said I’ll take 20. They flew up from Texas and signed us up.”
Selling the Brand
Dave and Carla Siemens say they’ve succeeded at serving the rural lifestyle mar- ket because they were tractor customers before they became tractor dealers.
story, but Siemens looks at it more pragmatically. “They say you can’t compete with the guy who is getting into or going out of business,” he says. “When we started out, we would deliv- er free to anywhere in California. I was the guy who was pretty hard to com- pete with.”
If there was any good fortune involved, it was that Siemens’ saw the emerging market for compact trac- tors around his home in Red Bluff, some 200 miles north of the affluent Bay Area of San Francisco, at about the same he was tiring of corporate life. He had a successful 17-year career in the insurance business before he decided to become a tractor man. He had quickly worked his way to a claim manager’s position and his sal- ary was based on a Bay Area pay scale, which is to say he was doing pretty well. Eventually, he’d had enough with the continual reorganizations of corpo- rate America. One day, his wife, Carla, said, “If you don’t like your job, why don’t you just quit?”
Earlier, he had purchased his first gray market tractor to maintain the 3-acre property where he and Carla lived. ‘I just wanted a tractor to mow the grass and put in some gravel. I only used it about 50 hours a year. It was pretty typical of why people buy those kinds of tractors.”
Then he decided to sell it to make some money on it. He did it again a few more times over the next few years. While still working at his insurance job, Siemens met someone who was selling a container of eight Yanmar tractors in Redding, Calif. “They were
gray market tractors and he didn’t know how to work on them or where to get parts.” Siemens ended up buying seven of them and started selling them out of his barn.
“I used to fix up cars and I was a lit- tle bit mechanical. And my dad used to have a car dealership, so I had a little sales experience,” Siemens explains. After making a “little money” sell- ing the tractors, Siemens gave his boss a 3-month notice and bought 20 more tractors, 20 loaders and box scrapers and began to set up his busi- ness. “The day I quit my job, I had an inventory ready to sell. I also said I would never hire an employee. I would do it myself.”
On the weekends and evenings, he did “tractor work” for people. At the time, the operation consisted only of a house phone and a bedroom desk. Six months later, with his business growing rapidly, Siemens hired his first employee and sales doubled. But as his sales grew, the lack of a significant quantity of good used tractors became apparent. This and the issues with gray market equipment led Dave’s Tractor to take on Branson Tractors. “We sold quite a few Bransons and still do, but they were heavier and big- ger than what many of our custom- ers were looking for. At the time, they didn’t have the smaller models to com- pete with the Kubotas,” says Siemens. In 2003 we found out that Mahindra had contracted with Mitsubishi to build their 15 series, 18-32 hp). We looked at them and I called Mahindra and said I’d like to be a dealer. They said, ‘you’ll have to order five’ and I
According to Siemens, the other dealers in the area were still target- ing the big operators. “They kind of missed the curve on that one. So it gave me a chance to move a bunch of tractors when nobody else was competing.” But it wasn’t like he was selling the green or blue tractors that most people, even the rural lifestylers, would recognize.
To get its name out, the dealership began sponsoring local events like bar- rel racing for horse owners. “If they needed a tractor and an arena grader, we’d get a tractor out there and let them use it. If there was a go-kart race in town, we put our logo on a car. If there was a rodeo, we sent a tractor down there.
“People started saying, ‘You’re here to stay. You’re part of the community.’ It didn’t cost much to let someone use a tractor for 10 hours.”
While the dealership was quickly accepted in the community, Siemens says that he’s still fighting the “Indian” image of the Mahindra tractors. “Nearly every customer asks, ‘Where were these tractors built?’ So we’re still bat- tling this even though Mahindra’s now, by some ways of counting, the third largest tractor-maker in the world. It’s the biggest minor brand in the U.S., but it’s still not John Deere by a long shot. Answering that question is something we’ve learned to do.”
How do they do it? “We just say, ‘We’ll be glad to tell you where they are built, but you also have to ask the other dealers — whether it’s John Deere, New Holland or Massey Ferguson — where theirs are built.’” Siemens says it’s important to get the customer to understand that, for the most part, all these compact trac- tors are built overseas without sound- ing defensive.
“We’re finally getting to the point, where we sell tractors built by Mitsubishi in Japan, and not Chinese tractors. There are 350 tractors on our lot right now (Dave’s Tractor became
24 RURAL LIFESTYLE DEALER DEALERSHIP OF THE YEAR SPECIAL REPORT JUNE 2013
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