Casey Equipment 50th Anniversary

we remembe friendship, tie and shared success.

We look forw ward to many more.

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‘Compleat’ Success Casey Equipment Turns 50 “It all started with the founder, Joseph Cyril Bamford,” said Casey Equipment President Jim Cox. “The founder, whose son, Lord Bamford, is running the company now, was more open to creative engineering designs than were competitors. JCB responded quicker than some competition and pursued innovation more aggressively.”

In 1976, five years after the Illinois dealership formed, Casey Equipment leadership showed its own capacity for innovative thinking and teamed up with the British manufacturer. It has continued to build out its lineup of brands from there, a process that continues in 2021. Casey Equipment is a compleat success story. ** Company founders John Casey and Don Cox worked together for 15 years before they started their own company. Casey’s family

By Giles Lambertson CEG CORRESPONDENT

Over the last 50 years, Casey Equipment Company has developed into metro Chicago’s compleat heavy equipment dealer. That is, the dealership is not just “complete” in its equipment offerings and services, it is “highly skilled and accomplished in all aspects.” The dictionary distinction in the words is worth noting.

The British meaning captures the character of a dealership that for 45 years has represented a British manufacturer that is equally as accomplished as an organization — JCB. The synergy of the dealer and the manufacturer of industry-leading equipment is such that Casey Equipment today is the longest-serving JCB dealer in North America.

Don Cox (L) and John Casey established and incorporated Casey Equipment Company on Feb. 19, 1971.

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owned a construction equipment firm and Cox was an employee of it. In 1971, they pooled their experience and funds to open Casey Equipment in Addison, Ill., a western Chicago suburb. The co-owners and a mechanic comprised the entire staff.

Their first equipment offerings were Insley excavators, manufactured in Indianapolis, Ind., and Layton asphalt pavers, an Oregon product. After Insley was bought out in 1975, Casey and Cox began to methodically research more viable product lines. Winning the right to represent JCB was the immediate result of that search and representation of other major product lines soon followed.

“Our philosophy is not to change the core mix of products we represent, but to complement them,” said Cox of the ongoing market examination. “All the lines of equipment we have added have complemented the brands we already represent. We never want to jeopardize the relationship we enjoy with manufacturers we have represented for 30 or 40 years, but we are open to growing by complementing what we already have.”

Cox grew up around the company he now presides over, his high school summers spent working there. He formally joined the family firm in 1979 after earning a degree in economics and an MBA from the University of Illinois-Champaign. He began as a commissiononly salesman and experienced success, becoming sales manager.

(L-R): Don Cox, former president of Casey Equipment, presented his then 12-year-old grandson, David Cox, with his first paycheck, as David’s father, Jim Cox, shares this proud moment.

What a difference 25 years makes!

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This JCB 217S backhoe loader played a role in Chicago’s Navy Pier reconstruction.

The founding co-owners continued their partnership for 21 years, John Casey selling his half of the company to Don Cox in 1992. The transition in ownership continued until 1997 when the younger Cox bought the last of his father’s share of the business. The 91-year-old Don Cox is still around to advise his successors as necessary.

When Jim Cox joined the family firm, Casey Equipment served its customers from one location, having moved the original office from Addison to Des Plaines at the other end of O’Hare International Airport. Today, three dealership locations serve customers. The Des Plaines office yielded to a facility in nearby Arlington Heights. A second office operates farther south in the Chicago suburb of Lemont. A third location is situated farther west in Cherry Valley, a Rockford suburb in a more agricultural region of the state. ** JCB is the long-standing flagship brand of the dealership, but other major manufacturers have been represented by Casey Equipment for nearly as long. More than three decades ago, Casey became a dealer of LeeBoy, a North Carolina builder of road paving and maintenance equipment. About the same time, it signed on with Dynapac, a European company that pioneered roadway compaction equipment.

“LeeBoy is the number one manufacturer of pavers in the U.S. in terms of market share,” Cox pointed out. “It is our second-most valuable manufacturer as far as unit sales. Our highest market share by product comes from pavers.”

Besides pavers, LeeBoy builds a full slate of roadbuilding and maintenance equipment including motor graders, conveyor loaders, spreaders and asphalt tank trucks. The company offers 11 models of pavers, the largest being the 8616D, a 12-ton machine with a Tier IV Final 127-hp Kubota engine capable of laying a 15-ft.-wide mat.

