Noble Equipment Dealership of the Year 2023

After so many years at a large dealership, Gellner was attracted to Noble Equipment because, in his own words, it made working at a dealership “sound fun again.” Having risen through the ranks at Cervus and spending most of his time in its corporate environment, he felt Noble Equipment was the right size to allow him to get back in the field with customers. Bradley agrees and returned to the dealership world for similar reasons.

“Leaving Cervus Equipment gave me a chance to pause, reflect and really decide where it is that I wanted to go from that point,” Bradley says. “I had opportunities to go with other larger dealers. But I was looking to get back to more of a 3-5 store operation. I think that’s the sweet spot in the industry.”

Bradley, who’s been in dealership management for about 20 years, learned to appreciate the dual manager model while heading up Cervus’ Australia and New Zealand business for 9 years, which helped drive revenue and market growth as well as support the aftermarket business. 

“I initially went down there in a business development role, and then that evolved to managing director for Australia & New Zealand,” Bradley says. “I had dual general managers for New Zealand and dual general managers for Australia. I found it to be very effective because when it came to parts and service support or customer, a fixed-asset issue, the branch managers knew who to go to, and they could give that focus and attention to that part of the business. The general sales manager generally had the local branch sales managers reporting to them, and then they would really be driving revenue, market growth, asset turns — all those things.”

In his experience, he says, dealerships with one general manager tend to see that manager “lean” toward one particular department, usually whatever area they grew up in. He believes that his and Gellner’s different “leans” help balance out their efficiency. 

Implementing Structure

Part of what Gellner and Bradley bring to the table is a “big dealer” mentality in a smaller dealership environment. This gives them the best of both worlds — the financial and operational practices that made Cervus successful but with the customer interaction and “boots-on-the-ground” mentality that Noble Equipment is known for. After assessing the full state of the business when they first joined in 2021, they determined 55 projects they wanted to complete at Noble Equipment. They say that now in 2023, they’re almost done.

“The business has reached that awkward teenage stage where we grew more quickly than the brain could process it,” Gellner says. “When you’re a smaller dealer, you can get by without a lot of processes, and I don’t want to get so corporate that you’ve got a process for everything.”

Source: Noble Equipment Ltd.

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Specifically, they introduced a formal budgeting process 2 years ago, which forced leadership to take a hard look at the dealership’s present condition and future goals.

“We’d never really budgeted before, but we sat down and asked, ‘What have we done? What do we think we’re going to do next year?’” he says. “The budgeting process is not a big, onerous task. We do it in about 2-3 days, maybe one day per store. But it forces you to evaluate the business. What do we think is going to happen next year based on growth trajectories, based on equipment availability?”

Another process they’ve introduced is an annual leadership meeting with a facilitator to determine the dealership’s 1-, 3- and 5-year plans. They hold these annual meetings offsite to avoid distractions and usually in scenic locations to refresh their minds, with the goal of achieving a unified vision for the company’s trajectory.

“Our year-end is November, so we meet in August,” says Gellner. “Then we do our budgeting in October because by then we can see what the year is looking like, what the pre-orders are looking like. Then we can get our budgets done for November. We bring in the department managers in December and go through it.”

One of leadership’s concerns is growing too fast because, as Gellner puts it, this can cause dropped balls.

“We talk a lot about glass balls and rubber balls,” he says. “When you grow too quickly, you want to make sure you’re dropping the rubber ones that aren’t going to break. The glass ones — the customer experience ones — we want to make sure we don’t drop those.”

Noble Equipment Majority Owner Hans Van Den Bosch brought several European equipment brands to the dealership’s lot, including Spanish bale handling equipment manufacturer Arcusin and Dutch dump wagon manufacturer Jako. Photo by: Ben Thorpe

Farmer Mentality in Ownership

Noble Equipment’s majority owner, with 70% of the business, is Hans Van Den Bosch, a Dutch dairy farmer who relocated to Canada in 1993. In 2005, he split off from his Canadian dairy farm and began a broiler operation. He also began his own earthmoving business on the side, and he still operates both today. Van Den Bosch entered Noble Equipment in 2015 after being approached by the founder, Harry Vandenberg, to see if he was interested in acquiring the business. He bought out Vandenberg’s share of the business, leaving 20% in the hands of Vandenberg’s son, Ryan Vandenberg, and 10% with his nephew, Darren Vandenberg. Van Den Bosch plays an active role in the dealership’s operations, often driving parts between locations or lending his own equipment to customers as a temporary machine when they have a breakdown. He says he brings a farmer perspective to the dealership, now working on “both sides of the counter.”

Bradley says that spending 30 years in the John Deere world has helped him appreciate the value of management training and dealer development. He says he can’t count the number of courses and trainings he received during his time working at Deere dealerships.

“When I came here, I combined that development mentality with my experience. I’m from Central Alberta, so I know a lot of the customers and the type of business that’s happening. I had to learn the products, and I had to do a little bit of blood transfusion on understanding our value proposition or what we’re trying to sell.”

Implementing Key Account Managers in Sales

One of Bradley’s ongoing projects is implementing a key account management system, in which one sales rep is devoted to working with only certain accounts and adding an advisory element to his interactions with them. This is another format he learned from his time at larger Deere dealership groups. 

“We took our senior salespeople, gave them specific key accounts, and then we put in a territory salesperson, so the two of them were on the same piece of dirt,” says Bradley. “What I’ve found over time is most salespeople, once they’re in that territory for 4-5 years, they have their trapline of accounts, and they don’t have the capacity or the time to check on the other accounts or competitive accounts. So you have dual coverage — an ag salesperson who’s really handling the transactional, traditional part of the business and a key account manager who is looking after your large-scale, older, well-established accounts, that they really don’t want the rookie salesperson looking after.”

