From the time he started Agri-Service, Cleve Buttars understood that to succeed, his business needed to be laser focused on people. First, it needed to be customer centric. That included delivering products and services to create customer satisfaction and loyalty. He wanted them to become advocates for his business.

In order to accomplish this, he also knew his employees needed to share this attitude toward the people walking through the dealership’s door. “One of the goals I set for my business was I would never work with or employ a jerk,” he says. “I was not going to work with somebody who was not a good person or who was difficult to work with. I planned on making my employees feel like partners because I knew how important it was.”

Dedication to this approach was based on Buttars’ 20-plus years of experience at his family’s farm equipment dealership, Buttars’ Tractor, in Logan, Utah. “I worked there from age 12 to 35. I even worked full time when I went to college. I started in the parts department and gradually went to sales and then management.” 

He says that’s where his philosophy on how to run a successful dealership — focused on people, externally and internally — developed. 

New Beginnings, Stiff Competition

In the fall of 1989, at the age of 35, Buttars decided to strike out on his own and leave the family business. He was encouraged by Paul Rudge, district manager of Hesston at the time, to look at a failing dealership in Twin Falls, Idaho, some 200 miles away from Buttars’ Tractor.

Rudge arranged an interview with Fiat Corp., which owned Hesston at the time. With some help from Fiat with start-up costs, Buttars hired another salesman and a parts person, eventually adding a service tech and a bookkeeper. He also invested $5,000 in “an old truck and some tools.”

In January 1990, Agri-Service was born as a Hesston dealership. Fourteen months later AGCO acquired Hesston, which at the time was in a 50/50 participation arrangement with Case IH. So, Buttars was not only stepping into the arena with established John Deere dealers, but he would also be selling the same Hesston big bale equipment as Case IH. The only difference was the Case IH balers were painted red.

“Other dealers in the west used Cleve as a sounding board when they wanted to discuss issues with AGCO or other dealership matters…” – Paul Rudge, former Hesston district manager

Despite this, Buttars admits his timing couldn’t have been better. During the 1980s, several large dairies from California moved their operations to the Twin Falls area and were switching from using small hay bales to big bales. According to Buttars, big balers produced better hay that held up better in bad weather and were simpler to transport, and Hesston dominated the big baler market through much of the country. “We lived and grew with the Hesston big balers from the start,” says Buttars.

“I came up there as a 35-year-old kid starting a new dealership that had to compete with established dealers. I knew we would get the sales, but I also knew that sales weren’t where dealerships make their real money,” he says. “For continuity, we needed to build our parts and service business. This is how Agri-Service would ultimately succeed.”

And he was right; the sales did come. After the first year, Agri-Service was among Hesston’s top 10 dealers. In the second year, it was the company’s third biggest and by the end of the fourth year in 1993, it topped all Hesston dealers in sales nationwide.

Nurturing Internal Partners

Asked to characterize what made him successful and what set him apart from competing dealers, Buttars explains: “I didn’t lose employees who we didn’t want to lose, and I didn’t lose customers who were worth keeping. I did whatever I had to do to hold onto them and developed a good base of employees and customers.”

Buttars paid his parts people and service techs “more than anybody else did. I knew that a competent parts person who would get up in the middle of the night and get customers the parts they needed was invaluable. The same thing for service. Techs who worked after hours could almost double their wages for overtime. I made it worth their while because it wasn’t me getting out of bed at 4 a.m. to help a customer.”  

The dealership salesmen were paid fairly, but not as much as competing salesmen “because sales were easy,” he says. “We were selling big balers that everybody wanted. Tractors were a little trickier, but people came to us to buy those things, too.

“With our salespeople, we worked out a competitive markup. They had to quote the exact same price on new machinery and they made a standard commission that was livable. They made more if they bought the trade from the customer for less than I would allow them to put into the trade-in. If we allowed $18,000 for a used baler and they bought $16,000, they got one half of that windfall. That’s where they made their money. They became partners with me on that used equipment.” 

Inaugural Farm Equipment Hall of Fame Class of 2024: Cleve Buttars





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Another part of Buttars’ approach to salespeople was to teach them their best friends were the shop people. “At a lot of dealers, shop people hate salesmen because they overpromise on the sale, and salesmen hate shop people because they overestimate reconditioning costs,” he says. “But those two became partners in finding the best way to recondition stuff. The salesman did better that way, and if the shop beat a reconditioning estimate, the shop people got a bonus.”