The signature Dynapac compacting equipment offered by Casey Equipment ranges from hand-held plate compactors to a 2-ft.-wide radio-controlled trench roller to the 16-ton CC5200 VI, a doubledrum vibratory roller that features 8-ft.-wide drums and a 130-hp

(L-R): Casey’s James Austin, sales manager; Corey Ford, territory manager for northern counties of Illinois; and Mike Fay, territory manager of DuPage and Kane counties with a small sample of equipment, including a LeeBoy 5000 Pathmaster; a JCB 270 skid steer; and Dynapac CC1300 double drum roller.

Countryside Landscaping celebrates its new fleet of JCBs, purchased from Casey Equipment.

(L-R) are Don Cox, Jim Cox and John Casey at Medieval Times customer appreciation event 1991.

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“Lessons from Dad included be fair, honest and treat your customers the way you want to be treated. I grew up when a handshake was the same as a written contract. We do our best to live up to that philosophy,” said Jim Cox (R), president of Casey Equipment with his father, Don (L), and son, David.

Machines like this JDB C3X compact backhoe loader shown at the Cherry Valley shop are available through Casey Equipment.

Cummins diesel engine. Somewhere in there is a compactor for just about any customer.

The combined road-building and construction equipment segment is the single largest in Casey Equipment’s book of business and is handily served by JCB, LeeBoy and Dynapac product lines.

“It definitely is our number one market,” Cox said. “Other business activity is split between municipal and ag customers.”

Agriculture is a relatively new component of sales for the equipment dealer. Cox said it started with farmers and rural customers buying skid steers and tracked loaders, the increasingly popular pieces of compact equipment with a host of applications.

“In the last five or six years, ag has become a major part of our business,” he said.

The segment grew faster in 2018, when Casey Equipment began to represent Yanmar tractors. The Japanese company built its first tractor in 1967 and entered the United States market 12 years later.

Today, the dealership sells small tractor units like the 1,500-lb., 21hp 221 model on up to larger utility and midsize tractors like the 59hp YT359C. “At the branch in Cherry Valley, probably 50 percent of sales opportunities are ag,” the company president said. “We do very well there with JCB skid steer loaders and Yanmar is a perfect complement to that. We sell mostly midsize tractors with mowers and loaders being the most popular attachments.”

Sales growth continued last December when the company expanded its rental fleet by adding Bomag, a world leader in cold planing equipment and compactors for soil and landfill refuse. It and Dynapac are both brands of the French company FAYAT. Adding Bomag — as well as an earlier addition of Big Tow trailers, which are manufactured in Minnesota — shows the company’s continuing interest in changing its lineup of products to match changing markets. ** Many equipment dealerships long ago began to offer customers a

Jim (L) and Don Cox host an open house to showcase Casey Equipment’s machines.

David Cox, current vice president of Casey Equipment, had a fascination with equipment at an early age.

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CONGGRRAATTULAATTION IONS!

LeeBoy salutes our friends and partners at a Casey Equipment Co. in celebrating this historical milestone.

AS DEPE PENDA DABL BLE AS Y YO OUR D DA AY IS LON ONG.

www.LeeBoy.com 9

The Casey Equipment crew sets up for an open house at its Arlington Heights shop, located at 1603 E. Algonquin Rd., Arlington Heights, Ill.

rental option. Casey Equipment started doing so 40 years ago and rentals continue to grow as a part of the dealership’s business.

“Two things have changed in the last five to seven years,” Cox said. “One is snow equipment rentals. We have about 125 pieces in our inventory for the snow removal market. The other is adding Bomag planers to our inventory. We added 17 planers just in the last six months and have one of the largest rental fleets in the U.S.” In all, some 175 pieces of heavy equipment are rentable at Casey.

Bomag planers are the fastest-growing type of rental machine, with Dynapac rollers, LeeBoy pavers and the full JCB line also steadily going out the door under rental contracts. The company offers a full range of rental options — daily, weekly, monthly — as well as rent-to-own options.

“We have an aggressive rental-purchase program, and short-term rentals give us the exposure to customers we might not otherwise be able to reach.”

While the market in Cherry Valley differs from the other two locations because of its more rural character, the company’s approach to customers doesn’t vary from place to place, according to Cox. “As far as what we do with rentals and our equipment inventory,

Casey Equipment’s fleet of service trucks is ready to help customers when the need arises.

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The Cherry Valley branch is located at 1548 Huntwood Drive, Rockford, Ill.

we have the same representative equipment at all three locations.”

The company’s customer base ranges from western Illinois through the Chicago metro area into northwest Indiana. Yet the digital revolution has impacted Casey Equipment’s approach to sales and rentals as it has many other companies. Cox said social media and the company’s website “have given us more national opportunities to sell equipment out of our rental fleet. More buyers are searching the web for equipment, and we are engaged in those sales as well.”

