A John Deere equipment and service store that opened in Rock Hill, SC, in March was the latest fruit of a 76-year-old business venture built on partnerships.
Partnering is the key to working relationships inside JRE Holdings Inc., which does business as James River Equipment. Partnering also comes close to describing the company’s relationships with its customers.
“We try to make everyone in the company feel like they are owners and running the company themselves,” said Mark Romer, great-grandson of the founder of the John Deere equipment enterprise over which he presides. He added that “pushing all the decisions down to the front line keeps everyone thinking about how to grow the business.”
The better business decisions, he said, “are made by people who are closest to the customer.”
Romer speaks from the home office in Ashland, VA, a Richmond suburb not far from the James River from which the company draws its name. But the roots of the company extend way out west to Holly, CO, where Rudolph Romer opened a dealership in 1926.
Holly is a small town on the southeastern edge of Colorado, an area pretty much indistinguishable from the southwestern edge of Kansas just 10 mi. away. Think Dodge City, not Denver. It is a region of dryland farming and ranching and, about the time Romer started his business, dust bowls.
Somehow the equipment sales and service enterprise survived both The Great Depression and the usual pains of starting a business. In the second half of the century, the company went on to spawn successful new enterprises halfway across the country.
That happened 25 years ago when Romer’s father and uncle looked east at the invitation of John Deere executives. The dealerships they launched then in Virginia now have a significant market presence in North Carolina as well and are entering South Carolina.
James River Equipment Inc. was begun in 1977 as a John Deere construction and forestry equipment dealer. It now offers pretty much everything Deere builds.
“We sell the full line,” said Romer. “We’re spread very evenly across the product line.” Approximately 80 percent of equipment sales are for use in construction.
Yet the inventory of equipment varies from store to store as determined by customer demand. Some of Virginia’s 11 stores stock only John Deere agricultural equipment; others have only construction equipment, including non-Deere offerings like Sakai compaction equipment, Interstate trailers and Bobcat skid steer loaders. A couple of the stores primarily are parts centers.
The Virginia offices include Ashland, Chester, Richmond, Burkeville, Danville, South Hill, Fredericksburg, Fishersville, Roanoke, Manassas and Winchester.
Individual inventories are determined at the store level in North Carolina, too. “We try to make decisions that make sense locally,” said Terry Thomas, general manager of the James River Equipment store in Charlotte, NC. He echoed Romer’s theme about partners and front-line decision making.
“How we do business in one area might not be the same as in another area. Each store has a lot of ability to make decisions,” he said.
The 32-year-old Thomas and Ronnie Rowe, the general manager of the James River Equipment store in Greensboro, are leading partners in the firm’s North Carolina operations.
The other two North Carolina stores are located in Mt. Gilead and North Wilkesboro. All the stores are in the central and western parts of the state.
JRE Holdings Inc. has approximately 330 employees and 67 of them are scattered among its North Carolina stores. Some are in between. The “in-betweeners” are mechanics stationed with their field service trucks in communities away from dealerships.
“We try to put mechanics close to the customers,” explained Thomas. The company operates 14 service vehicles in North Carolina.
The company’s South Carolina venture came about in November 2000 when JRE bought Bestracs, a John Deere heavy equipment dealership in Rock Hill.
But most may not have noticed. Though the company “made a few changes to serve customers better,” said Thomas, it kept the Bestracs name on the store for all of 2001.
Now, he added, the company has decided to “change the name to tie it to the good customer following in Virginia.” So in March, the Rock Hill company store officially opened at 380 Anderson Road Highway in a 12,000-sq.-ft. (1,080 sq m) facility with nine drive-through service bays.
It operates as a combination construction and agriculture equipment dealership, whereas the Charlotte store is a construction equipment dealer only — sales, rental, parts and service.
The new facility actually is just a few miles into South Carolina, south of Charlotte. The decision to invest in a store essentially on the other side of the city is driven by the company impulse to better serve its customer base.
“We are always looking for opportunities for new business,” explained Thomas, who began managing the Charlotte store in January 2001. “We try to put ourselves close to customers. If we see opportunities to serve them better, we’ll do it.”
How, then, do you measure the success of a company that focuses on empowering its employees and serving its customers? The bottom line is a good place to start looking for the answer.
“We have grown this business,” said Romer, “to a group of dealerships that has a business volume of $200 million a year.”
Another measure of success might be an award given by John Deere to dealers: The Partners in Excellence Award, which is based on market share, profitability and product support. JRE won it four years running.
More significantly, only two other firms in the country won it for four consecutive years, and one of them is the group of Colorado heavy equipment dealers that are still part of the Romer operation, the Colorado Machinery group.
In other words, two out of three top winners in the country are affiliated companies. “You have to take care of customers to win that award,” Romer said of both operations.
Colorado Machinery has stores in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Ft. Collins. The leading partner there is Keith Olson, who has run the Colorado Springs dealership for 30 years.
The JRE Holdings/Colorado Machinery companies have prospered by placing a premium on individual judgment and by building customer loyalty. But good decision making probably has something to do with it, as well.
Romer’s father, Roy Romer, bought out his father’s share of the John Deere agriculture equipment business in 1962. He then expanded the company into Deere’s construction line of equipment.
It was an insightful decision and eventually led to Deere inviting the company to open construction dealerships in faraway Virginia. Roy Romer, incidentally, went back into state political activity a few years later. He rose through state office ranks until he was elected governor of Colorado in 1986, the first of three terms in that office.
An equally fortunate event for the company occurred in 1980 when the governor’s son, Mark, completed law school at Yale University and returned to the Virginia John Deere dealerships to help out for, say, six months.
After three years, he decided he liked it enough to stay. He married a Virginia woman, Donna Crawford, never practiced law and along with 10 key partners has been instrumental in building the company.
“We just have had a lot of success in bringing on board good partners,” is how Mark Romer sees the company’s success. “We have a very good team of people. The success of this business is not about iron, or about facilities. It’s about people.”
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