President: Scott Highland
Specialty: Sales, rentals and servicing of construction and logging equipment
Year founded: 1955
1999 revenues: $85 million
Projected 2000 revenues: About $85 million

Smith Tractor & Equipment Co. President Scott Highland said this year has started off well compared to 1999’s slow start, which he attributed to unusually wet weather. However, once 1999 got under way, it proved to be one of the company’s best years.

Highland said this year should be as good as 1999, even with the possible side-effects of Initiative 695 looming. He said he hasn’t seen much impact from I-695 yet, but he did have a few tractors returned at the end of 1999 from contractors blaming the initiative.

"I’m surprised and pleased that I-695 hasn’t severely impacted us," he said.

Fife-based Smith Tractor & Equipment sells and rents just about any kind of construction machine imaginable, from Bobcats to large excavators and articulated dump trucks. It has 160 employees working out of branches in Chehalis, Montesano, Kent, Mount Vernon, Yakima and Wenatchee.

Smith’s business mix includes 60 percent sales, 19 percent parts, 12 percent rentals and 9 percent service. About 80 percent of the business is construction equipment and the rest is logging and forestry equipment.

In the peak construction season, the company has over $35 million into its rental fleet, which includes 500 pieces of equipment. Also, each of its eight branch offices has a rental manager.

"We are heavy involved in the rental business," Highland said. "It’s a key part of our strategy."

Highland said his rental fleet has very low hours, with less than 1,000 hours on the average tractor. The average age of the fleet is about a year.

Smith Tractor is a John Deere construction equipment dealer. Its competition includes dealers of Caterpillar, Komatsu, Case and Hitachi equipment.

Some of the new Deere equipment Smith is offering include the 27 ZTS, 35 ZTS and 50 ZTS mini-excavators with zero tail swing. They weigh 6,300-10,500 pounds.

On the larger side, there is a new line of articulated dump trucks with payload capacities of 25,000-40,000 pounds. They include model numbers 250C, 300C, 350C and 400C.

The largest new machine is the 750 John Deere Excavator, which weighs in at 75 metric tons.

Highland said a trend in his industry is fewer contractors are doing their own maintenance because modern machines have become more complicated, much like today’s cars. To handle that need, Smith Tractor has a service department in every branch.

"The tractors produced today are higher quality than they ever have been," Highland said. "There’s nowhere near the downtime in the industry there was 10 years ago.

"I believe that contractors and dealers, if they work together properly, can take a significant amount of the cost out of the equipment ownership and operating segment their business. All the new things we see coming are customer efficiency and cost management helpful things."