Across the company, JCB skid steer loaders are the top seller in respect to unit sales. The loader’s single-arm side-entry design remains unique in the industry, a safety and operational feature that perennially makes it an industry-leading product. Just as it was a pioneer in the backhoe loader market many years ago, JCB is expanding its market share today with its revolutionary Teleskid, the only skid steer and track loader with a telescoping boom.

What does Cox foresee JCB coming out with next?

“They’re always introducing new products, but one of the big things coming is in the area of electric-powered equipment. It’s also working on a backhoe motor powered by hydrogen. JCB is leading

Casey Equipment’s Cherry Valley facility services Rockford, Rochelle, DeKalb, Belvidere, Woodstock and Crystal Lake, Ill. 11

Casey Equipment’s Lemont, Ill., facility is located at 16754 New Ave.

Furthermore, the dealership has an inventory of steel and rubber tracks for its tracked machinery and shelves of tires for the host of rolling machinery produced by JCB, LeeBoy, Big Tow and Dynapac. ** Fifty years in business means lots of ups and downs have been experienced. Casey Equipment was born in the 1970s, a time of high inflation and economic turmoil. It had to weather the downspin of the post-9/11 attack period in the early 2000s and the big recession of 2008-09. The pandemic-related economic disruption of the last year continues to test the mettle of sales departments there as elsewhere.

The president looks back with pride that Casey has “never laid off an employee during a downturn. We kept everybody employed.

Those periods of our history all were challenges but we saw our way through them without layoffs.”

Consequently, the company has current employees who have been with the company for 10 and 20 years.

One reason the company survived without slimming down its staff is that “we have always run a very lean company as far as number of employees. We each wear a lot of hats and do whatever it takes to get things done. We have to do that because we are a smaller dealer in a pool of large dealers.”

Cox said the culture of Casey Equipment has been pretty consistent through the five decades of its existence, adhering to the business tenets of the company’s founders.

“Lessons from Dad included be fair and honest and treat your customers the way you want to be treated. I grew up when a handshake was the same as a written contract. We do our best to live up to that

the industry in some areas of ‘green’ equipment.”

Casey always has focused on parts and service support. Its certified and factory-trained technicians are called upon for spot repairs, planned maintenance and warranty work, plus making site calls using five field service trucks.

The company’s parts operation is impressively complete. OEM parts are, of course, on the shelf and ready for installation, but to lower costs for contractors the dealer also offers remanufactured parts as part of an exchange service. And Casey keeps a full stock of wear parts — teeth and bushings — for machines that punish their components in harsh work environments. Think planers and excavators, for example.

The Lemont branch services Joliet, Naperville, Bolingbrook, Plainfield, Elmhurst and West Chicago in Illinois, as well as Crown Point, East Chicago, Hammond, Portage and Valparaiso in northwest Indiana.

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JCB wheel loaders are called on for snow removal at the United Center.

Casey Equipment’s JoAnne Coletta, office manager, and Doug Wisner, service manager help keep operations running smoothly.

philosophy,” he said.

These guiding tenets of the company clearly have sustained it.

Another key one is that leadership constantly seeks opportunities.

Whereas some companies hunker down in tough times, Casey Equipment keeps looking outward.

“Adding Bomag to the company lineup in December with the pandemic still around is an example of that,” Cox said. “We aggressively came out of a tough year and are looking for record sales this year.”

The company is quietly evolving into a three-generation family business. Jim Cox’s son David is vice president. Like his father, David Cox grew up in the company, worked in various capacities as a teenager before coming aboard full time 10 years ago. The 36-yearold has complete management of the office and accounting responsibilities as well as overseeing parts and service departments.

Casey’s team of leaders look confidently into the future of the business.

While they are not currently on the verge of expanding product lines or locations “we are not opposed to doing it when it makes sense,” the company president said. “We are exploring opportunities to expand, both with product offerings and, perhaps, geographically.”

Adds Cox: “We are developing a vision of what Casey Equipment will look like in 10 or 20 years. Our first goal is to expand our customer base, gain presence and market share with the manufacturers whose products we currently represent and then look for further growth opportunities. Rental management and e-commerce will continue to evolve but I believe that people always will do business with companies that they trust and can rely on.”  CEG 13

CONGRA ATULA ATIONS, TIONS, Casey Equipment E

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for keepin ng our community rolling fo for the past 50 years.

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