Page 176 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Top Grade Construction paving crew at work.
ZERO TO SEVENTY-FIVE IN MARKET SHARE
It took three years, but in 2001, Cat finally became the paver of choice. And by 2006, it was the num- ber one paver in the industry. Today, Peterson en- joys over 75 percent PINS (Percentage of Industry New Sales) or market share in the paving market within its tri-state territory. But back in 1992, it was a big fat zero. Those early machine woes put a glitch in Caterpillar’s and Peterson’s efforts to win over the market. But many customers with fleets of traditional Cat equipment stuck it out, despite the rocky start. “Everybody that bought a paver in the early years played a part in its evolution,” says Hodson. Customers like O’Grady Paving, Top Grade, Ghilotti Construction, Ghilotti Bros., and Interstate Grading & Paving were all first adopters and helped Peterson gain traction in the market. “They put their faith in us when things weren’t so good, knowing that we would recover and help with their product and never walk away from them. Which is exactly what happened. But we went through a lot of growing pains in those early years,” says Hodson. “We put out a lot of loaners
to customers who were having problems with their machine. And it cost us a lot of money. I’m sure there were some people around here who thought paving wasn’t such a good idea at the time because we spent a lot of money early on to get this to go.”
Marty Johnson, Peterson’s BCP shop foreman in San Leandro, was on the front lines as a paving field tech back then. “In the early days, we went after Barber-Greene customers to try to get them to convert over. We did lots of equipment dem- os and jumped through a lot of hoops because the machine had a lot of problems from the start. But Cat was really good about taking care of the ma- chines that were already sold, bringing them in over the next couple of winters for retrofits and updates. That really impressed the customers be- cause they saw that Peterson would stick with them and wouldn’t just walk away. They were real happy to see Cat come to the table and admit that, ‘Yep, we’ve got problems and here’s our fix.’ That made a big splash in the industry and changed a lot of minds of customers still sitting on the side- lines watching this whole thing unfold.”
174 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG