Nov 18 2024 26 mins
Todd Backman, President and CEO of Florida Coast Equipment and Big Orange Rental, discusses how they prepared for and managed the impact of hurricanes on their dealership and rental operations. They prioritize the safety of their employees and customers, prepping their stores and equipment for potential damage. They also ensure that essential equipment like generators and chainsaws are available in affected areas. The response to the hurricanes is ongoing, with some areas still underwater and ongoing demand for equipment. The rental business has seen increased demand, with priority given to existing accounts.
Welcome to The Dig, where equipment finance news editors connect with industry leaders and dealers to discuss news analysis, market trends, tips, and more. I am Johnny Martinez II, Senior Associate Editor of Equipment Finance News, the one news source for both dealers and lenders. And on today's episode of The Dig, I'm joined by Todd Backman, President and CEO of Florida Coast Equipment and Big Organe Rental, and I'll let Todd introduce himself. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah.
Happy to be here. Yeah. I'm Todd, President of Florida Coast and President and CEO of Florida Coast Equipment and Big Orange Rental. We are a 14-location Kubota dealership as well as Big Orange Rental, which is our rental arm. But even that is predominantly Kubota equipment, focusing in Florida. We have stores from Ocala to the Keys, which is basically three-quarters of the 80% of the population in Florida, 260 employees, and I'm excited to have a conversation today about what's going on in the industry.
Fantastic. Well, again, thank you so much for joining us. And, you know, you talked about it so much of what, well, everything you guys do is based in the Florida region, which has been drastically impacted by not one but two hurricanes that have come through. And so with the Florida market being impacted by these hurricanes, first off, how did you guys prepare to kind of manage the situation both at the dealership level and at the rental level because there's some subtle differences between the two? Yeah.
Yeah. So, look, the first and foremost we want to do is go, okay, guys, let's look at this from the human perspective. What do the individuals need to do at home? And so what we try to do, which can be fairly disruptive, is that anything that's in the cone kind of four days out, you know, four to five days out, we start prepping the store no matter where it is. And so if there's a chance that it's going to get affected, we start prepping the store.
And that is literally, you know, getting machines off of racks and getting things down, anything that can fly away or become a projectile, get it on the ground, get it inside, making sure crates are cleaned up, making sure trash is cleaned up, just kind of the really basics. And what we try to do is get in front of that so that when we're 24 hours out, people can go home and get their homes ready because a lot of times the people are waiting for the last minute to do their homes, but we try to get in front of it from the dealership perspective so that people can get out and take care of their homes.
The other thing we do is that, you know, if the East Coast isn't going to get affected, but the West Coast is, whether it's grapplers, generators, chainsaws, we try to get that stuff to the affected markets as quickly as possible. And kind of the way that goes is really the five days leading up to a storm, you're going to sell generators, you're going to sell chainsaws, that's what it's going to be, gas cans, whatever is essential to kind of get through that initial wave.
And so we try to get that stuff in quickly. Molly and her team are working on the marketing side to make sure folks know what we have and what we don't have because gas cans, you may have a floor full of gas cans and two days later you have no gas cans. You may have generators and then you don't have them. It just is a matter of how quickly these things go. And so that's kind of the first run.
Then right before the storm it's, you know, making sure that we have everybody's phone number, know where everybody's going. I usually am the first one in and so I'll usually go in and maybe another member of our team will go in. We find a hotel close to what we believe is going to be the most affected area. We're going in to make sure that we have Starlinks ready to go coming out of the storm and things like that.
So we want to kind of get in as quickly as possible. First and foremost, we're trying to check with our staff as quickly as we can, hey, is everybody safe? Everybody good to go? Then we're looking at our facilities. And then the immediate thing is like, okay, guys, this is go time. You know, we get up in the morning and say we're going to deliver superior customer service on rival product support every day. You find out whether you really believe that or whether you're able to do that after a storm because guys are putting together machines without power there.
