Photo courtesy of Kuhn Equipment
Mike Schulz (L), owner and president, and Mike Bernard, vice president, both of Kuhn Equipment.
As Kuhn Equipment marks its 50th anniversary in 2024 as a supplier of used recycling, demolition and construction machines, it is worth noting that the company strategically evolved to find its perfect niche within the marketplace.
Indeed, for more than half of its existence, the Summerville, S.C., dealership, located just outside Charleston, was almost strictly a business geared toward selling used earthmoving equipment such as scrapers and motor graders, according to Mike Schulz, Kuhn Equipment's current owner and president.
Company founder Dallas Kuhn, Schulz's stepfather, first established the company from his home in Marietta, Ga., in 1974.
Photo courtesy of Kuhn Equipment
Following his graduation from Texas A&M University, Kuhn concentrated on becoming experienced in the business. His first stop was Peoria, Ill., where he took a job in the industrial marketing department at Caterpillar's corporate headquarters, a position that entailed working directly with Cat's motorized scraper division.
"He eventually left Cat corporate and went to work at a dealership in Kansas City as a used equipment guy," said Schulz. "From there, he made his way down to Atlanta where he worked for Semac Construction Equipment, one of the first truly independent used equipment distributors to begin in that city. He gained a lot of experience down there and made good contacts, which led him to open his own company in Kuhn Equipment."
Dallas Kuhn worked out of his home for the first half of Kuhn Equipment's existence — first in Georgia, and then in the early '90s in Charleston. Schulz, who has worked at the company since 1995, was Kuhn's first employee.
In 2001, Kuhn built a new facility in Summerville to expand into the Charleston rental market.
Now, Schulz runs Kuhn Equipment's day-to-day operations with a specific focus on equipment procurement and sales, while his business partner, Mike Bernard, works to expand the dealership's customer base and provide top-flight equipment at competitive prices to its customers.
"Mike and I work well together," Schulz said. "My background is in marketing and sales, while Mike, who has an accounting degree, also does a lot of the sales and is the numbers guy. He and Amber Driggers handle that side of the business."
Kuhn Equipment sells to customers nationwide, while its service technicians serve the two Carolinas and Georgia.
"Businesses from across the country routinely come to Kuhn's yard in South Carolina to purchase equipment," according to Schulz. "That includes people from as far away as Alaska. Customers have come to understand that we represent a value in quality used equipment."
Kuhn Markets Earthmovers, Recycling, Demolition Products
When Kuhn Equipment moved from Georgia to its Summerville location almost 23 years ago, the dealership was both prosperous and content in selling and renting previously-owned heavy machines, Schulz said.
Since then, the company decided to expand into selling and renting new attachments and used and refurbished recycling and demolition products, as well.
Photo courtesy of Kuhn Equipment
That led Kuhn to explore its options.
"We were doing a lot of reciprocal business at the time, which we still do with a partner company in Germany, and when I would have meetings with them, they would say, ‘You must get into recycling; it is the future,'" Schulz said. "They said there was always going to be a need and it was only going to grow. They kept driving that point home, but I said, ‘Nah, we like doing the bulldozers and the motor graders — that equipment is kind of what we do.'"
As time went on, though, he began to realize the truth of what his European colleagues were saying, and that the market was no longer quite as driven by used earthmovers anymore.
Kuhn then began transforming its business model toward used recycling and demolition equipment, along with new attachment sales, according to Schulz.
"As we saw there were legs to the recycling equipment industry, we started making better contacts in that business and developing supply-chain partnerships with reliable companies that wanted us as colleagues. That smoothed the transition to where we are now."
As proof of its evolution, Kuhn primarily offered new attachments for recycling and demolition work but has since broadened its inventory to include used full-size machines like wheel and track material handlers, along with high-reach and scrap-processing excavators from makers such as Komatsu, Volvo, John Deere, Kobelco, Cat and Hitachi.
Demolition Contractors Often Turn to Kuhn
Many of Kuhn's excavators have been used on demolition jobs throughout the Southeast over the years, among them the removal of an old Clemson University dormitory to make room for additional parking, a challenging demo of a reinforced concrete canal bridge in Port Canaveral, Fla., and the razing of an old mill building in Georgia.
Referring to the latter project, Schulz said that more than 15 years ago, Kuhn supplied an ultra-high-reach demolition unit (UHD) to a contractor working to take down a decades-old structure along the Savannah River in Augusta, Ga. The five-story building had served for many years as a candy factory before plans were made to completely demolish it to make way for a new library at the site.
"We put one machine there that did the actual high reach and dropped debris onto the ground, along with another nearby to do the finish up work as far as processing the materials," Schulz said. "I just remember that all the heavy manufacturing equipment was still in there, supported by 20-inch-thick concrete floors laced with rebar."
