Where are you from?
I’ve lived 50 miles from Beatrice, Nebraska my whole life. I currently live about ten miles away, with my wonderful wife and my three boys, ages nine to sixteen.
Tell us about what you do at Exmark.
I work in customer service, which has two groups: customer care and technical service. I’m in technical service, where we focus on the technical aspect of the product, and assisting our distributors. Typically we’re on the road about 50 percent of the time January through March. We go to different regions and do hands-on sessions on-location at dealers, making sure they are up to speed on our latest products.
For the rest of the year, we’re tied to the phone the majority of the time. For instance, last year Exmark customer service took 6,500 phone calls. If there’s a major issue we can’t resolve over the phone, we hop on a plane and go out to help resolve the problem firsthand.
The main parts of our job are preparing our service people with hands-on service and knowledge, and answering the customers’ needs. We combine those two and become both the voice of the service guy and the eyes of the customer.
What’s your favorite thing about working with Exmark?
This industry is amazing, full of such great people. I’ve built amazing relationships with end users, dealers, and distributor partners. It’s something that I look forward to each day.
At Exmark, we focus on doing the right thing and developing partnerships with our distributors, dealers, and our end users. By working together and helping our partners, whether distributors, dealers or end users, we’re making our own jobs a little easier in the long run. We’re all interrelated.
What do you like to do in your free time?
With three boys at home, I don’t have much free time! But my main passion for the last 7-8 years has been coaching baseball for my boys. It’s so much fun. The organization does it right. Even though we want to win, the more important priority is building character. And the people are great. There’s nothing better than getting a group of parents and kids together and watching them grow together as a secondary family.
If you could have lunch with any person, who would it be?
I’d like to talk to somebody who lived through the Great Depression or The Dust Bowl. We take so many things for granted and must remember to be careful with what we continue to take from Mother Nature. Any person that lived through such trying times and fought through that: it’s just remarkable to me. Those people just didn’t have the same benefits we do today. You see pictures of what they went through with the Dust Bowl and it’s remarkable they could persevere. We take a lot of things for granted today.
What’s something surprising about you not many people know about?
I graduated in a class of just 8 people. When I was in 6th grade, the entire school from kindergarten to 12th grade had about 110 people in it so I knew everybody by name. Most people are surprised to hear that.