You're doing contracts without power. You have no internet. You have no phones. I mean, you go third world country really quickly after a storm and so anything we can do on the front end to prepare for that is simple. I mean, things as simple as price books. In the old days, you had paper price books. Now everything's online so we're making sure that we're downloading price books coming out of making sure that if we have no power, we have no internet, that we can still get it.
And if you haven't lived through a storm, I mean, when the cell towers go, I mean, you have nothing. I mean, you have Starlink and that's it. People don't realize. You know, the old days you had paper contracts and you had paper quotes and all that. You don't have any of that. Everything is electronic now so you've got to figure out how to operate back in the dark ages again when this happens. And so anything you can do to prepare for that is what we're spending our time on.
Gotcha. And, you know, now we're a few months removed. How has the response sort of been at the dealership level both in terms of, hey, here's what we've done to kind of move forward and get our operations going, but also, you know, now we're starting to get to the back end of it. We're returning to whatever normal is at this point, right, because they try to get back to 100% normal. Yeah. So this storm was really strange.
One, the devastation was way worse than what the media covered. Obviously things in North Carolina had been so bad that what happened here was small. But, I mean, it's – look, we're talking November 15th today. We still have communities that are still underwater from that storm. So we haven't come out of it. There was – you know, there was a couple of pictures of the Tampa Bay Stadium and things like that. But that really wasn't the damage.
If you live in the northeast, you'll probably understand this best, is that, you know, usually after a big snowstorm, the main highways, they get clear really quickly and they look good. But the side roads were a disaster for weeks. That's really where we are right now. The main roads are clear, but there were tons of coastal flooding damage done. This storm did not bring the normal wind damage that you see in a lot of places. But it was tons of flooding, tons of inland flooding, and the damage on this was not – you didn't look at one area and it'd just be devastated.
You would drive two hours over a big rainstorm and then you'd show up and it looked like you had a massive flood. It didn't look like a hurricane, it looked like a massive flood. Then you'd drive across to Vero and, I mean, the tornadoes just wiped the place out. And so, you know, it's been spotty as far as how do you recover from that. So what we didn't get was that normal deal where, you know, you'd have massive powder towerages, they'd build one for weeks and things like that.
So yo...
Welcome to The Dig, where equipment finance news editors connect with industry leaders and dealers to discuss news analysis, market trends, tips, and more. I am Johnny Martinez II, Senior Associate Editor of Equipment Finance News, the one news source for both dealers and lenders. And on today's episode of The Dig, I'm joined by Todd Backman, President and CEO of Florida Coast Equipment and Big Organe Rental, and I'll let Todd introduce himself. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah.
Happy to be here. Yeah. I'm Todd, President of Florida Coast and President and CEO of Florida Coast Equipment and Big Orange Rental. We are a 14-location Kubota dealership as well as Big Orange Rental, which is our rental arm. But even that is predominantly Kubota equipment, focusing in Florida. We have stores from Ocala to the Keys, which is basically three-quarters of the 80% of the population in Florida, 260 employees, and I'm excited to have a conversation today about what's going on in the industry.
Fantastic. Well, again, thank you so much for joining us. And, you know, you talked about it so much of what, well, everything you guys do is based in the Florida region, which has been drastically impacted by not one but two hurricanes that have come through. And so with the Florida market being impacted by these hurricanes, first off, how did you guys prepare to kind of manage the situation both at the dealership level and at the rental level because there's some subtle differences between the two? Yeah.
Yeah. So, look, the first and foremost we want to do is go, okay, guys, let's look at this from the human perspective. What do the individuals need to do at home? And so what we try to do, which can be fairly disruptive, is that anything that's in the cone kind of four days out, you know, four to five days out, we start prepping the store no matter where it is. And so if there's a chance that it's going to get affected, we start prepping the store.