As a result, he said the high-reach excavator required "a pretty aggressive muncher/processor to break them simply because they weren't your standard structural floors."
The contractor on that job used a Komatsu PC450 UHD with a Genesis Demo Pro attachment. Once the material was on the ground, a Komatsu PC300 equipped with a LaBounty UP50 concrete pulverizer came in and broke the building debris into manageable pieces.
Top Material Handlers, Attachments Available at Kuhn
Among Kuhn's leading manufacturers of material handlers and new attachments are SENNEBOGEN, Cat, Fuchs and Liebherr, a group which Schulz refers to as the dealership's "big four" brands.
"We are heavy into material handlers for sorting and processing mostly metals, but also paper and plastics," he said. "You can break it down into two areas: one, the material handler itself, which is used for waste and scrap sorting into different piles; and two, putting a scrap shooter on the boom of the excavator for use in processing the materials. To sell that material to the mill and get the most money, companies must first process it to a size. The way to do that is to cut it up with big hydraulic shears on the end of the boom."
Photo courtesy of Kuhn Equipment
Other attachment lines available through Kuhn include Genesis, a key producer of shears and buckets for demolition excavators made by the well-known OEMs; and LEFORT, a Belgian maker of scrap metal recycling equipment, including balers, shears and shredders.
"We are the exclusive LEFORT stationary shear dealer for Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, meaning we cover this territory for sales, doing delivery setups, commissioning, and after sales parts and service support," Schulz said. "We have a sales associate who is our LEFORT representative and is based in the Greenville, S.C., area.
"LEFORT's shears work very simply," he added. "A recycling company will take all its scrap and throw it into what looks like a big, open-top container that has large blades within that chop up the material to produce a product that can be sold to a mill."
Schulz is proud of Kuhn Equipment's top-notch parts department, which, he said, can quickly source components from most major equipment manufacturers. The dealership's large in-house inventory of common attachments is also prized by its customers.
"We have a strong shop with six service bays where we do attachment rebuilds, generator set installations, shear package conversions and put in OilQuick coupler systems," he said, while adding that Kuhn also runs two outside service trucks.
Over the years, the company's service center for equipment and attachments has grown to become an extremely popular feature among both its customers and machine suppliers.
For instance, Kuhn serves as an authorized service provider for SENNEBOGEN's line of mobile and stationary material handlers; its mechanics were trained by SENNEBOGEN, as well — two facts that Schulz said enhances the dealership's reputation and standing in the marketplace.
"Additionally, we are an authorized Genesis rebuild center," he added. "We sell factory-fresh attachments, and our shop is equipped to completely refurbish most brands of attachments — especially shears and demolition processors."
As an example of the rebuild center's work, Schulz said, "We will take a grapple and reseal it, depending on the level of machine that the contractor is using. Kuhn always has new grapples in stock, but sometimes people don't want to spend $35,000, choosing instead to go with one that is used — but not used up — and pay half the cost of a new attachment. We try to offer options for everyone and every budget, within reason."
Photo courtesy of Kuhn Equipment
Neither Genesis nor LEFORT do much of their own service work in the Georgia-Carolinas region. As a result, their customers are often referred to Kuhn for repairs. Within the dealership's shop facility, its technicians can maintain and fix high-wear shear attachments that slice through metal but can become dull due to abrasiveness.
"When they are brought in to us, we've got people that are trained by Genesis to restore the shears back to a new condition," said Schulz. "They also do welding buildup, reseal the hydraulic components, and put them back in frontline condition. We do the same with LEFORT and honor its warranties in our territory."
He believes that the endorsement of Kuhn's service center by well-regarded manufacturers like SENNEBOGEN, Genesis, LEFORT and others is key to attracting contractors and customers to the Charleston-area company.
"It definitely enhances our reputation and our standing in the market. Plus, I would like to think that they know that the Kuhn service center gives them timely service and work done right, which are our objectives." CEG
Eric Olson
A writer and contributing editor for CEG since 2008, Eric Olson has worked in the business for more than 40 years.
Olson grew up in the small town of Lenoir, NC in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he began covering sports for the local newspaper at age 18. He continued to do that for several other dailies in the area while in college at Appalachian State University. Following his graduation, he moved on to gain experience at two other publications before becoming a real estate and special features writer and editor at the Winston-Salem Journal for 10 years. Since 1999 he has worked as a corporate media liaison and freelance writer, in addition to his time at CEG.
He and his wife, Tara, have been married for 33 years and are the parents of two grown and successful daughters. His hobbies include collecting history books, watching his beloved Green Bay Packers and caring for his three dogs and one cat.
Read more from Eric Olson here.
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