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In this episode of the Farm Equipment podcast is brought to you by Machinery Scope, Managing Editor Christine Book sits down with Bill Hartzler, co-owner of Lowe & Young. Lowe & Young is the 2025 Dealership of the Year in the small operation category. Bill shares the history of Lowe & Young, the company's defining moments and what challenges they face when covering such a large geographic area.

The discussion continues with co-owner Jason Steiner joining the conversation to share his thoughts on winning the Dealership of the Year award and the importance of a good team.

     
   

   

     
   

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Full Transcript

Hi, I am Kim Schmidt, Executive Editor of Farm Equipment. Welcome to Farm Equipment's Podcast. In this episode, our managing editor, Christine Book, sits down with Bill Hartzler, co-owner of Lowe & Young. Lowe & Young is the 2025 Dealership of the Year in the small operation category. This episode of the Farm Equipment Podcast is brought to you by Machinery Scope. Let's jump in as Christine and Bill talk, the history of the dealership and how Lowe & Young measures its success.

Tell us about the dealership's origin story, what the current customer profile looks like and whose equipment you're selling.

Yeah, so typically Lowe & Young in the past has sold to employees that work here. That's one of the requirements is that the owner group, if you retire, you sell your shares. So thankfully right now we have three younger shareholders that are in the process of buying in and that seems to be working well. Two shareholders that have been here for a long time, 46, 47 years have retired now and we're in the process of buying them out.

How about next to the customer profile? Basically how to describe your farm customers, what kind of crops are they growing, and then what about the other customers, your hobby farmers, your construction, utilities, municipalities? Speak a little bit to the different audiences, customer audience you have.

We have a pretty good mix. We have some cash crop, have some beef, have some chicken, pig farmers, different mix there, a little bit of landscapers. We sell skid steers to those folks, but primarily the dairy farmer is who we focus on.

And you want to give a short recap of who you carry and your brands and your a short lines, and the rest is an overview of what you offer the customers?

As far as our brand names, our big three of course are AGCO, new Holland and Krone, and a lot of smaller sidelines too that we carry Kinsey, Great Plains, Woods, but the big ones are Krone and New Holland and AGCO.

So you covered the beginning of the dealership. How about any defining moments in the company's history, two or three that stand out as key achievements or major milestones?

I think probably the biggest thing for us that really put us on the map was in 2013 we built a 12,000 square foot shop and we were just out of space, so that was a really good move. Maybe another thing that made a big difference for us was including some of the younger, when I say younger, now, I'm one of the older guys, but including some of the younger shareholders, getting them to buy in and the younger people seem to bring energy and fresh ideas. So that's been a good thing for us to bring in people. And right now, Jason and I have three partners that are 20 years younger than us, so they bring the energy and a lot of the higher-end technology to the plate. That's been good.

What are some of the defining moments at Lowe & Young? Can you share what core principles drive the business and lessons the management team has learned along the way?

We try to run an honest organization here. All glory to God, we've had a very successful business here. But when we hire people, there are people of character, honest, hard workers, typically who we hire are farm kids, got a work ethic matter, afraid to get out of bed in the morning. If they can milk cows before before school, they can work for us. So yeah, we try to keep our culture, our culture is extremely important to us, so very, very important who we hire. We're very selective. We might interview somebody three, four, five times before we offer a position. So we're very careful about our culture.

One of the things that we probably learned a lesson on is if you're going to do something, you got to do something that you really do well and excel in it and don't try something that maybe you dabble in and it doesn't work out. I'll give you an example. So rental. We tried rental for a little bit and I thought, boy, that's the answer. We've got $12 million worth the iron sitting here on the lot. Let's start renting this equipment out. And we could tell right away we were just dabbling in it. We were not fully engaged, it wasn't our area of expertise, and there are people that are very good at that. We were not good at that. So that was kind of a lifeless. We exited that business. We do not rent equipment.

Well, can you tell us about your background with the dealership, Bill?

