Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/236097
2014 Business Outlook Report Committee in December makes McConnell too queasy to discuss at length, but beyond even the impact of policy, he predicts the industry could witness some southerly winds perhaps 18 months down the road. A possible warning signal: In the early fall he was anticipating a hot rental conversion season, "but we got a lot more back than we got nailed down." East Coast Mixed Line Dealer – Liebherr, Link Belt, Kawasaki, Terex trucks. Gerard Calamari of Contractors Sales Co., Albany, N.Y., has carved out a nice niche business from a one-location store that serves a relatively small but high-quality customer base. Although it's a bit of a gamble depending on the 80-20 rule, where 80 percent of the business is generated by 20 percent of their customers, Calamari says his company is carried along nicely when their customers land good contracts. Case in point, a customer got the emergency state contract for highways and there were some floods, he said. "They rented a third of our rental fleet for a big part of the season because he was responding to 100 different jobs, literally...We're a small company. We don't have a big appetite; we don't eat the whole pie. So we get pulled along." His company recognized early that rental was going to be an essential direction for AED dealers and he was an early adopter – nevertheless, volume fell off the cliff by 40 percent in 2008, "like the rest of the planet." They've made a strong comeback and they've ramped rental back up so the company is close to hitting the $20 million revenue mark. But rental has been somewhat disappointing the last two years, he says – they're making it up through used equipment sales, creating their own good, late-model used machines from the rental fleet. Midwest Roadbuilding (including Volvo) and Readymix Equipment Dealer. Larry Glynn at CMW Equipment, St. Louis, couldn't wait any longer for highway work to come back to Southern Illinois and Central Missouri. In a word, highway work in his region is "dismal." One of his largest customers, an international contractor that was spending $5 million to $10 million a year on (continued on next page) Sandboxes The top three construction sectors served by AED dealers who took the CED survey are: surface infrastructure, housing, and commercial building. Unconventional shale energy places fourth, followed by niches that include concrete and scrap/recycling. Water infrastructure ranked sixth, then traditional mining, then forestry. Survey-takers wrote in additional sectors: landscaping; export; heavy industrial and steel and chemical; telecommunications; government/municipalities; and waste handling/landfills. January 2014 | Construction Equipment Distribution | www.cedmag.com | 41