From local welding shop to global company Landoll Corporation celebrates 50th anniversary
Don Landoll has a word of advice for parents: If you see a natural inclination for a certain subject in a child, do whatever you can to encourage it. The founder of Landoll Corporation in Marysville clearly remembers when his parents promoted him from TinkerToys to an Erector Set with a motor, having seen early on his interest in building things. “The unique part of that is, we didn’t even have electricity on the farm then yet,” he said. Now, as his company prepares to celebrate their 50th anniversary, he marvels at the technological gains he has seen in his lifetime, right up to their latest piece of equipment, a fiber-optic laser cutter technology that has only been available for a couple of years.
The second of eight children and the oldest son, Landoll remembers working alongside his grandfather on the family farmstead making needed repairs. He learned to weld in vocational agriculture class as a freshman at Hanover High School. “I was strong enough at it and dad could see my desire, so we built a new shop and I started welding for the neighbors,” he said. He built a few projects his sophomore year, then constructed his first trailer as a junior. When his father passed away in 1970, a neighbor helped him buy back that original trailer. landoll parts catalog,landoll parts online,landoll 930e operator's manual,landoll 440 parts manual,landoll 4400 planter parts,landoll 275 disc chisel parts,landoll parts dealer,landoll tillage,landoll parts online,landoll parts,landoll 930e operator's manual,landoll 440 parts manual,landoll 6230 owners manual,landoll serial number lookup,bendi parts manual,landoll parts dealer
Right after graduating from high school, Landoll reported for military service, but a failed physical landed him back home the very next week. He went to work for the local International Harvester dealer, which also included Hanover Manufacturing. “That’s where I really knew I wanted to go into manufacturing,” Landoll said. At the age of eighteen he worked in the three-man shop of Hanover Manufacturing. On November 22, 1963, the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, one of the other men in the shop approached Landoll about partnering together to buy a welding shop that was for sale in Marysville. At twenty years old, he and his partner, thirty years his senior, started Quick Service Welding Company, a welding, radiator and blacksmith shop. They started with fabrication, building Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) parts, camper frames and anhydrous ammonia bars. “The challenge with fabrication is you don’t have a steady work flow,” he said. “So I needed a product to fill in between. That’s when I started building pickup stock racks.”
His partner left after three and a half years to go back to work for the railroad, and gave Landoll the opportunity to buy him out. He continued making anhydrous bars for Harris Manufacturing, and also began building his first tillage tools. At the same time he started building liquid supplement feeders for livestock. “That was a really great product line for us because we were building them for all the major feed companies that were selling liquid supplement,” he said. With fewer than ten employees, he also began building a chisel plow. Since it was a primary tillage tool that was only used in the fall, they didn’t have anything else to do the rest of the year, and that’s when one of Landoll’s founding principles was developed: diversification. “If it weren’t for diversification, we wouldn’t be here talking,” he stated. He explained that at the time larger farm tractors were coming onto the scene and the implement dealers didn’t have a way to haul them. Landoll came up with the idea for a traveling axle trailer and got it patented. They started building them in 1969. “In the 1970s you couldn’t build product fast enough,” he recalled. “Then the '80s were tough and a lot of farmers went broke.”
With the farm market struggling, a contact from FMC Corp. in California sent the company in a new direction: building ground support equipment for aircraft. They built trailers and de-icing equipment for airplanes. After four years of building those, the military placed an order for 391 deicers. “Farming was tough and we got an order for $43.8 million,” he said. Over the next fourteen years they built over 2000 of the units, which gave the company a shot in the arm. An other of Landoll’s guiding principles was illustrated there: relationships. “We did a lot of work with the government and had a very good relationship,” he said. “Since Thanksgiving of 1984 we’ve never been without a government order.” The added benefit of the large military contracts is what they bring to Landoll’s other manufacturing projects. “It’s really major,” he said. “Because when you get these kinds of orders, you can buy the latest and best equipment available. And when you finish those orders, you still have the latest and best equipment available to build farm equipment.”
They entered into the material handling business in 1993 when an opportunity came along to work with a man from England who had a unique fork truck design and was looking for a manufacturer in America. “At the time they were building in a communist factory in Slovakia and I said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a great patent, but a poor design,’” Landoll said. They redesigned the fork truck and starting building it. In 2003, Drexel, their biggest competitor in that market, got into financial trouble and Landoll bought them out. “Now we have narrow aisle and very narrow aisle lift trucks,” he said.
In 2010 Landoll Corporation acquired Brillion Farm Equipment and brought it to Marysville. “Brillion was 104 years old when we bought it,” Landoll said. “In four years we doubled the sales with our style of manufacturing and our in-house sales department.”
Landoll places high value on his sales staff and their dedication to working with customers. “Our salesmen are blue jeans kind of salespeople,” he described. “They’ll go out and demonstrate equipment, not just say, ‘Look it up in the book or on the internet.’ We’re hands-on education from the sales side. That’s something that many others are getting away from.” They also have three service trucks that can be dispatched if a customer has a problem. Total customer satisfaction is another of his principles.