At the 2026 Dealership Minds Summit, we sat down with a distinguished panel of Farm Equipment’s Dealership of the Year alumni. The session featured insights from 3 industry leaders: Neil Messick of Messick’s Equipment (2026), Michael Van Houweling of Van Wall Equipment (2016) and Brady Foster of Birkey’s Farm Store (2007). 

What is your dealership’s biggest challenge and how are you trying to combat that? 

Van Houweling: In this environment, this will not be too much of a surprise: it is asset management, particularly on the used side of the business. We enjoy relatively high market share, which means that we have a relatively significant amount of used equipment to move through the system. The way we’ve been focused on that has been a two-pronged approach. The first prong is trying to enhance the effectiveness of our sales processes and our sales team overall. We didn’t have a sophisticated workflow system for the entire sales process, but we’ve implemented that over the past few years. Our CRM system was adequate, but not well utilized. We’ve put emphasis on that system. Our overall sales training and sales management has improved significantly in this environment. That’s the upside of an environment like this. It forces us to get better at things that maybe we didn’t necessarily have to be as good at before. 

The other part, the second prong, has to do with the merchandising of the equipment. We found ourselves moving closer and closer to the sophistication of automobile dealerships, which we envy many days in how effectively they’re merchandising their used equipment and the programs that they’re putting in place. For us, that included things such as different warranty programs and support programs for the used equipment and different strategies about how we’re emphasizing the value of equipment that comes from the middle of Iowa. There’s a lot of tests and learning in that. To do that, we’ve had to enhance our staff a little bit. We’ve got specific swim lanes now that we didn’t have for wholesale and program management. Those are the tactics that have been the most helpful to us

Foster: In this market, asset management is a big piece of it. That’s where all the risk is on our business. It’s a lot about standardizing best practices. We have standard operating procedures throughout the dealerships, and we try to get everybody to do the job the same way at the same time. But there’s also these best practices we have throughout the organization. There’s little tips and tricks that some facilities are performing and it’s helped the bottom line. How do we replicate that across the other locations we have? 

In this market, when all good sales are under pressure and you find a couple salesmen who are doing well and you dig in, ask why is he having so much success in this market? What you find out is that he delivers parts to his customers every time he goes to them or he talks to them about service specials. He’s tying that customer to the dealership. That’s a great best practice that we should be replicating across all of our locations and not just letting the top salesmen keep those tips and tricks to themselves. 

We’ve gone so far as to have store managers get together and they present a best practice. It’s not very different from what we’ve come here to do. We come here to learn from each other. While we’re all kind of in the same business together, it’s sharing ideas. It’s really helped our business over the years. We try to do that internally because we can sit here and share ideas, but if they never get down to the people where the rubber meets the road, it doesn’t do any good. That’s a big opportunity for us in today’s market, just continuing to sharpen ourselves and get better at what we do. 

Messick: We have been more fortunate than most in terms of our whole good sales. We’ve managed to grow this year, but we’re not nearly as exposed to the big ag markets as many of you are. One of the places we’ve been able to find that success in this last year has been in shortlines. We’re seeing some declines from our major vendors, but by having our guys understand a broad breadth of stuff, they’re able to find unique things that they’ve still been able to move. That has held up well for us. 

One thing that hasn't held up, that we continue to feel the pressure of more than we used to, is retirements. I’m going to somebody’s retirement launch every other week. We’re bringing a lot of these people back part-time. The older generation doesn’t know how to turn it off real well. But we’re definitely feeling that pressure of having a younger workforce, bringing new people in again and watching the old guard dial it back a little bit.