Conversation Series Extra: Bob Walker, Walker Mfg. (July 2001 Issue Bonus)

BW: When I got out of college, that was the time when the business got moved up to Wyoming, and there was really no opportunity for me. My brother and I had always wanted to work with dad. But I went away to college and he went through that cycle that basically took the business down to nothing. So those were years I was working in the aircraft industry. When he was able to get started and move to Colorado, he asked me to come work with him. At that time, my brother graduated from college and we joined the company at virtually the same time.

Back in those years, my dad did not want to be in marketing. He wanted to do manufacturing and leave the marketing to other people, and he learned a hard lesson about that. If you really want to be in control of the product, you’ve got to have control of the whole thing from producing the product to dealing with the customer. If you put other people into that loop you have to give up a degree of control of the whole process.

L&L: What has made riding mowers so much more popular in recent years?

BW: Years ago, the walk-behind was the industry standard for a lot of industry mowing because the riders that were on the market at that time literally would not fit into the areas to mow, their productivity was no good and they cost a lot more money. The combination of zero-turn, which was a great technology, and then to make it into a compact machine that would fit into a lot of the same areas that walk-behinds would, was a breakthrough.

Another thing that has fueled the compact issue is the evolution in engines. Engines have evolved nicely in the last 20 years where we’re getting a lot more power in smaller, lighter engine packages that allow us to keep the machines compact. Look back at some of the old, cast iron, clunker-type engines and see how heavy they were to get 14 or 15 horsepower. Nowadays with the V-twin engines, we’re getting 25 and even 30 horsepower in a small, fuel efficient, lightweight, compact package, and that’s allowing us to design machines in a smaller package. We’ve also definitely made advancements in ergonomics and operator comfort.

L&L: What are manufacturers doing to improve mowers today?

BW: A lot of companies are making machines that are comfortable to operate for long periods of time, especially compared to the walk-behinds. Really, your best operator for a walk-behind is a 20- to 22-year-old man, but everyone else will lose their stamina. Meanwhile, you can put a 50-year-old on a riding mower and they can produce every bit as much as everyone else, so that has opened up the labor pool. There have been some advancements in maintenance. The tilt-up deck where you can easily get to the underside of the deck has been a big improvement on commercial equipment because you’ve got to maintain your cutting blades and keep your decks clean. It has virtually become an industry standard on front-cut machines, and some of your mid-mount machines are even coming out with ways to raise up the decks.

But if you look at a comparison sheet, the first thing people tend to talk about is ground speed, and the customers tend to go for that. A lot of people don’t understand that when it comes time to make a turn, for example, both machines have to slow down to turn because if you go full speed into a turn, you’re going to tear up a lot of grass. Again, it’s not a point easily understood or sold except to the keen observer of equipment who through experience found out that the fastest machine may not always win the race. Now mowers are already going faster than a lot of terrain will let us go. But I don’t foresee mowers that will go 25 or 30 miles per hour. I don’t think that’s the direction we’re going to see improvement in. It could very well be in this area of agility of the mower and its ability to easily and quickly move on a landscape property.

Another trend impacting design is attracting and keeping labor, which is a big issue I don’t think will go away. The people you attract want a comfortable and a safe machine to operate. If you’re going to attract people to work in this industry, you have to offer that. But I really am concerned about the trend of trying to hire people from out of the country. Not to say there’s anything wrong with those folks, but I think a lot of them aren’t getting the kind of training to put them on a piece of equipment like this and operate it like it ought to be operated. The pendulum swings. I think there has been a lot of emphasis on faster machines, but as long as the backbone of the industry is these smaller owner operators, and there’s certainly more of them out there than there are these crew-driven guys, then this issue of operator comfort and safety is certainly something I believe will drive the design of the machines for the future.

L&L: Is there a lot of room for dramatic changes left?

BW: I can’t tell you that there’s anything I see right now. Being an optimist, yes, I believe there will be some dramatic things, but I can’t foresee it right now. New things are being discovered all of the time, and you never know how some new technology that doesn’t even seem related to lawn mowers will actually impact the lawn mower design of the future. And it doesn’t have to be high tech, but some new technology that’s discovered that eventually begins to impact us. The Europeans are working on a laser cutting mower, so maybe that will eventually replace all of the mower blades. That could happen.

L&L: How have the contractors changed since you’ve been in the business?

BW: My sense is that there’s a better level of business sense today. The business practices have got to be carried out at a higher level in order to truly survive and be in the industry. For awhile, you can operate and maybe just be lucky, but ultimately you’ll run out of money if you don’t pay attention to the business. I think, in general, contractors understand that if they’re going to be in this business they have to be a businessperson. I think that with the tools and software available today, there’s no reason for someone not to run their business the right way.

L&L: This business obviously means a great deal to you. What do you enjoy the most about it?

BW: Today, I’m especially happy for my parents. They’ve worked hard all their life, and now they get to see some degrees of success. Again, a lot of what they worked on didn’t amount to much and there wasn’t much to show for it when they were all said and done. That’s not the stuff people dream about, but sometimes that’s necessary.

We understand that there’s no way we could carry the whole financial load of manufacturing the product and getting it to the market. Some of the bigger companies have the resources to do that, but we don’t. These people are people that we’re working with, and it goes deeper than just a business relationship.

