Three years ago, Roy Cooper, a Cat® sales representative at Finning, spotted a Grindstone Landscaping pickup truck driving down the street, and realized he had yet to do business with the company. To a salesman like Cooper, there are only two types of construction workers in this world – customers, and people he hasn’t met. So, naturally, Cooper followed the pickup to its destination and introduced himself to the truck’s driver, Grindstone Owner Dave Dueck.
Dueck enjoyed a strong relationship with a different equipment manufacturer, and had an almost religious devotion to that company’s foot-controlled skid steers. “I told Roy, ‘I’m a diehard and I always will be. If I ever need something bigger, I’ll call ya.’”
That time arrived sooner than expected. A couple years later, Grindstone had grown into a much larger operation, and Dueck needed to extend his equipment, so he called Cooper. After an individualized equipment assessment, Dueck made his first Finning purchase, a Cat 907H compact wheel loader.
Within days, Dueck was blown away by his 907H. “Anything we needed it to lift, anything we needed it to do, it was the perfect machine,” he marvels. “So, I ended up buying another one, and now I’ve got two. They’re incredible machines.”
Dueck gets year-round performance from his fleet by including snow and ice management as one of his winter services. When his old skid steers needed replacing, he turned to Caterpillar for an upgrade. Operating at full throttle, he discovered that the Cat skid steer burned less than half the fuel that his old skid steers did. Dueck just had to run the numbers to see the savings potential. He found that for every 1,000 hours of operating time, a Cat would save him $7,500 in fuel costs.
Looking back, Dueck says he was only hurting himself to resist change. “A lot has to do with being stubborn, and not wanting to learn something new. The older I get, the more I learn that you need to be more open to things. You can’t have tunnel vision, because you’re not going to be successful that way.”
These days Dueck’s fleet consists of about a dozen pieces of equipment. And, most of that iron is Cat.