An added benefit to implementing this system is an improved succession strategy, whereby the territory salespeople can step in if a key account manager leaves, since they would already have the basic knowledge of their territory. 

“That was the part I never liked about territory structures because if someone leaves, you’re usually putting a brand-new person into that territory who is either an ex technician, farmer or a salesperson from another industry, and they have to learn the systems, the products — everything,” he says.

A ‘Holistic’ Sales Approach

Bradley wants to see more dealers take a holistic approach to their larger accounts and weigh the wishes of their OEM — roll equipment, gain market share — against what is truly best for the customer, even if that means the customers keep a piece of equipment for a few more years.

“You’ve got to be always thinking about time — how you save that customer time and money, how you make them more productive, more efficient. You’ve got to be thinking long game, not the short game, with the large producers. Yet you still have to have a sales force that, when someone calls about a 10-year-old piece of equipment, you’ve got to be able to drop everything, chase that opportunity and translate it into cash so you can keep everything in balance.”

When he started at Noble Equipment, Bradley saw it as a dealer with key accounts in its southern market and transactional customers in its northern market but no real definition of what its business really was. 

“It was something that I initially identified and thought, ‘That’s not a sustainable model. We need to target and attract the larger accounts, start to be their solution, start to come with valid business reasons,’” he says. 

Bradley is also aiming to build out the dealership’s commercial Krone presence in its northern market, grow its harvester, mower and large square baler business and improve its tractor business with the Deutz-Fahr line. Having a strong tractor business can help balance against the seasonality of the company’s core hay and forage business, he says.

Bradley notably does not implement a traditional CRM at Noble Equipment, preferring to use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. He’s not found a lot of success using a full CRM system, saying he’s not a believer in spending a lot of time with its administrative side, which in his experience, can turn a high-performance salesperson into a mediocre one.

“It’s executing on the strategy that there still must be an upward trend of growth, with that responsibility that you can support what you sell,” he says. “You’ve got to keep bringing the sales staff back to, ‘Are you on the farm? How many people did you see face to face?’ I’m very big on demonstrations, and I’m really big on the sales guys being the product experts. There’s no way that you can be a product expert if you’re not out running the equipment yourself. The hours in the seat takes a lot of effort, but that’s what we’re here to do.” 

Bradley adds that Noble has a fleet of support demo units that it holds to ensure it has machines available to support a customer if their unit goes down for an unacceptable amount of time or at an inopportune time.

Facing-Off with Oilfields for Techs

Most dealers must address outside businesses trying to poach technicians. Noble Equipment is up against a dominant competitor, however: the Alberta oilfields. Gellner says the oilfields always take a particular interest in dealership techs, who they recognize as hard-working and able to think on their feet.

“The oilfield has really impacted us because we’re so close to it, and it goes through cycles,” Gellner says. “When they’re on an up-cycle, they go on a hiring binge and just crank up the wages until they get enough people to do what they need. But on the flip side, as soon as it goes through that cycle, they lay them all off. A lot of our employees have experienced the oilfield and are tired of that cyclicality.”

Technician Henk Vanderveen works on a forage harvester at the Nobleford, Alta., store. Noble Equipment has been investing in its tech retention to compete with nearby oil field wages. Photo by: Ben Thorpe

To stave off the hiring wave cycles, Noble Equipment has put more effort into attracting and maintaining technicians. This means raising its shop rate to pay for more competitive wages, sponsoring apprentices at a nearby college’s technician program and distributing tool allowances to help new techs fill out their toolboxes. One of the biggest tools, however, is competing with culture.

“There’s a weekly team meeting so techs know what’s going on in their department, there’s a monthly store meeting, and we try to do a monthly luncheon where the senior management team answer questions,” Gellner says. “Twice a year we do a formal all-employee meeting where we recognize long-time service employees, but we also do a recap of the last 6 months and a preview of the next 6 months. We want our employees to know what’s happening with Noble Equipment.”

Saving Steps in the Parts Department

Noble Equipment recently moved its Olds, Alta., location down the street, doubling the total square footage to 16,000. A big part of the move was to focus on parts, where the attitudes center more on having the right parts instead of having the right parts metrics.

General Manager Sheldon Gellner believes saving steps is the key to improving parts department efficiency. Photo by: Ben Thorpe

“Our owners are more concerned with having the right parts on the shelf than what our metrics are,” he says. “We actually overstock. One of the challenges we have is most of the OEMs we represent don’t have a Western Canadian parts depot. That can mean a longer delay for our customers. We want to mitigate that by having the right parts on the shelf.”

The new parts department also features Noble Equipment’s new logo, which Gellner says is based on the Krone logo, a nod to the dealership’s origins as a Krone dealer. One design element they’ve added is removing one 6-foot-tall section of shelves in the middle of some rows to allow staff to slip between the aisles faster, an idea Gellner got from a friend who’d worked at a local Deere dealer with 30 years of parts management experience. 

“He recently retired, and I’ve been friends with him since 1995,” says Gellner. “I brought him in on a contract basis to say, ‘This is our design, what do you think?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, this is good. Let’s tweak this, let’s try this.” He looked at everything from the numbering system to layout to efficiency of the parts department.” They also upgraded the height of the shelves to 12 feet to make more use of the vertical space.

Noble Equipment has created small passages between its parts shelves for staff to get between aisles quickly Photo by: Ben Thorpe

The enemy to beat is steps, says Gellner. The less time parts employees spend gathering parts, the more customers they can help. 

“We’re at $148 an hour for our labor rate, and we’re toward the lower end,” Gellner says. “A lot of our competitors are $175-$200. At $150 an hour, every minute you can save that you’re not getting parts for the shop, somebody’s paying that $2.50.” 

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