Establishing a basic labor budget has countless advantages for dealers looking to get the most out of their service shops.

Based on the results of the Western Equipment Dealers Assn.’s 2018 Cost of Doing Business Study, North American farm equipment dealers are making progress in improving a number of metrics typically used to measure their financial performance.

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 this interview, Mike Lessiter, Editor/Publisher of Farm Equipment, takes the rare opportunity to interview four ag executives — spanning two generations — from Vermeer Manufacturing. Sitting around the founder’s family table in Pella, Iowa, the group shares the story of how the invention of the round baler lead to their present-day international operation.

In this interview, Mike Lessiter sits down with Lars Paulsson from Laforge Systems, the North American presence of the company that he cofounded in 1991 with Laforge owner and inventor Hubert DeFrancq of France. The two go way back, and jokes abound, but so does insight on the company that supplies the hitches you see on the fronts of tractors today.