West Side Tractor’s Golden Anniversary F
ifty years and three generations ago, West Side Tractor Sales Co. dedicated itself to the proposition that John Deere customers shouldn’t have to travel to the south side of Chicago for sales and service. Turns out, Rich and Mary Benck had a viable idea. The dealership not only has endured, it has grown far beyond perimeter towns of Chicago. The company now operates in 10 locations stretching 300 miles from Rockford in northern Illinois to Bloomington in southcentral Indiana. “The whole concept of how we have done business hasn’t changed over time. The variables of how we do business have changed,” says Steve Benck, the firms’ president and one of the constants in the evolving company: Benck family leadership. His father started and developed the company and 25 years later handed the reins to Steve and his two siblings, Diane and Tom. Now three of the founder’s grandchildren, Jen, Lauren and Brian, have professionally come home to West Side to further enrich the company story.
Farm Machinery Roots Rich Benck grew up on a farm on the Illinois border in Grant Park, IL, spending lots of time using John Deere Indianapolis
machinery. He subsequently became a skilled diesel mechanic for International Harvester in Kankakee, learning the craft well enough to become an Air Force diesel engine instructor in 1952. Re-entering civilian life four years later, Benck took his mechanical skills to work at Calumet Industrial and Farm Supply, a Ford dealership that later took on the John Deere product line, in South Holland on Chicago’s south side. Over the next half decade, he worked his way through dealership roles at Calumet as mechanic, parts manager, service manager, and, finally, salesman. So in 1962, when a Deere dealership opportunity surfaced in Lisle, a western suburb of Chicago, Benck felt prepared for the ultimate business role: owner. “My wife, Mary, and I scraped together $15,000 and purchased the dealership,” the senior Benck recalls. The couple partnered with the Calumet owners in the deal that created West Side, an arrangement that ended a year later when the Bencks bought out their partners. (They eventually would buy out Calumet itself). “We opened the doors with three employees total and no credit available,” Benck says of the 1962 business venRockdale