Expanding the Business #

When we took over the Ford franchise, besides dropping American Motors and Volkswagen we moved the Case franchise of the business to a separate building in the Industrial Park. This building was owned by Brian and was paid rent for as long as we used it. Now, Schulz Motors consisted of 3 buildings. Our main building which consisted of the Showroom and connected service and parts area, the Service Station across the street from it and now the whole agricultural area in that building of Brian’s in the Industrial park.

During this time the parent company of Case, Teneco purchase International Harvester and did not want to have two competing Tractor and Ag companies they wanted them to merge into one. I think they called this Case International. Where there was both a Case and an International Harvester they would pick one and buy out the other. All of the other smaller communities around us only had Case franchises so Teneco gave each of them the franchise. When it came to Barrhead there were both and as an excuse Teneco said they had to give it to the International Harvester because they did not want to show favorites. This was a real blow to both my Dad and my Uncle. I couldn’t have been happier. This solved my cash flow problem that I was seeing with dead, and I mean dead used tractor deals that we were unable to move for 3 or 4 years.

The year was 1985, and in the terms of the contract, Case would have to pay us dollar for dollar for all our parts and inventory and that included the Used Tractors that had been sitting there for years. The new franchise had to buy them dollar for dollar. By the way, the new franchise could not sell those tractors and machinery either. This put us in the black with a strong cash flow and no more liabilities with the Bank. My uncle still continued to make stupid mistakes like buying our Truck and Trailer with cash instead of financing it. This put a big dent in the cash that was available to us. What can I say, he refused to allow me to show him how easy it was to predict when and where we would be short money with the cash flow prediction that was right on the financial reports.

With the end of the Case franchise you might think we would just hang it up. We would not be able to sell any more tractors and any Case International Machinery, but we could still run an agricultural service department. We made a deal with a Case dealer that we were friends with in Stony Plain and got them for cost plus 10% or something like that. Although, the International store won the Case International franchise they lacked the expertise that we had in our shop. The other day my brother was telling me a story about how the Case International store was doing a PTO warranty job and it blew up twice on them. Case HQ called us up and asked if we could do it. Our condition was that they would have to bring it to our shop and we were able to complete the job easily. In our hay day we fixed so many of these in record time because Dad had designed a tool to simplify the process and as a result Case rewrote their Service manual.