We’ve been following and reporting on “Right to Repair” legislation for over 2 years now, and it just keeps popping back up in my newsfeed. This time around, it was an opinion piece that appeared in Bloomberg.

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.