Page 82 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

The Cat Rental Store, Hillsboro, Oregon in 2018
Peterson went into the business full tilt. “Cat man- dated that we use the Cat Rental Store model in Oregon,” says Goggin, “but we took their idea and ran with it the Peterson Way. We didn’t come in with a few pieces and wait for the demand to dic- tate our inventory. We came in with hundreds.” Backed by fifteen years in the local rental mar- ket, Bolen knew exactly what Peterson’s inven- tory lacked. “We built up our non-Cat inventory to over six hundred items with aerial equipment, trucks, reach forklifts, traffic control equipment, light towers, forestry mowers, and much more. We had to park some of it out along the fence line by the freeway because we were running out of room,” says Bolen.
Since then, Peterson has grown its rental pres- ence throughout Oregon and Washington. It also uses the Cat Rental Store branding at many of its California rental locations. Today, Peterson’s Rental Services group operates out of thirty stores throughout Northern California, Oregon, and southern Washington.
OREGON’S THREE-IN-ONE RENTAL BUSINESS
Peterson’s Oregon rental business was a hybrid from the start, built upon Cresco’s success and the Cat Rental Store template. “In order for a rental business to be viable, you need to have all the oth- er allied products because customers aren’t going to come to a place that only rents backhoes,” says Duane Sr. “People want a store that rents what- ever they need. In California, we fully embraced that. We bought Cresco because we didn’t want to start from scratch. And the Cat Rental Store model hadn’t come out yet.” In Oregon, Peterson took the lessons learned with Cresco, fused it with Cat’s business model, and added heavy equipment rentals and power generation up to 100kW. (Large commercial power is still under Peterson Power Systems in Oregon.) What emerged was a three- in-one anomaly that has proven quite successful in the Oregon market.
80 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG