David and Troy discuss the psychological impact of preventative maintenance on the value of your equipment. #BlackbirdTV
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: Troy Clark, President, Clark Machinery Sales. To learn more about our guest, visit ClarkMachinerySales.com, or call 410-252-5494.
Recorded: September 28, 2020
Published: November 16, 2021
Segment transcript
Troy, when you’re buying a piece of equipment, what’s the most important thing to you to bring a piece of equipment in inventory? What do you look at? I know it’s probably because I have an eye towards resaling the thing, which means it’s sort of like somebody that’s going to be a house flipper. They look at the house and they say, Well, I’m not going to have to put that much money into it. The bones are good. The siding is good. The carpet doesn’t need to be replaced. So in the same way, my team looks at the visual, but there’s a reason we look at the visual in my experience. If the visuals are good, if it’s not filthy, if the machine is clean. That says to me, that the operator, the company has a regular regiment of maintenance, right? Yeah. Says to me that they are aware that they’re taking care of the small problems so that they’re not going to grow any big problems if they hear a noise. I have a customer. He said, Troy, I want you to take this Haas UMC 750 to market. Great. So that’s super what you tell me about it. Well, we’re going to replace the spindle. What’s wrong with the spindle? He said. Well, nothing. Oh, OK. So what do you have a spindle on the on shelf? He said, well, because we started hearing a noise, this is what we’re going to do. So just know that. That’s awesome. Yeah. Those are the type of people we love working with, and we love bringing people into those type of shops. That’s why we have a 60 to 70% repeat buyer, you know, customer relationship going on because those are the winners. I just had a guy last week say you have dirty machine, these machines are going to get dirty anyway. And OK, I get that. But why would you want to start with a dirty house? So I just think maintenance, regular maintenance, you vacuum your house… clean out the shop, clean out the machine. It’s an indicator of condition. Absolutely. And if I could just pile on that as an appraiser, I go into lots and lots and lots of shops. And in our report, in our narrative, we comment on the condition of the shop and the housekeeping and the general housekeeping. Because as you point out, Troy, that is a reflection on the preventative maintenance programs that that company has. In the write up? Like… It’s in the narrative of our report. And that’s a narrative that builds on the things that are outside the scope of, well, this is, you know, a 25,000 dollar machine. And when you walk into a shop and it’s knee deep in oily chips and there’s rags all over the place and just you, you kind of walk out and take a bath. It reflects on so much more of what’s going on there. And when you see equipment that’s covered with Band-Aids, to your point, you’re not going to want to buy it. You’re the dealer, you’re the guy who’s going to buy it, tweak it, resell it, you’re going to give the guarantee on it. So the takeaway: preventative maintenance shows. And it shows on the equipment. It shows on the maintenance. It shows on what the shop looks like overall. And people are going to be more reluctant to purchase a piece of used equipment from a shop that looks like it hasn’t been maintained at all. I think that’s interesting because you’re asking me about retail or what I look as a buyer., and when you buy, but from a from an appraisal standpoint, that’s… that’s very interesting. And I haven’t pushed that with people, but that’s really true. You need your machines to appraise for more so that you can get a larger line of credit from the bank. You need your machines to appraise for more when you go to sell it to a competitor or somebody an employee. Wow. Yeah, yeah, you need to have more than just the story that these machines are tight. These machines run great because how they appear affects so much. Yeah. The psychological impact of preventative maintenance on the value of your equipment. Troy Clark Clark Machinery Sales, thanks for joining us today. Thank you, David.