Equipment’s turnaround actually began more than a decade ago, when owner Hugh Barr sold the dealership to New Holland.
According to the Kings, PT&E had been a thriving, service-oriented deal- ership in the Pensacola area, but after the sale it was classified as a “dealer development store” that, in theory, would give a successful store man- ager an opportunity to buy into the business over time.
In the late 1990s, an interim man- ager at PT&E selected a new location and business focus that, according to the Kings, set the dealership on a course for failure.
“Being a customer all those years, I saw it go from good to bad,” says Todd, who’d been buying equipment from PT&E since 1994. “You could tell by looking at it from the outside.” The decision to buy a dealership wasn’t taken lightly by the Kings. They spent months going back and forth with New Holland over the details, but they felt the customer base in northwest Florida was still there, and some longtime employees would be staying on, making the tran- sition easier.
Another positive was that the Kings had no history in the world of ag equipment retail except their expe- riences as customers, which would
What The Judges Had to Say
“This company had a very good return on assets at 14%, in a year (2009) where it was tough to make money. Their market share is nearly 30% and they had a fantas- tic absorption rate of 118%. They’ve had a positive growth since 2009 in terms of total revenue, and built a new facility and moved in last year. During the relocation they went forward with a name change to Kingline Equipment to afford the dealer- ship new opportunities.”
become one of their greatest assets. Once the purchase was made, the
Kings say they had to reverse a series of critical marketing and management errors made by previous owners, including: • A store location far removed from vehicle, foot traffic and existing customers
• Highly effective employees placed in unfamiliar jobs
• An overly selective, unmotivated service department
• Too little inventory on the lot • No hours on Saturdays • Little money spent on marketing • No web site Todd and Summer then embarked on a 5-year plan to bring the dealer- ship back.
New Name, New Building, New Location. Perhaps the biggest mis- take, the Kings say, came in 1999 with the relocation of PT&E 12 miles north from their high-traffic post in Pensacola.
The move was made to serve
more agricultural customers, but the location was north of a major traf- fic artery, State Highway 112, that brings Alabama residents south into the Pensacola area for shopping and other activities. Foot and vehicular traffic to the dealership was negative- ly affected.
“You’ve got to know where your niche is,” Todd says. “To go up there and fight John Deere over a little bit of ag business, you’d go broke trying to do it. I think they thought they’d move up there and all the customers would follow them. But they found out 15-20 miles makes a difference to people.”
The Kings decided to build a new, 10,000-square-foot dealership on Highway 29 in Cantonment, Fla. — just north of Pensacola — that they would own and control, and it would be closer to the customers Kingline Equipment planned to regain. “What made the decision easy is that we knew it had to be done,” Todd says. “We could wait 10 years for the
The showroom inside Kingline Equipment’s new building (l), is brightly lit and welcoming. The building’s tighter footprint lets customers see more equipment with a lot less walking around than the previous location.
DEALERSHIP OF THE YEAR SPECIAL REPORT JUNE 2013 RURAL LIFESTYLE DEALER 13
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