanted luxury
JD green machines on their front lawn. The area is saturated now with one and two million dollar five acre "farmettes" where each retired stockbroker feels obliged to get a SCUT or CUT
to play with.
You have to know your area and your market cold. It's irrelevant if you like it if it won't sell. Items have to turn multiple times each year or you'll usually lose money.
And all the hidden costs with loaner mowers, loaner tractors. You can't charge a first class price without first class service. And in my home town in PA folks buying equipment clearly typified the more money than brains concept. Except they were really very smart folks, phd's, brokers, but a lot of them came from the city and had no idea what they were doing.
A tractor was like a small Jeep that did tractor things...
I would have made a killing for JD, and instead the other dealer that soured the deal for me went bankrupt five years later and JD had no representation for almost 40 miles.
Water under the dam. So I did my other hobby, electronics, instead. Inevitably I wound back in insurance and finance to pay the bills, but I always wondered how that dealership would
have done. Probably would have worked myself to the bone. And have the same problem Messick's has trying to provide good service to most folks coming in the door. You just can't stock
everything for sure and you can't help everyone. But you try to be broad, and stock lines that can really be a problem.
For example, just today, my local Kubota dealer Service Manager was so frustrated with techs tied up fixing Cub Cadet lawn mowers and garden tractors that he
muttered under his breath he'd like to pile them all up on a barge and ship them somewhere. His background was ag tractor and dealing with price point MTD
equipment is a big switch. But you have to have a two thousand dollar mower in a store. You don't have to have the awful 999 clearanced every year at 899 Husky/MTD mower
that was probably wholesaled for 700 bucks. But it's shiny and new even if only cost 400 bucks to build and the dealer has to fix it under the warranty.
So important to pick the right company to get in bed with. And if you can buy it on Amazon, maybe pick another brand...
I sold my Radio Shack two years before Circuit City came to town. They would have put me out business. Timing can be important if you can get established before all the
late arrivers show up.
