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. 

Name: Bob Mazer

Dealership: Mazergroup

City: Brandon, Man. 

Primary Lines: New Holland, Bourgault, Brandt, Elmer’s Mfg., Farm King, GrainMaxx, Highline, MacDon, Salford, Seed Master, Supreme International, Unverferth, Vaderstad, Ventrac, Versatile, Wallenstein, Akron, AMI Attachments, Cub Cadet, Honda Power, Husqvarna

Locations: 18 in Manitoba & Saskatchewan

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.”


“I call him Bob the Builder. Bob is a builder, and fundamentally believes foremost in our drive toward customer care, while making a little bit of money. And that is a lot different than saying ‘we have to sell a bunch of stuff and line our pockets’…” – Wally Butler, CFO, Mazergroup


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?”

Luck of the Draw — Surviving Struggling OEMs

When asked of the hardest time of his career, Bob Mazer pointed to a period when both Massey Ferguson and Versatile — Mazer’s 2 primary lines — were both in financial trouble. “To have both of those in  trouble simultaneously was nerve-wracking,” he says. 

At the time, Mazer Implements was a single-store dealership, and Mazer says things could have gone entirely different for the business. 

“Ford New Holland bought Versatile,” he says. “And they wanted me as the dealer for Ford New Holland. That was the luck of the draw. But boy, that was a tight one. I could easily have been out of business. 

“I saw that so many times with the International and Case dealers and the Allis and White dealers and so on. They all suffered through that transition.”

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.”