And that is literally, you know, getting machines off of racks and getting things down, anything that can fly away or become a projectile, get it on the ground, get it inside, making sure crates are cleaned up, making sure trash is cleaned up, just kind of the really basics. And what we try to do is get in front of that so that when we're 24 hours out, people can go home and get their homes ready because a lot of times the people are waiting for the last minute to do their homes, but we try to get in front of it from the dealership perspective so that people can get out and take care of their homes.
The other thing we do is that, you know, if the East Coast isn't going to get affected, but the West Coast is, whether it's grapplers, generators, chainsaws, we try to get that stuff to the affected markets as quickly as possible. And kind of the way that goes is really the five days leading up to a storm, you're going to sell generators, you're going to sell chainsaws, that's what it's going to be, gas cans, whatever is essential to kind of get through that initial wave.
And so we try to get that stuff in quickly. Molly and her team are working on the marketing side to make sure folks know what we have and what we don't have because gas cans, you may have a floor full of gas cans and two days later you have no gas cans. You may have generators and then you don't have them. It just is a matter of how quickly these things go. And so that's kind of the first run.
Then right before the storm it's, you know, making sure that we have everybody's phone number, know where everybody's going. I usually am the first one in and so I'll usually go in and maybe another member of our team will go in. We find a hotel close to what we believe is going to be the most affected area. We're going in to make sure that we have Starlinks ready to go coming out of the storm and things like that.
So we want to kind of get in as quickly as possible. First and foremost, we're trying to check with our staff as quickly as we can, hey, is everybody safe? Everybody good to go? Then we're looking at our facilities. And then the immediate thing is like, okay, guys, this is go time. You know, we get up in the morning and say we're going to deliver superior customer service on rival product support every day. You find out whether you really believe that or whether you're able to do that after a storm because guys are putting together machines without power there.
You're doing contracts without power. You have no internet. You have no phones. I mean, you go third world country really quickly after a storm and so anything we can do on the front end to prepare for that is simple. I mean, things as simple as price books. In the old days, you had paper price books. Now everything's online so we're making sure that we're downloading price books coming out of making sure that if we have no power, we have no internet, that we can still get it.
And if you haven't lived through a storm, I mean, when the cell towers go, I mean, you have nothing. I mean, you have Starlink and that's it. People don't realize. You know, the old days you had paper contracts and you had paper quotes and all that. You don't have any of that. Everything is electronic now so you've got to figure out how to operate back in the dark ages again when this happens. And so anything you can do to prepare for that is what we're spending our time on.
Gotcha. And, you know, now we're a few months removed. How has the response sort of been at the dealership level both in terms of, hey, here's what we've done to kind of move forward and get our operations going, but also, you know, now we're starting to get to the back end of it. We're returning to whatever normal is at this point, right, because they try to get back to 100% normal. Yeah. So this storm was really strange.
One, the devastation was way worse than what the media covered. Obviously things in North Carolina had been so bad that what happened here was small. But, I mean, it's – look, we're talking November 15th today. We still have communities that are still underwater from that storm. So we haven't come out of it. There was – you know, there was a couple of pictures of the Tampa Bay Stadium and things like that. But that really wasn't the damage.
If you live in the northeast, you'll probably understand this best, is that, you know, usually after a big snowstorm, the main highways, they get clear really quickly and they look good. But the side roads were a disaster for weeks. That's really where we are right now. The main roads are clear, but there were tons of coastal flooding damage done. This storm did not bring the normal wind damage that you see in a lot of places. But it was tons of flooding, tons of inland flooding, and the damage on this was not – you didn't look at one area and it'd just be devastated.
You would drive two hours over a big rainstorm and then you'd show up and it looked like you had a massive flood. It didn't look like a hurricane, it looked like a massive flood. Then you'd drive across to Vero and, I mean, the tornadoes just wiped the place out. And so, you know, it's been spotty as far as how do you recover from that. So what we didn't get was that normal deal where, you know, you'd have massive powder towerages, they'd build one for weeks and things like that.
So yo...