Yeah, so I started here when I was 18 years old. I wanted to be a mechanic, but the opening they had was at the parts counter and I enjoyed the parts counter. They actually let me back in the shop a little bit. I worked on a couple tractors. This would've been back in 1984. So I worked on Ferguson tractors and did an engine overhaul and a couple small projects in the back, but then the help that they needed was up at the counter and one of the owners back then told me, he said, "You just go back up to the parts counter, that's a good spot for you."

So I ended up working up at the parts counter for 27 years, and in that time, similar to Jason's story, I had an opportunity to buy stock. So after I had been here 14 years, I was able to buy stock in the company. We started buying out one of the retiring partners and that was a good move. My children were young. I didn't think the timing was right, but now that I look back, that's when I had the energy. So I think it was a good move. The other thing we had the opportunity to do is buy the real estate from the original owners. So we ended up buying that. We meaning the four younger shareholders at the time bought the real estate from Roy Lowe and Don Young.

And for me, I probably spend most of my time praying for wisdom, asking good people, smart people, surrounding yourself with people that can probably answer those questions for you. I have no college education, so I grew up in this business and when you graduate from the school of hard knocks, you make a few decisions. You think, boy, I shouldn't have done that. But then you learn from it. I've had some really great people over the years that were able to help me learn as I go. And whether it's an accountant or an attorney or a previous owner here that was willing to mentor me, that's who I could learn from and that was huge for me.

What metrics are most important to monitor in running an ag equipment business, and how often are you measuring them?

So what I try to track, years ago somebody taught me that some of these KPIs, these key performance indicators, some of the things that I look at regularly, absorption rates. So to me, I look at parts and service absorption rate monthly. I've got a spreadsheet. Calculate it. Take a look at it, keep an eye on it. It actually fluctuates. But parts and service absorption is probably the biggest one we look at. The other one we look at is cash. So cash flow, we try to look at, excuse me, where cash might be. Actually, it might be important to have cash flow even more so than profit. At times there's a machine come due and you don't want to necessarily pay a bunch of interest on it, but you also don't want to skim the margins too much. But sometimes cash flow is better than profit. So we look at cash as well.

We'll follow up with, what are the keys to the dealerships absorption rate?

One of the biggest things that helped us years ago, New Holland had a program called Growing Dealer Profitability GDP. And what they encouraged us to do is when we put parts on a work order and service on a work order, I'm talking about an internal work order, a trade-in, for example, we always put that stuff on at cost, but what they wanted us to do is put that on at full list. And that was a hard lesson for us to learn. They wanted the labor to be at full list, they wanted the parts to be at full list. And what that did is that actually helped raise our profit percentage, if that makes sense. I think that was one of the key things, along with raising our shop rates. We don't like raising our shop rates. We realized that when we're sending a bill out to a farmer, how hard they work to earn their money, and for us to charge too much on a shop rate didn't seem to make sense to us, but we know that if we're going to attract and keep good help, we have got to have a shop rate that supports it.

Can you share with us your financial achievements?

So like our total revenue, our total revenue in 2024 was 43,510,571, and it was a breakdown of whole goods were at 30,000,147, parts were 9,598,000 and service was 3,764,000. For us, the year-over-year growth, it was actually in every department. The profitability, we probably look at that more now as a three-legged stool. We probably focus more on parts and service profitability, and now we've realized too that we can earn margins in selling new machinery too and whole goods and focus on that. That way it's not just all depending on the parts and service departments, but all three of generating top line and bottom line revenue.

We'll get back to the discussion in a moment when co-owner Jason Steiner joins the conversation. But first I wanted to thank our sponsor, Machinery scope. At Machinery Scope, they believe equipment owners and dealers deserve better, better protection, better support, better value. They're a family-owned team that's farmed the land, turned the wrenches and sold iron so they get it. Machinery Scope's, extended warranty solutions are flexible, valuable, and fast. With insured coverage you can count on and service that keeps deals moving, whether you're protecting margins or equipment, they've got your back Machinery Scope, raising the bar for people who keep the industry running. Now let's get back to the conversation, Jason, joining Christine to talk about what it means to be the Dealership of the Year

To what you attribute the growth and profitability nine, 12 and 10.5% over the past three years?

We have a good team here, I guess is what it boils down to. We have a tremendous team. We've added sales guys, which it was hard for me to think that way at first because I grew up at the parts counter, but I always thought that we had too many sales guys. But I think it's proven well that if we can get a good team of salesmen out there that are promoting iron and getting a lot of units out on the ground is the machine population is what drives parts and service revenue for the next 20 years. So that's been a key thing for us.

What types of training does the dealership offer its techs?

Yeah, so what we do now, that's different than what we used to do. I think back in the eighties and nineties we would have mechanics that could work on about every brand. Now we try to have them specialize in a certain area. We've got guys that all they work on is Fendt tractors all day long. We've got guys that work on Massey Ferguson tractors all day long. We've got guys that work on hay equipment all day long. They've got guys that work on skid steers all day long and they specialize in it. They go to training our Krone guys that are working on these commercial choppers. They've got to go to factory training. When a chopper breaks down, they have got to know what they're doing. So we do a lot of training and it's specialized. It's not generalized like it used to be so much, but you definitely have to have a specialty and that seems to work for us.

What types of challenges do you face covering such a large geographic area at Lowe and young?

Yeah, I think rapid growth, like what we've experienced is out of my comfort zone. I like moving a little bit slower, crawl, walk, run, but we were kind of forced, it seemed like to grow rapidly, one of the stresses is probably the hardest thing is to find and keep good help. So that looks different now than it did 35 years ago. We used to be able to pick from six different mechanics or technicians and say, "Hey, we want this one." But now it seems like the list that we're picking from is pretty slim. And we also have to raise our wages to be able to compete in that arena too, because we're not just competing with local shops, we're competing with automotive, we're competing with manufacturing. There's a lot of jobs that people can earn a pretty good living, but we have got to get the best mechanics, the best technicians that we can find, actually in every department at our dealership parts as well and sales.

We are measured in our PAR, our primary area of responsibility. With New Holland, three counties, Wayne, Homes and Medina. But with AGCO, we were 12 counties for many, many years and now they've raised that. We have 18 counties that we cover. With Krone commercial, we're responsible for the whole entire state of Ohio. So that does create some challenges. If we're in western Ohio, fixing a chopper and a customer breaks down in Wayne County, shame on us. We've got to have repair guys here, staff that can cover our own people, the people that made our payroll for the last 30 years. So that's one of the challenges about going out too far is taking care of your local customer.

Let's talk about the outlook moving forward on emerging technology and on the steps that Lowe & Young will take to continue to meet and exceed both customer and OEM needs.

Yeah, I think for me it's hiring young people that are either fresh out of college or fresh out of a vocational school or something. Some of these younger people just shine with technology. That's the people we need to go after. We as a history at Lowe & Young here, we just basically hire smart people and people that could catch on extremely quickly, send them to training. Yeah, it's tough though. Well, we just expanded bricks and mortar here quite a bit. We doubled the size of our building in 2023, so I don't think we'll be doing a lot there right now. But I think one thing that we can do, a couple of things. One is service trucks. So we built service trucks in the past last year we built one. We're going to try to build another one this year, take a good heavy chassis and put a nice box on it, service box and welders, cranes, torches, air compressors, try to do remote service where you don't have to have bricks and mortar where we can go out and do the service on the farm.

The other thing that we're really focusing on is parts drop boxes. So Kyle can tell you more about that, but we ship a lot of parts through these boxes. We drop them off at different areas throughout the state of Ohio so that people aren't driving support to come here and pick up parts. We did put a location in Ashland in November of 24, so that is just a parts only location. We have two guys working over there that are selling parts out of that location. And as far as growth, that's probably it for my view. Yeah, right now we have 26 trucks, so it's anything from a minivan to a semi-truck and anything in between, but a lot of those are half-ton pickup trucks that the sales guys are driving. Some of them are the vans that the parts people use to go out and distribute parts to these drop boxes. And then the other thing we've got, of course, is heavy-duty service trucks that go out on the road and do the service. And we've got some pickup and delivery trucks that are rollback trucks that we can use as well to bring equipment back into service it here.

How do Lowe & Young's parts and services departments work together?

20 technicians and 10 at the parts counter here at this store in Worcester and two over in Ashland. So 12 total. But we do try to avoid the silos. You were talking about silos a little bit. Those departments have to work together because they're basically serving the same customer base. We try to work together in all the departments really, but especially those two.

Can you share how the succession plan is set up and what's being done to tap future leaders?

So we have a buy-sell agreement in place, and as a shareholder gets closer to retirement, typically what we've done in the past is pick out a younger person that looks like a future team player that we would like to have part of the owner group and that person can start buying shares from the older shareholder. Right now, with the five current owners that we have, if a shareholder was to leave today, it would probably be like a redemption of shares. The company would probably buy them out. But it is definitely a possibility that employee could buy out an existing shareholder.

Knowing community involvement is important to Lowe & Young, what ways are you involved with the community?

So myself personally, I'm involved in a mentor program at the school. It's called a huddle where you spend time with a teenager that you're mentoring basically to help there. But the other thing that I've been involved in for about 30 years, I was on an advisory committee at the Career center for Ag Mechanics, being involved in that a little bit. Then I was close to the teacher and close to the students and we could hand-select who we hired. That wasn't a bad thing, but myself personally, I get involved. I'm a Sunday school teacher, so I've been doing that for 35 years or so, and I enjoy going on mission trips and getting to know young people and actually that's helped us here because then if I recognize a talent in somebody, then hey, maybe they could come work for us. And then as far as allowing young, we are involved in the local fair, Wayne County fair. We are a buyer. Not only are we a buyer from some of the 4H projects and some of the items that the kids raised, but we also support it in other ways too. We have a display of machinery down there and we support it financially as well.

How would you characterize the dealership's relationship with its major suppliers?

Yeah, so I think it's very important that we are working together closely, especially with our biggest lines of equipment. This morning we had three reps from one of our companies that we represent and two from another one. So we had reps that are in here working with our team. It's good to keep that relationship strong. I appreciate it when they come here. Boots on the ground means a lot to us. When you can actually take a rep out and visit a customer, that means a lot to the customer too. So having a good relationship with the manufacturers that we work with is very vital.

What would you say are the top influences in the ag equipment business today and what's driving the changes in the ag industry overall?

So we like to think of our economic driver as milk prices around here. So if milk prices are strong, equipment is moving. If we were to look at a growth chart in the last 30 years, we could pretty much equal that. When the milk prices go up, our sales go up when the milk prices dip off, our sales dip off right with it. It's just one of the economic drivers of our businesses is milk prices. And commodity prices as well, but primarily milk.

What would you say is the single most important factor in farm equipment retailing that equipment dealers need to focus on to both survive and thrive now and in the future?

I think it's pretty simple. Service what you sell. I mean, for us, it's worked for 76 years, but I'm sure there's more technical answers in that. But I think if you take good care of your customers and you hire good service people and you have a good parts department, I think people are going to keep buying iron from you. I don't think it's too complicated, but.

How's it feel to be selected as a farm Equipment 2025 Dealership of the Year?

What we see though is our imperfections, our flaws are areas that we need to improve on, and when we win an award like this, it's like, wow, we see everything we need to improve on. But it is good to win some of these awards too. But most of the time I see our flaws in areas that need.

There's a team effort here. It's no one person that wins awards. It's everybody working hard and we feel very honored to win this award. There's a lot of great dealerships out there and we just feel very honored to be included in that group or single, basically what I still consider to be a single location with a parts location. But I think it'd be very difficult for us to, at this point, to go out and buy a bunch of brick and mortar and dealer locations and split this core group up. We work so well.

Thanks to Bill and Jason for sharing their Dealership of the Year story with us. You can read more about Low and Young as well as the other Dealership of the Year, Mazergroup in the July-August issue of the magazine or at Farm-Equipment.com. For Christine, as well as our entire staff here at Farm Equipment, I'm Kim Schmidt. Thanks for listening.