Barely five years ago, US family-run ag dealership Godfrey Bros was voted Dealership of the Year in the annual ‘Oscars’ run by trade magazine Farm Equipment.

The company was a Michigan-based single store John Deere dealership originally acquired by the Godfrey family in 1974, run by Kevin Godfrey and his son Wally. In the year, they won the award, Godfrey Bros, had sales of $20million, 18 employees and had achieved a 43% increase in sales growth during the previous 3 years.

Even then, they knew that a cloud hung over their head. Although they were the epitome of a successful dealership where customer service dominated everything, they were a ‘square-peg in a round hole’.

They simply did not fit the John Deere model of ‘bigger is better’.

They hung out longer than many others mainly because of the fiercely loyal support of customers, but on 1 September they bowed to the inevitable and sold out to GreenMark, a John Deere dealership group with 16 outlets.

Kevin Godfrey is philosophical. He had known for some time that Godfrey Bros was never going to figure in Deere’s plans. “The bottom line is that they (Deere) are in control, this is the game, and we are part of it.” He says that GreenMark has treated them well but added wistfully, “It’s tough knowing I will never own a John Deere dealership”.

This scenario was mirrored in the UK by the recent news that Bartram Mowers had been acquired by Ernest Doe, another company started in the same era as Godfrey Bros. They were put in a similar position when Ransomes withdrew their franchise having decided that the ‘bigger is better’ model suited their strategy for a large area of eastern England.

This industry has been built on entrepreneurial spirit, risk-taking, passion, enterprise and sacrifice.

The sadness is that those families responsible for building such businesses, creating customer loyalty and employing staff, are now out of the loop. They will effectively have to start again in order to use their proven talents.

Let’s be honest, this is the way that the major international brands will operate today and in the future. But I do believe that our sales and service sector is better equipped to manage what is effectively a two-division dealership structure because we are a family-based industry at the retail level.

I wouldn’t even categorise this as a Premiership and Championship division. The larger dealer groups such as Doe, White, Lister Wilder etc (most of whom are family companies themselves) pride themselves on offering customer service of the highest quality through their branches. Likewise single-store dealers (often started by people who have fallen victim to ‘rationalisation’) will succeed by building their business on exemplary customer service - which is often more important than the brands they sell.

At the same time, specialist manufacturers are continually on the look-out for high quality dealers, particularly when the ‘big-boys’ demand that their dealers offer a full-line of equipment to the exclusion of possible competitive products.

This should not be a debate about big versus small, there is enough flexibility and room for both multi-branch and single-outlet dealers to co-exist and meet customer needs.

It is worth remembering that an enterprising engineer, John Deere, spotted an opportunity in the market in 1837 to manufacturer a superior plough mouldboard. Four years later, a Leicestershire entrepreneur named Thomas Cook organised an escorted train journey for 500 people to travel from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance meeting at a shilling a head, thus creating the world’s first package tour.

From humble beginnings, both mens' endeavours resulted in world-wide brands. History however may judge their resulting success differently