Page 202 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 202

  CORE VALUE: INTEGRITY
GROWING THROUGH THE LEARNING CURVE (2004)
For some people, Monday mornings just aren’t worth a damn until after a couple of cups of coffee. For Mike Coiner, no amount of coffee was going to fix this problem. The voice mail he’d just picked up was pretty brutal: “If this is as good as it gets, then bring a blankety-blank low-boy and get this thing
out of here. I’m done!”The call was time-stamped two o’clock that morning. And here he’d thought everything was finally going fairly well.
  Left to right: The Timberking; Peterson’s Forestry expert, Mike Coiner
It had been a rough couple of years trying to support Cater- pillar’s new feller buncher—the Timberking. But Coiner, Pe- terson’s technical communica- tor in Eugene at the time, was doing his best. Caterpillar had acquired the Blount-built ma- chine a few years earlier to fill in a gap in its own forest prod- ucts line. Coiner had been there when the first ones arrived in 2004. The fact that they couldn’t get one off the truck without a lift should have been a warning of things to come. Still, if Cat- erpillar offered it, then Peterson
would stand by it. Coiner’s commitment to his customer had taken him down a long and rutted road to prove that he stood by what he sold—come hell or high water. Still, it hadn’t been pretty.
Back in 1999, he’d helped sell Tony Meline his first feller buncher, a Timbco T445C from Papé Bros. At the time, it was the hottest thing in the timber industry. Meline, owner of TRM Cutting out of Coos Bay, Ore- gon, had bought his father’s logging business back in the late 1980s and had finally decided to make the leap into the twenty-first century with mechanized felling. In 2004, when talk of the newest computerized feller buncher started circulating, he was intrigued. At that point, he had two Timbcos working at full output for Weyerhaeuser. But Meline, by nature, was not one to sit back and watch others take the lead.
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