An Associated Equipment Distributors study indicated that 7 out of 10 dealers have responded to our current economic slide by cutting employees, cutting hours, and reducing new product and parts inventories. Dealers' customers surveyed recognized those moves, but said those were the very things that keep them committed to a particular supplier: level of service and support, and parts availability. Rod Sutton asks where that leaves us today, and how it portends for the future in a recent Big Iron Blog . How are your equipment dealers providing service in lean times? Have any secured your loyalty with superlative service? Any shaken your trust? How much grace can you afford?
I read the articles this mourning and thought that the questions struck me the wrong way but I couldn't figure out why. It kind of seemed accusatory in that it implied the dealers were backing down their enterprises at the expense of their customers. Having worked for several dealers in the past, and been on the down side of those layoffs, and run my own business for multiple years through good and bad I find the head lines and the questions to really be out of touch with what is actually happening. The first priority of any business is to stay in business. The state of the economy dictates what has to be done to accomplish that. From my point of view based on my past experiences, no one can afford to pay people to stand around waiting for a customer to call needing parts or repair service. Dealers are in the same predicament that their customers are in. Not enough sales and repair work to justify keeping the number of people and parts that were profitable a couple of years ago. The reason for that is their customers are not working either and have cut down on their personnel and the number of machines they operate. The two operations are linked and dependant on each other. The problems in the articles is that they did not establish that anyone even had a problem. I would suggest that the better head line and premise should have been "How Have You Been Affected By Cut Backs at Your Local Dealer?". The author could then have gone into the statistics from the AED and then done some homework with interviews and quotes from companies in the construction industry. Had that been done I think the author might have found out what was actually happening and delivered real insight to benefit us all. Just My Opinion
I've had my hours cut in half. So have all the remaining employees- one week on, one week off. Our company has applied for "Workshare". Like you say John, everyone is trying "to stay in business". I had to do my first "worksearch" today to claim benefits. I know the service manager at Pape Mt Vernon and he graciously offered to put my resume "on file". He said they were busy but I assume that meant there was enough work for the existing mechanics. I went across the street to Barnett. There were four people just standing around and I asked for service manager who's name I found on the Internet. "We are slow right now" but at least he gave me a business card to add to my job search record. Next was NC Mt Vernon. Didn't get past the receptionist. "We've already laid off six mechanics... here's an application" We need to focus on what got people into homes and businesses into commercial property and for that, you can look to the overlords in the financial sector.
There is no doubt the HE side of things is tough all around right now. However, ag is going strong. If you have HE mechanic experience, go to your local farm dealer. They could likely use you. My farm dealer has refocused on the ag side of the business, so my service there has been great. My volvo CE dealer sucks on the best day. Sadly, i won't be buying a fleet of articulating haul trucks anytime soon, so i don't show up on their radar....ever.
Around our dealers have done the usual cutbacks with employees, parts inventories, etc. What I have noticed is that they are bending over backwards to help us when we need them. Service depts are quick to help, parts guys treat us better than ever, sales people are calling on us more now. While we still get free lunches from the sales guys, I am having a hard time getting free hats from them. I appreciate all that they are doing for us, but I feel like if the economic situation we are in mow that they would not treat us like they are. But that is hard to prove because when everything gets back to normal we have a relationship now and I don't see that changing. The dealers I am refering to are Cat, Komatsu, John Deere.
I had a call from a salesman at a certain dealership who had seen my machine in his area last year. I told him that it was funny he should call now when nobody could be bothered to return my calls when I was looking for a used excavator a few months back. :beatsme What goes around comes around