Page 71 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

The reason we exist
Six months later, Cartwright chose Dolan for the hillside 345 rescue even though he had plenty of his own technicians. “When we were on the pipeline, we were pretty much resident pipeline mechanics,” says Dolan. “We’d call our service manager from Peterson every once in a while, just to say we were alive. But we worked for Rockford for those two years straight. Within three weeks, the boss could see that we would be there every morning. Seven days a week. No wait time. No questions asked.” The end result was a happy customer who decided they could get everything they needed from Peterson.
Over on Spread 6, Shively was
experiencing a similar situation.
“They were having a lot of duo-
cone seal failures on final drives
because of all the mud and debris.
So they asked me to go check out a
machine to see what parts I needed
and get it taken care of. I ended up
staying late into the night to get it
done. The next morning, they asked me to go out and finish the job, but it was already done. After you’ve done three or four of these in a row, you start figuring out what parts to keep on your truck to make things more convenient. It’s all about the customer’s uptime.”
After that, Cartwright started asking him to bring in a couple more Peterson techs to help out. “It got to where they started asking us to give their mechanics a hand. In the beginning, it was basically: What do you want me to do? Where do you want me to go? By the middle of the job, I was telling him where I was going, what parts I had ordered, and where I’d be next. Eventually, he realized he could delegate that section of the spread to the Peterson guy and know it was going to get taken care of.”
During those two years, Dolan and Shively lived in the small, nearby town of Lakeview for stretches at a time. “Spread 6 was very difficult to access,” recalls Shively. “So when we got back to town, it would already be shut down for the night. We’d call in our dinner orders to-go and pick them up on the way to the hotel because the restaurants would already be closed by then.” Often on weekends, their young families would come to town for a visit, swimming in the hotel pool and hanging out with dad. It was a very big commitment for all the techs and their families.
Dolan and Shively and their teams represented Peterson well on the project, so much so that after a while, there were no other service trucks on the job except Peterson’s and the contractor’s. “The balance Peterson had between trusting us to do our jobs and still maintaining control over daily operations was amazing,” says Dolan. “Peterson is second to none when it comes to customer service and being able to make things hap- pen for the customer. It almost seems like magic. I’ve worked for another equipment dealer so I’ve seen the difference. I’m very proud that even though we had another dealer in our territory, we represented Peterson to the point that halfway through, there were no other dealer trucks in Klamath Falls,” says Dolan. “You can accomplish anything when you’ve got a team behind you that’s got your back.”
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