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In this episode of the Farm Equipment podcast is brought to you by Machinery Scope, we check back in with the executive leadership team at 2025 Dealership of the Year Mazergroup.

Starting off with CFO Wally Butler, the Mazergroup shares how the dealership has evolved over the years and how it is facing its challenges head on, from customer experience to developing its team and sales processes.  

As the business has grown since that time, it’s become more important to have a plan in place for leadership development. In 2024 Mazergroup kicked off its Mazergroup Leadership Development Program to help build its bench for future management and leadership positions. Karen MacDonald, vice prescient of people & culture, explains that structure of the program and its early results.

Now, we’re going to check in with Chris Finley, Vice President of Parts & Service Operations. In the parts department, there’s been a big focus on customer experience. Chris shares some insights on how the dealership has used secret shoppers, what the Mazergroup Way means and how the group works hand-in-hand with its customers and OEMs on product development and solutions.

In the sales department, Brad Tarr, vice president of sales & marketing, talks about Mazergroups 0 365 goal for used equipment and how the sales department uses menu pricing to simplify things for both the sales team and the customer.

     
   

   

     
   

This episode of Farm Equipment Podcast is brought to you by Machinery Scope.

At Machinery Scope, we’re more than a warranty provider—we’re your partner in closing deals, protecting margins, and building long-term customer relationships. Our flexible programs are designed to work with your sales process, whether you're selling new or used equipment, on the lot or online.

We help you stand behind what you sell with fast quotes, prompt claims, and insured coverage that builds buyer confidence. Plus, we pay fairly—retail labor rates, travel time, and MSRP on parts—so you and your customers stay protected without the hassle.

When you work with Machinery Scope, you’re backed by a team that’s been in your shoes—and works like you do.

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Full Transcript

I'm Kim Schmidt, executive editor of Farm Equipment. Welcome to Farm Equipment's podcast. In our last episode, we shared my interview with the late Bob Mazer, CEO of Mazergroup. This time around, we'll listen in on some of my interviews with other from Mazergroup's executive team recorded while I was visiting back in June for the Dealership of the Year coverage. This episode of the Farm Equipment podcast is brought to you by Machinery Scope. We'll get things started with Wally Butler, CFO of Mazergroup, who shared some of the history behind the modern Mazergroup and how the structure for the dealership today stems from some key changes that were made back in 2009.

And 2009 was a real turning point for Mazergroup. It was real birth of Mazergroup as we know it today, where we converted from individual store operations and individual local owner managers to really being one organization with an overall view of dealership operations while still maintaining our customer care model at the local stores and really making customer care decisions at the local stores. But it really enabled us to use the efficiencies and economies of the total group to implement bigger change and bigger resources for the entire group. At that time, we also implemented an entirely new management structure that really was functional as opposed to local and so I think that's really benefited Mazergroup to try to get the best of customer care for all of our stores

"With 18 stores spread out across Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Mazergroup is committed to local customer care," Butler says.

So for Mazergroup, our home office is really a support mechanism for local customer care, local sales, local decision making on anything to do with customer care. And then really, the home office is there to support operations to do the best we can at the store level, grow the business, take other ideas and make them come true at the local store level.

As the business has grown since that time, it's become more important to have a plan in place for leadership development. In 2024, Mazergroup kicked off its Mazergroup Leadership Development Program to help build its bench for future management and leadership positions. Karen MacDonald, vice President of people and culture, explains the structure of the program and its early results.

In 2024 in particular, we were certainly experiencing some labor challenges specific to filling some leadership roles and had been talking previously about different types of professional development we wanted to be able to offer in the organization and so we developed the Mazergroup Leadership Development Program, which kicked off last October in 2024. We have an application-based process, so we sent out a call to action to the organization, seeking applications from those individuals that wanted to be considered for the program for both professional and/or personal leadership development. We were happy to receive 25 applications in our first year and so we did then implement a baseline criteria that folks would have a minimum of two years experience to be considered for the first cohort, which narrowed the field to maybe 20 applications. And then we had looked at what their application said about their desires for leadership, why they wanted to learn more about leadership, how it might benefit them personally, professionally if they were willing to relocate.

Mazergroup has 18 locations across two provinces, so obviously, we're looking operationally at potential vacancies coming up and where we may need to plug some holes, so to speak. So we kicked off the program with a full day of history about Mazergroup and how Mazergroup started. We talked a lot about what leadership means, did some role play. We did some questionnaires, some assessments. We also then talked about operational basic metrics, just to give the group a sense of what we use to monitor, operationally, the success at Mazergroup. That was followed by two key components that really, I'll say are the foundation of the program. One is a coaching, is a leader training. It's nine half days of virtual training that we use a third party to facilitate for us. It's really based on looking within and it starts with a DiSC assessment, so folks understand how they like to communicate and how they prefer communication coming the other way.

And then really, a series of, yeah, virtual half day sessions that talk a lot about how we can provide feedback to our teams. And that's followed by a two-day mental health, first aid training as well that we roll out to that group. We roll out those two programs, the coaching and the leader and the mental health, first aid to actually all of our management team that really set the stage, again, for this program. And at the end of the leadership development program, we finalize it with an HR fundamentals day where we talk a lot about recruitment and what that looks like at Mazergroup and things to be aware of from a leadership perspective when you are looking at bringing on new folks to the organization, as well as some of the legislative components that make that up. And then performance management and providing feedback, that wound up the day.

So that went from October 2024 till the end of April 2025. It was extremely well-received. The eight graduates, I'll call them, provided a lot of great feedback in person on our last day, as well as through a survey tool that we developed to get some real focused feedback on maybe how we could improve the program. But above else, everybody said that regardless of whether they were to move into a formal leadership position or not, they felt they had really benefited personally and enjoyed going through the program as a cohort group, which we will continue to do this year as well. We call it a meet and greet and so regardless of the position, we have an in-house talent acquisition specialist who's a crackerjack and so as part of her recruitment process, she'll be, of course, screening applicants and any applicants that she is recommending and putting in front of hiring managers for consideration, they will decide who they want to set up a meet and greet with.

And that's generally virtually over Teams, unless they happen to be based locally. But it's a very, very short meet and greet. It's very informal, purposely so, because purpose, the goal of it is to assess fit. Do we feel like this person could just be a fit with our team, whatever that team may be? The parts team, the sales team, the service team, the admin team. And do they think that they see themselves as part of a fit as well? So it could be 15, 20 minutes. "Hi. How are you? Tell us a bit about yourself. What would you like to know about us?" And then if we're moving them forward in the process and we share with them that then next step will be more like a formal interview. And I will share that we did change for our leadership interviews, any management position a few years ago too.

We've started providing the interview questions to our candidates in advance. I think our belief is that the purpose of an interview isn't to shock somebody or catch you off guard and oftentimes, if you're asking behavioral-based questions, I think it's helpful if you have a bit of time to think about where you may have some experience in different situations, so that was a practice that we changed as well. So I think between those two things, that just helps us hopefully narrow down to the right candidate that we want to bring on board and that wants to join our team.

We'll get back to the Mazergroup team in a moment, 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 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 the people who keep the industry running.

Now, we're going to check in with Chris Finley, vice president of parts and service operations. In the parts department, there's been a big focus on customer experience. Chris shares some insights on how the dealership has used secret shoppers, what the Mazergroup way means and how the group works hand-in-hand with its customers and OEMs on product development and solutions.

Funny story, I guess, is that when we first started talking about this maybe three or four years ago, I thought we were pretty good at this already and so I thought, "Hey, let's try and do some secret shopper calls and see how well we're doing." And so we have 18 dealerships and I don't know, 80 parts people or something like that and so the level of customer service maybe wasn't exactly what I thought it was across all 18 stores and so it really became just what do we want to do when someone calls in? And so if it's a regular customer, what are the questions we want to ask? If it's a new customer, which is probably even more important to make sure that we understand what they're looking for in that instance, really, what are the questions we want to ask them? And so it really just built into a process in which we could teach.

And then individually, we taught each of those skills like why you do this and what good looks like in little mini-seminars throughout the last couple of years to say, "Okay. Well, why are we asking if there's an associated part they might need?" Well, it's not because we're trying to necessarily sell more to the customer. It's because if they open up something to fix it and they don't have that part now, now they have to call us again. And so it's really all, again, about looking after the customer and building that customer experience that's best in class. We've been really focused on customer experience and so that's really what the term is. Internally, we started talking about was customer experience. What did they experience when they come to our dealership, whether it's for parts or service or whatever? And so then when we were talking about the processes or how we want to treat customers. We started saying, "This is the Mazergroup way."

And so the best example I like to use is our parts carry out service. And so if a customer comes in and they have more parts than they can carry out on their own, it's expected that we will carry the parts out for the customer. It's the Mazergroup way. And so no matter how busy we are, if the phone's ringing, if this customer's on the line, if the customer says, "No, I can come back and get that, I'll make two trips," our expectation is that they just say, "Nope. It's okay." They walk out, they help them and they take the parts out. And so that's the Mazergroup way. So when we think about the customer experience overall, it's tough to really pinpoint one specific thing that can make us stand out from our competitors or our peers or from anyone else and so it's a whole bunch of little things that we're really focused on to really set ourselves apart and I think ultimately becomes just a preferred place to do business when we have all those little things done really well.

