Page 70 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CORE VALUE: CUSTOMER FIRST
Case Shively
the demand. “Rockford had their own pipelayers and support equipment, but they didn’t have enough to do a job of that size,” says Case Shively, Peterson lead on Spread 6. “They rented equipment from NC Machinery, from Pipeline Machinery, Cashman, Peterson, Cresco, Western States, and a few others I’ve never heard of. We had three hundred machines total between Spreads 6 and 7, and we worked on all of it.” Peterson and Cresco had thirty haul trucks, twenty excavators, and twenty D8T rentals on the job, plus a number of re-rents to Cashman before the job moved into Oregon. “In terms of rental volume, our Klamath Falls store has always been the smallest,” says Rich Bolen, GM of Peterson’s rental operations. “But in 2011, it was our number one rental reve- nue-producing store. That’s because, at that time, the Ruby Pipeline was one of the largest construction jobs in North America.”
Weather didn’t shut it down either since it was a seven-days-a-week, fast-track project. “When conditions were bad, D8s towed our service trucks to wherever the broken-down machines were,” says Shively. “And they were spread out all over. There was no one spot they brought the equipment to; you went to it. So we got dragged around in the mud a lot.” Initially, Rockford built a sled to haul the service trucks around, but after an incident where a Cashman truck got its fuel tank ripped out, they aborted the idea and reverted back to D8 tows.
The weather was often miserable but Dolan & Shively worked through it anyway.
Since half the pipeline sits in Nevada, Cat’s Nevada dealer, Cashman Equipment, already had a significant portion of the product support business, including rentals. They even had an air-conditioned parts trailer parked on Spread 6 at Lakeview, Oregon. However, Rockford discovered a whole new level of customer ser- vice once they entered Peterson territory. “I was there about two weeks when their master mechanic [Beau Cartwright] pulled me aside one day and asked if I’d just show up every day,” says Dolan, Peterson’s lead on Spread 7. “He wanted me to work the same schedule as his own guys. Cashman techs had to get dispatched for each job. But since I was assigned to the project, I didn’t have to wait for approval. I just showed up every day.”
68 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG