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). 

With a finite group of buyers and buyers buying less, what type of outbound new marketing, initiatives or events have you guys been doing that are showing value?

Foster: We don’t have anything that’s record breaking, but the customer today wants to do business differently than the customers 10 and 20 years ago. You can buy a car online today and never see it and it shows up on your driveway. I don’t know how that translates into agriculture, but as we’re seeing these retirements and as the next generation comes up, the relationship piece seems to mean less to the customer and the ease of transaction seems to mean more. 

We’ve been dealing with a shrinking customer base for a hundred years. We have to continue to figure out how we navigate that. It’s a big concern of mine in the shrinking buyer market when you have the new generation come up and they don’t put value in reliability in the relationship with their local dealership. I don’t know what that means for us long term, but it does change how we go to market with our customers and what the support means after the fact.

Maybe this generation needs to get through and experience tough times before they understand the value of having a good partner in a dealership, but they definitely want to do business differently. I don’t know if we’ve done anything marketing wise that’s different than that, but we’re trying to make it easier for the customer to do business with us because they don’t want to come into the store. They don’t want to stand there for half an hour to look up a part. They just want to push a button and have it show up at their farm. 

Van Houweling: For us, it is a little bit the same as what Brady was saying. There is not anything sort of remarkable that we’ve done differently. Two things when you think about our whole good presence overall, we’re spending a lot more time assessing where we’re positioned relative to the market on different pieces of inventory. There’s more analysis and rigor in that than I think there ever has been. 

The other thing that we’ve evolved is when we have sales opportunities that aren’t necessarily connected to a currently assigned account. We have a very small number of sales professionals that are handling those calls. We have a lot of confidence that they can handle it effectively. We’re treating those calls more like gold than we ever have. Within the AOR, we have to remember there may be fewer buyers in the market today, so we can get smarter on how we’re spending our time and who we’re calling on. We’ve spent more time with our sales team around analyzing where they should be spending their time. Who are likely the buyers? What do we know about their purchase history? What do we know about our assessment of their capacity to make a purchase today? Those would be some analysis questions that we’re spending more time contemplating now than we would have four years ago. 

Messick: One thing that was drilled into me a long time ago from our general managers, people buy from people. One thing I feel we’ve done differently in marketing over the years is when we market to our customers, we market to our customers as Messick’s. I am not the brand that I represent, I am Messick’s. I am not Kubota of Eastern Pennsylvania, I am Messick’s. We do things such as tractor events for our communities. 

The last one at our Mount Joy store had around 800 people show up. Most of them were never going to buy anything from us. It makes a huge impression on your customers to be in the local community. Every one of our stores are doing things like that now. 

We’ve reestablished budgets for people to go out and buy children FFA animals and try to be that to your local community. Be what Kubota would refer to as dealer of choice. When somebody wants to buy a piece of equipment, I want to be their local dealer and not just a representative of a color.