Business View Magazine | November 2019

36 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2019 AT A GLANCE WALCO EQUIPMENT LTD. WHAT: A distributor of agricultural, lawn, and garden equipment WHERE: Elmira, Ontario WEBSITE: www.walcoequipment.com W alco Equipment Ltd., with headquarters in Elmira, Ontario, is a distributor of short line agricultural, lawn, and garden equipment; industrial products, such as chains, hooks, overhead lifting devices, wire ropes, and other hardware; cargo control, such as heavy duty tie downs, interior straps, and products for interior vans and flatbed trucks; and tire chains for snow blowers, garden and full-size tractors, and truck and forestry equipment. The company sources equipment and products from around the world to provide quality products at competitive prices, marketed through selected dealers. Walco has been in business since 1972 and was purchased in 1983 by its current owners, including its CEO, Laverne Martin. “It was a very small company,” Martin recounts. “We began to grow it, and move into a variety of different areas. We continued to expand our lines; we went from a straight agricultural equipment distributor to add industrial components as another market segment. One of the reasons that we diversified into the industrial is because we found, a number of years ago, that as a distributor, especially in Canada, your sales are down in the winter time. So, as one market is down, the other one helps to support you. So, that’s something that we moved into to diversify ourselves. We added warehouses – one in Randolph, Minnesota and one in St. Germain De Grantham, Quebec. We put people there, but had our products at somebody else’s facility. As we grew, we eventually built our own warehouses.” “We are not a manufacturer in that we do not do the cut and weld onsite,” Martin continues. “We have people who do it exclusively for us. It’s our own private label and we farm it out to local small manufacturers to produce our product. On the agricultural end, we are strictly wholesalers. We only sell to dealers, and not end users. We have found, through the years that, in the agricultural THE ONLY WAY TO DO BUSINESS