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590 Heartland Drive Sugar Grove, Il 60554 (630) 409-6882 www.swensonproducts.com/upfit

by Meta Levin

Equipment’s uplift facility in Sugar Grove, IL purchased a flatbed and had it installed. Three weeks later, he called because the corners had been damaged. He brought the truck in at 7 am on a Monday and he had his repaired truck back that afternoon.

Customers of Swenson Truck Equipment’s uplift center know that they can count on the facility for good, fast service. In fact, service personnel often stay late and come in on weekends to get the work done, says Danny Thomas, sales and operations manager of the facility.

Thomas is proud of his company’s customer-centric attitude. “We stand by our work product like no other company I have been with before,” he says. “We try to get repairs done immediately, because we know our customers are making a living with that piece of equipment.”

A 30-year veteran of the trucking industry, Thomas knows of what he speaks. In fact, the center’s reputation attracts customers from all over Illinois, from Chicago to downstate.

Thomas started in the industry with Badger Truck Equipment, which is where he was first introduced to ILCA. The memory of that experience led him to join ILCA recently as part of Swenson Truck Equipment’s uplift center. His career also included a stint with Navistar’s On Command Connection sales team.

Landscape contractors represent a large part of Swenson’s business, says Thomas, and many of them have encouraged him to join the ILCA. “Our customers are there and we need to support our customers,” he says. “We joined in the spring and we plan on taking a more active role in ILCA in the future.”

Swenson Truck Equipment is a part of Swenson Products, a brand of Aebi Schmidt. Swenson manufactures large, small and medium spreaders, as well as tailgate spreaders, dump bodies, all purpose bodies and liquid systems from its facility in Lindenwood, IL.

Eskil Swenson founded the company in 1937 as Cherry Valley Pulverizer Company, producing a twin-roller chain- drive spreader, primarily used to spread fertilizer and other products for agriculture. Eventually it expanded into salt and abrasive spreading and has continued to evolve to provide products that offer controlled spreading, chiefly of snow- and ice-control products.

Now known as a snow equipment company, Swenson boasts distributors all over the United States. The company-owned Sugar Grove facility installs dump bodies, snowplows, platform bodies and salt spreaders, all of which, says Thomas, have become more technologically sophisticated in the last few years.

Technology now allows snow- and ice-control professionals to manage everything, from how much product each spreader is laying down to the width of each spread. Municipalities have adopted these methods for a few years, but now landscape contractors are asking for it.

“They are budget conscious,” says Thomas. Today, a landscape contractor can not only track a truck’s location to within three feet, but can-also put down a geo-fence around property and trace when the truck crosses the geo-fence going in and when it leaves, allowing the landscape contractor to be more accurate when estimating jobs. “People are being savvier with technology.”

In addition to a demand for high technology products, Thomas sees that more and more customers are buying stainless steel dump bodies than ever before. “They don’t rust and they last longer,” he says. In 2015, Aebi Schmidt, a global company that focuses on smart product systems and services, bought Swenson and three years ago, the uplift facility in Sugar Grove opened.

The uplift facility has between two and 15 people in staff, depending on the volume of work. They also have service people on the road, who they will bring into the facility when needed. In large part because of the proximity to the Lindenwood manufacturing facility, the uplift center maintains many parts in stock. “Our average turn around (for work) is eight to 10 days,” says Thomas.

When not working on trucks, Thomas likes to work on race cars — specifically dragsters. A friend owns a shop, where Thomas often can be found outside of work hours.

Married, Thomas is the father of a 31-year-old son, who works for Navistar corporate and a 28-year-old daughter, who is a nursing student.