Some people have said, and I think it might be true, that we’re pretty unique for pulling off the Family Reunion event we had last year. This comes right out of our culture of who we are and how we think and live. You don’t keep a family together mistreating other members of the family. You’ve got to treat people right.

We have a keen sense of the level of investment our dealers and distributors have made to help us bring our product to market. And then you have the customer. A lot of people like to talk about how companies have created a cult or a following, and how do you do that. Well, part of that is to create a sense of camaraderie. Harley-Davidson is a classic icon of a club. If you drive a Harley, you’re in, and it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, black, yellow or white. So how do you create that? Well, you can’t trick people. This can’t be something that you just make up - it has to be real, and you have to live it.

L&L: The fact that this company only makes riding mowers obviously makes you unique. Why is that all you manufacture?

BW: First of all, we have a real sense of our limitation of who we are and what our resources are, which includes talent and time as well as money. But quite a few years ago we had introduced our primary machine, and people were telling us that we should come out with a bigger size, an industrial-size machine, so we began to work on it.

One day we woke up and realized that we had a lot of work to do on this existing machine, and if we started to divert a lot of resources to this new product we wouldn’t do justice to the current product.

Incidentally, we stopped that project on the big mower, and the chassis is still sitting in the shed out back. We’ve never looked back. That’s not to say that we couldn’t have built that bigger machine and built a better machine than what was on the market. But it’s a diluting of your resources to the point that you can either choose to do several things and maybe not do them to the level of excellence, or you can take everything you have and put it into one thing in order to go to a higher level. That’s the choice that you’re faced with.

L&L: Has competing against a number of larger manufacturers been difficult for the company?

BW: A number of years ago Jacobsen called here. This was before they were part of Textron and they didn’t have a zero-turn mower, so they were interested in getting into the market, perhaps with a private label agreement with us. They told us they were doing market research and one of the ways they could differentiate the product that we would produce for them from our product was that they would not want to put steering levers on it. They said, ‘Our market researcher has shown that steering levers will never be strongly accepted - it has to have a steering wheel.’

This was their conclusion, and we laughed at that idea amongst ourselves because here we were selling machines with steering levers all day long and people liked what the machine would do from a productivity point of view. But their research was sending them off in the wrong direction, so they asked the wrong questions or asked the questions in the wrong way. So that’s a strength that a small company can play to, and that’s stay close to the customer.

Of course, we’re one of the few, if not the only, commercial mower manufacturers that does not have a mid-mount machine. We’re not complaining about that. We consider ourselves specialists. We’re not trying to have a machine for every possibility, but that’s going to have some effect on us. We believe a worthy goal for us is to try to have a 10 percent share of the commercial riding mower market. At the moment, we’ve got a nice sized business here, but to get to 10 percent we’ll need to probably double our output. That could very well take a number of years for us to increase out share to that point.

L&L: Is your market share moving in the right direction?

BW: We’ve actually regressed a little bit in the last few years because of the mid-mounts. There are some big guys that are really pushing a lot of product into the market so we’ve actually dropped back. A few years ago we got up to 9 percent according to my figures and now we’re around 6.5 percent, but that’s not because we’ve gone backwards in terms of production. They’ve just gone ahead faster than we have. But that’s what makes business interesting.

L&L: So is the future for Walker Manufacturing still just riding mowers?

BW: Once you’ve established a brand name and a reputation in a market, it would be easy to say that we could put our brand on a number of different products to multiply our business, and we may do some of that. We may still build that big mower I was telling you about. As the company grows and our resources grow we may be able to take some opportunities that we wouldn’t have thought of 10 years ago. I don’t want to get trapped in the mindset that this is the only thing we’re going to build, but we admire the business models at companies like Dixon, Grasshopper and Dixie Chopper. These are companies that have stayed pretty focused. They’ve also tended to be specialty companies, and I think that’s part of the reason for their success.

L&L: The contractor and dealer can’t exist without each other, but they spend a tremendous amount of time complaining about each other. What’s wrong with this relationship?

BW: The typical complaint comes from a person who’s not being fair minded in their assessment of the relationship. Obviously, you need to think of your own interests, but the fair-minded person also tries to put themselves in the other person’s shoes and think about their perspective. When you do that then you can help create a bridge to improve the relationship.

The classic example is the contractor who complains about low-balling and then goes to his dealer to buy a piece of equipment and he wants a low-ball price. Is that fair mindedness? No, it’s not. He wants a profit for his business but he doesn’t want the dealer to profit. In order to have good customers, and everyone wants good customers, the first step is to be a good customer. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think when contractors are a good customer to a dealer they will find a higher level of customer coming to them. And I think the converse point is true as well. If you’re a holy terror as far as being a customer, you’re probably not going to attract the customers you’d like to have.

Clearly, there’s fault on both sides. We’ve got dealers out there who are trying to be more or less just equipment brokers that just sell stuff, and when it comes time to provide service, which is what being a dealer is all about, somehow they want to disappear. And those guys exist, but there aren’t any long-term prospects for dealers like that. We preach that hard all the time. If I’m not going to get service from a dealer I might as well sell over the Internet. But the point is that we want service for our customers so we won’t sell online because of that very issue.

Of course, there’s some fault with the customers who want some low-ball price. Then the dealers can’t afford to provide them the loaners and drive through service they want, yet they won’t provide them the margin they need to do that. There’s no long-term future in that relationship either. They really need each other, so those who figure out a way to build that relationship will grow and thrive on both sides.