Buttars believes the biggest key to his success was emphasizing that service techs and parts people were as important to the dealership as the salespeople. “Probably more so in the customer’s view,” he adds.

Keeping the Customer Satisfied

After relocating to Twin Falls, Buttars realized most competing dealers were large and “a little impersonal.” That wasn’t his way. “I got to know my employees and my customers personally. I’m a people person, and my natural default is to like people and they like me back. This helped me hire good people and to cement business relationships.”

Building and maintaining those relationships is really what set Buttars apart, according to Rudge.

After AGCO acquired Hesston, Rudge stayed on as the company’s Western Region district manager. He says, “There were better dealers when it came to the mechanics and operation of the equipment, but there was no one better at customer relations than Cleve. If a customer had a problem, he’d get involved to help solve it. He didn’t leave a stone unturned until the customer was satisfied. He was continually in contact with his customer base.”

Hall of Fame Digital Extras

For a complete archive of Farm Equipment articles on Cleve Buttars and Agri-Service, click here!

Buttars was also a visionary. He saw early on how farms were consolidating and getting bigger, as were farm equipment dealerships. And he recognized quickly how easy it was to lose touch with customers, especially when a dealership is expanding and reaching into new locations.

During a 2009 interview with Farm Equipment, Buttars said customer satisfaction needed to be a systematic effort that requires meeting customer requirements and consistent communications. Providing a structure to his efforts and making it a focal point of the entire dealership led to the creation of a new department that focuses specifically on customer retention. “That’s what we called it, the customer retention department,” Buttars said. “We created it for one purpose — that’s to provide consistent contact with our customers.”

Prying customers away from rival dealerships was always an ongoing battle. Buttars believed that losing a customer was totally unacceptable. Industry consolidation furthered Agri-Service’s efforts to keep its customers happy and coming back. “If you lose a customer, it’s a true loss. There aren’t many replacements out there.”

Succession Planning Success

By the time Buttars decided he was ready for “a change in life,” the dealership’s succession planning was well underway. By 2009, Agri-Service was employing nearly 200 people at 8 locations in Idaho, Oregon and Utah, along with a service-only shop in Idaho. 

Up to that point, it was the largest AGCO dealership for 7 consecutive years. Agri-Service was also the top AGCO parts dealers and the largest originator of contracts for AGCO Finance since its inception in 2001. Its growth ran parallel to that of its major supplier. 

By that time, Buttars enticed his son-in-law, Clint Schnoor, to leave a lucrative career in the mortgage banking industry. He named Schnoor COO, but more importantly, he became Buttars’ protégé. While Schnoor says he and Buttars had a “unique relationship,” he also saw his father-in-law as a “friend.” 

Until he joined Agri-Service, Schnoor didn’t realize how influential Buttars was in the farm equipment business. “Not only was he a pioneer in introducing the big square baler, but he had a huge influence on the dairymen who moved to Idaho from California.”

Schnoor adds Buttars’ passion for progress went beyond the dealership. “He was always trying to make the industry better.”

His influence extended all the way to the top of AGCO. Buttars served on AGCO’s dealer board for 10 years, while most of his peers served 2-year terms. In fact, Bob Ratliff, co-founder and CEO of AGCO, would come all the way to Twin Falls to see his favorite dealer, says Schnoor.

Noting Buttars’ “big personality,” Schnoor admires how much respect other dealers had for him. “He always kept in touch with other dealers and was always willing to reach across the aisle.”

With his successor in place, Buttars’ next step was to assure his employees continued to feel like partners in the business. He accomplished this in 2010 by establishing Agri-Service as an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). “I’d been looking into employee ownership for a few years and the timing just seemed right,” Buttars says. “The hope was that every employee would take ownership literally and treat the business like their own, which it was.”

In late 2013, Agri-Service was acquired by Western States Caterpillar. Today, Agri-Service has 13 locations and 241 employees and is #73 on the Farm Equipment Dealer 100™, a ranking of the top 100 North American farm equipment dealers by number of locations.

Jim Walker, who was vice president and general manager of AGCO North America in the early 2000s, says, “I always had high admiration for Cleve. He believed in the brand and his customers. He demonstrated that dealers could work in lockstep with their OEM and do a great job for each other.” 

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