Service makes success
What makes a successful machinery dealership? The key factors would have to include the right location, the right product and the right people, providing the best possible customer service. Experience and product knowledge also count for a lot, and these are certainly in plentiful supply at Burdens Golf & Turf of Wokingham in Berkshire
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he company provides a complete range of domestic and professional groundcare equipment - “everything
from a pair of secateurs to a 200hp tractor,” as area sales manager Ray Bennett puts it (and more about him later) - to a wide variety of customers, from golf courses, professional football clubs and other sports venues through to home and estate owners, local authorities and councils, hotels, holiday parks and even airports.
In addition to its main John Deere franchise, the business sells and supports equipment from fifteen other manufacturers, including Charterhouse, Dennis, Gambetti, Gianni Ferrari, GreenTek, Major, McConnel, Scag, Stihl, Trilo, Trimax, Tru-Turf, Turfmech, Wessex and Yamaha. But, all this came from very small beginnings, in a small wooden shed on the edge of a garden centre in Woking.
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Golf & Turf was set up there, in September 1987, by directors Tom Scanlon and Gordon ‘Chalky’ White and managing director Bill Fisher, when John Deere - who had only established its new groundcare division for the UK and Ireland the year before - appointed them as the company’s first dedicated groundcare dealer in the south of the country, including the whole of London. Before that, all three had worked together as salesmen and/or demonstrators for Lely’s agricultural equipment business, which included the famous Roterra cultivator, Iseki compact tractors imported from Japan, and farm sprayers. Tom Scanlon tested, demonstrated and sold the range throughout the UK during his time with Lely’s sprayer division. After Lely started to market the US- made Beaver Equipment range of trailed hydraulic five-gang mowers, the ‘gang of
three’ were approached by Beaver, in 1985, to set up a dedicated dealer network in the UK - Tom Scanlon covering the north of England and Scotland, Gordon White the Midlands and East Anglia, and Bill Fisher the south and south-west of England. Tom Scanlon takes up the story: “We felt that the Beaver mower, which was one of the first of its type on the market, just wasn’t getting a fair crack of the whip at Lely. They didn’t see its main potential in the groundcare market, so we jumped at the chance to set up a dealer network.” “We spent the next two years working fifteen hours a day, five days a week, driving 50,000 miles a year with a trailer and a mower. It was a struggle. The product was new, no-one had heard of it, and Ransomes was really the only game in town at that time. It had a range of wheel driven gang mowers pulled by 60
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