When Eddy Mazer, was 50 years old, he moved his wife and 5 kids from their Saskatchewan farm to Brandon, Man., to become an implement dealer. Bob Mazer was 9 years old at the time. 

“My heart has always been in agriculture and farming, and I didn't want to leave the farm. And so my complete being wasn't very focused on school, it was focused on how I was going to get out of school to go farming,” he says.

When Mazer turned 18 in 1968, he left school and started farming. But it didn’t last long, as his dad had other plans. One year later, it was time for Mazer to join the business. “So sort of by hook or by crook, there it was,” he says. 

Like many who grew up in the dealership, Bob held a number of jobs around the business as a kid and teenager — truck driver, set-up person and whatever else needed doing. “Eventually, I followed my dad around in sales and that really inspired me,” Bob says.

In 1968, after Mazer returned from planting his spring crop, his dad said he and his mother were headed to Europe for a months-long vacation. At 18 years old, he ran the business that summer. “I learned quickly,” he says, including how to sell.

While a lot of responsibility for a kid not old enough to legally have a beer, Mazer “had a ball.” He had the full support and back up of the 20 employees he says. “I had a good summer in sales and Dad got back thought I’d probably undersold because I sold so much,” he laughs.

To say “things grew from there” is an understatement on Mazer’s part. Since joining the dealership as a young man, he has grown the business into the largest New Holland dealership complex in North America at 18 stores. 

From the beginning, Mazer says he approached the business with a focus on what’s good for the farmer, including decisions on product offerings. 

Watershed Moment

“I was selling a Massey combine to a customer outside of town and he said, ‘I want you to see something.’ He took me to the field and showed me they had just bought one of the very first Versatile 900 4WDs,” Mazer says. “At the time 4WDs from International or Versatile — or even John Deere — were in the $10-$15,000 range. This tractor was $28,000, but it had 300 horsepower. I took one look at that thing and said, ‘Holy moly, this is the answer.’

Mazer jumped in his truck, drove home and called his dad to find out if he knew anyone at Versatile. Despite Eddy Mazer’s reservations over the brand, he connected Bob with the sales manager. “This tractor was the turning point,” he says. “We went in the next day and John said, ‘If Eddy Mazer or Bob Mazer wants a contract, you got it.’ And that was really the watershed moment, in 1970.”

Taking on the Versatile 4WD combined with the Massey combine proved to be a great combination for the larger farms in Manitoba. “We just had an explosion. We tripled the size of the business overnight,” Mazer says. 

A couple years later, Eddy Mazer retired and Bob took over the business, with his brother Ed Jr. joining him for 13 years. In the late 80s a John Deere dealership came up for sale, and Ed Jr. left to become the local John Deere dealer. 

Growing the Business

1994 is when Mazer Implements’ expansion began — an expansion that Mazer said was always initiated by the seller. The first acquisitions stemmed from a conversation on the phone. 

“I had a little bit of dispute with the neighboring New Holland/Versatile dealer,” he says. “We had a little situation on the phone and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just come and buy me out? I don’t want to be in the business anymore.’ And that’s how it happened. It was a conversation, in fact, an angry conversation.”

From that point on, he says, Mazer Implements added about a store a year for the next decade. “It became clear that the future of the ag industry would be multiplexes to drive some economy of scale, to be able to distribute the used iron so you weren’t sitting in one location trying to distribute it all.”

With each of those additions, the acquired dealerships shared resources but maintained their unique local identities. “Bob truly believes in partnerships, and that model is how we grew with  local owner/managers in partnerships,” says Wally Butler, CFO of Mazergroup.

Mazer says when it comes down to it, it’s the people in the business that were acquired that makes the difference. “We recognized early that buying a dealership, buying a building in a town with a name on the side of it wasn’t really anything,” he says. “You had to have the people. So, recognize and understand how to deal with those people in the dealership — and make no mistake there was loyalty to the original owner.”

The Mazer team sometimes faced animosity because they were the larger and  more aggressive dealer. That said, Mazer makes it a point on each acquisition to make sure the staff of the new store feels comfortable with their future. “We always gave them the benefits of their seniority of the time they put in at the prior dealerships,” he says. 

In some instances, like with the Regina store, the size of the customers was putting strain on the business. For example, the store’s largest customer in Regina is well over 70,000 acres and runs 18-20 combines. “They want new equipment. What are you going to do with the used units in your single store?”

To add to the challenge, the area also has a 45,000-acre customer and a couple who farm 35,000 acres. “If you take those 4 or 5 good customers of ours out of the equation of the land base, we’re screwed,” he says. “As an independent dealer, you’d be  screwed. We have stores that are 9 hours of hard driving from there to the east side. What’s happening now is that we’re dissipating this used iron across the whole organization. We have stores that tend to do more new than used, and Regina is one of them.” 

