There likely aren’t too many family owned companies in the world that are successfully growing under the fourth generation.

For shortline manufacturers, understanding how dealers work with them and what a dealer is looking for when taking on a shortline is an important part of how they run their business. Manufacturers got the opportunity to ask these questions during a dealer panel at the 2018 Farm Equipment Manufacturers Assn. (FEMA) Marketing & Distribution Convention in Minneapolis.

While it’s not always advisable to dwell in the past, it is important to know where you (or your business, or the industry) came from and how your history impacts who and what you are today. In our office, there’s a long bookshelf lined with all the past issues of Farm Equipment and bound archives of Implement & Tractor dating back to 1959.

"In our territory, securing capital for our customers is going to be a challenge,” says Tom Rosztoczy, Stotz Equipment president. “We have banks pressuring farmers to limit spending, questioning how money is spent, and trying to control farmer spending as much as they can to keep the farmers operating within the parameters the banks want to see.”

On paper, the two dealerships couldn’t be more different: one, a 25-store John Deere dealership spread across 8 western states, the other, a New Holland and Massey Ferguson dealership with 2 stores in central Wisconsin. But when you listen to the people who run them, their challenges are strikingly similar.

Prior to the appointment of Bret Lieberman as vice president of New Holland North America in 2015, the global farm equipment manufacturer experienced a fair amount of turnover in executive positions throughout the mid 2000s, making the communication of a consistent message to the dealer network a difficult task at times.

In this year’s series, the third such project Farm Equipment (FE) has done since 2006, Scott Harris is the newest exec we’ve sat down with and mic’d up, having just 8 months on the job. In the 14 years our company has operated FE magazine, Case IH has shown the greatest interest of all the major lines in the relationship with FE editors and the publication’s position in the dealer universe. (That isn’t to say the coverage pleased them, but dialog and the ability to pick up the phone with our staff has been important to Case IH).

It’s been 10 years since Farm Equipment last sat down with the top executives of the major ag equipment makers, and 13 since the very first time we published a report like this. While some things remain the same (consolidation, market share demands, purity pressure), others have changed — notably the economy and the names of the executives at the top.