Everything from how we answer the phone, how we interact with customers in person, how we communicate throughout the service repair process and we create an estimate upfront and then communicate throughout follow up. If a customer has a machine that's spending overnight in the shop, we'll do a complimentary cab clean to make sure the unit leaves better than when it came in. And so again, there's a whole bunch of little things that we've termed the Mazergroup way to really try and set ourselves apart.

I think it's something we really understood. We need to be at the leading edge of technology and so that's everything from the C&H terms of now field ops or their digital space to specific products that we help develop. One of which that we talked about earlier was the NIR product in just actually south of where we are today, about 45 minutes south of here. A slurry applicator and Mazer and New Holland worked together over a couple of years to really develop what's now a commercial product where a slurry applicator can map and talk about all the nutrient applications specifically on that field from a regulatory and from a billing standpoint.

They can now show them what they've done. And so that was a really cool endeavor, because we had a whole bunch of people internally working on it with a whole bunch of people at Raven and C&H with the customer. And so that's something we worked really hard to get to market with those other partners. And then from really a digital tool standpoint, we've been working with C&H since 2019, maybe even a bit before 2019 on a monthly basis minimally, to really talk about the products in which we need from a producer standpoint that our producers need to be successful.

And so we, at the beginning, were creating reports manually for our customers and so we had big fleet customers that wanted to understand their telematics and how much usage there was on the machine and all that data. And so we were manually pulling all that up, putting into spreadsheet, putting into graphs and then creating a usage report. And so then we showed that to people at C&H and Raven and of course, they were much better software engineers than us and so they got that to a digital application pretty quickly. And then of course, since then, now the whole C&H technology piece has grown significantly and it's in a really good spot today.

Our last stop in the discussion is in the sales department where Brad Tarr, vice president of sales and marketing, talks about Mazergroup's 0-365 goal for used equipment and how the sales department uses menu pricing to simplify things for both the sales team and the customer.

Yeah. So we have a goal of what we call 0365 inventory. The goal is for both new and used. New is a little bit tougher to get to, but used, we managed to get there in our fiscal year, 2024 ending. We had 0-365-day inventory. That's an accomplishment. I've been here 25 years and we haven't seen that happen yet. COVID certainly helped with manufacturers drawing back on production and a spike in demand. It certainly helped. We won't take all the credit for it, but we were diligent, we were focused. At the start of every year, we supply our regional sales managers with a list of inventory that's in their region and we say, "Listen, we want you laser-focused on making sure we figure out a way to clean through this by the end of our fiscal year." And yeah, happy to say in 2024, we achieved it.

We got very close at the end of our 2025 fiscal year, which just happened in March. Unfortunately, we didn't get there, but we got very, very close. So that continues to be a priority for us. We're going to continue to focus on making sure we're at zero and hopefully, someday we get new to zero as well. I would say some of the keys to what caused that was, again, our focus. Making sure our people understand the company's strategy, making sure that they're in line with company strategy, but we also incentivize. That's part of the incentive packages for our regional sales managers. And then of course, we discount, I guess, if you will, used equipment. We put our own discounts on it. If it's something that's been sitting around for six months and we have to make a move, we'll reduce the price to meet the marketplace.

We don't wait around. We don't kick the can down the road and wait for the year to end and then say, "What should we do for write-downs?" We adjust as we go. So that certainly helps. So we do a lot of menu pricing. We don't typically rely on manufacturer's programs. We create our own programs based on, again, the marketplace. It's tough for manufacturers, we believe, to paint marketplaces with a broad brush, because every market's different. So we know what is typically happening in our marketplace with competition. Then we make decisions on what we feel we need to additionally incentivize products by to meet the marketplace. Things like compact tractors, zero turn lawnmowers and most dairy livestock products, so Haybines, balers, Discbines and chore tractors up to 140 horsepower. We're typically menu pricing those based on feedback that we're getting from our field staff about what's happening in the marketplace and whether we're competitive or not.

We put together these menu price. A lot of our salespeople, it's funny, they don't even really want to sell until we have the menu pricing ready. They're so used to it now. We try to make their life easy. We want them ultimately out there selling, not sitting behind a computer, trying to work through menu pricing. Compact tractors can be just as complicated as combines, if not more complicated. So in order to have our salespeople, I guess, eager to sell those products, we want to make it easy for them, so we do a lot of menu pricing and it's working. It really works for us.

Thanks to the entire Mazergroup team who welcomed me into the dealership to film and interview their team. You can read our full Dealership of the Year coverage online in the July, August issue of the magazine. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Farm Equipment podcast. Until next time, I'm Kim Schmidt. Thanks for joining us