The growth was always contiguous, Mazer says. Eventually, Mazer owned all the New Holland stores in Manitoba and now has 5 stores in Saskatchewan. Today, Bob’s son Jonathan Mazer oversees the Saskatchewan stores, which do about as much in revenue as the 13 Manitoba stores combined. 

“Bob’s taken his business from a mom-and-pop, from working with his dad, one dealership, without formal education and he’s done it on drive and determination,” says Doug Harvey, president and CEO of DLH Group and an advisor to Mazergroup. 

“He takes great pride in what they've accomplished, and his growth has been from a number of different entities run by local entrepreneurs that he's bought,” Harvey says. “He started with one store, so 17 have been brought in, with 17 different personalities. Many have either gone onto the board or have stayed and worked at the locations.”

In 2009, all the locations officially rebranded under the Mazergroup name. And in 2010, the organization added a board of directors that has 4 outside advisors. One is Tom Kennedy, the former president of New Holland Ag. 

Mazer was the chair of New Holland’s North American Dealer Council 3 times and counts the dealers he served with — along with Kennedy — as mentors. “My mentors were both company and fellow dealers. I learned from them, understood how they were doing business, saw things that were successful, and some that weren’t.”

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Among those dealers he learned from are Doug Williams of WT Tractor in Arkansas, Larry Dinkel of Dinkel Implement in Nebraska and David Meyer of North-Dakota-based Titan Machinery (a member of the inaugural Dealer Hall of Fame class). 

“Besides being a good neighbor North of the border, there are three words to describe Bob Mazer — promoter, collaborator and entrepreneur,” Meyer says. “Through Bob’s leadership, forward thinking, strong customer and OEM relationships and early adaption of technology and innovation, he has set a high standard for parts and service support for their customers allowing Mazergroup to build a large network of top performing New Holland stores.” 

Mazer also was credited for voicing his opinion on the New Holland dealer councils. “He was passionate about what he thought New Holland should be doing, whether it was with product design, service issues, programming, sales support or equipment sales,” Kennedy says. “Bob can be outspoken at times on those issues, but once he gets that out of his system he is a true gentleman. Maybe he didn’t agree with everything, nor did I, but we figured out how to get through the issue.” 

Product Decisions

Mazer always  continued to farm. Standing in the customers’ shoes was key to his decision making searching for what was good for the farmer, not necessarily for his benefit  as a dealer. Taking on the Prasco air seeder in the mid-1970s is one example. 

“The seeding business was one that I recognized that there had to be a better way. We were farming around 5,000-6,000 acres at the time and spending man-hours packing up drills to get across a railroad track,” he says. “It’d be 2-3 hours to get across the railroad track, and here's this air seeder you could fold up and get across the track and start seeding in about 90 seconds. And so the light bulb went on.” 

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The Versatile 900 4WD was another. “I knew that horsepower was going to be big, because in the 1970s in Western Canada, there were thousands of farmers who were aging out at retirement age. We knew then that this was going to be kind of a free-for-all, and that the status quo was not going to happen. It had to change.” With larger farms formed through consolidation, more horsepower was going to be needed to get the job done. 

Mazer also had influence over products for the New Holland brand, Butler says. “Bob was instrumental in New Holland’s plan to bring a conventional combine to Western Canada. 

 “Whether it was Prasco air seeder or Versatile tractor, Bob would ask why good technology wasn’t available in Western Canada. So those were moments when Bob had a significant influence on the direction of New Holland.”

Kennedy echoes Butler’s sentiment and adds his influence over New Holland’s combine extended beyond just bringing the conventional combine in from Europe. “He was very influential as we developed a TR combine, because he was selling the conventional combine from Belgium,” he says. 

Employer of Choice

Agriculture is a people business and Mazer aims to care fully for the customers and his employees. The dealership  was an early adopter in the region of benefits and retirement programs, says Butler. Getting the programs started was the first thing Butler was tasked with when he joined the dealership in 1997. 

“It was ahead of the game. And to me, that was a major indicator having just joined the group, about the direction and Bob’s view of all staff members and where we had to be.”

While Mazer has no near-term plans to retire, a full succession plan is in place. “If I whack a deer on the highway and a horn comes through the windshield and gets me in the eye, we have a full succession plan and how the process will go,” he says. He also adds his replacement — when the time comes — will come from within Mazergroup. 

“I'm the guy that’s the outside-the-box thinker, the bigger thinker and when we get into expansion mode, then I'm the one who loves to do those kinds of things. But in the day-to-day operations, my executives are absolutely unbelievable and they've got it covered,” he concludes. 

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