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Kleis Equipment LLC Expands Its Footprint With AuctionTime & Machinery Trader
Although it’s easy to get lost in the trees and miss the forest, this isn’t true of John Kleis, founder and owner of Kleis Equipment LLC, based in Constantia, New York. From its roots as a small firewood and logging business founded in 1997, Kleis Equipment LLC has grown into a full-service dealership offering sales, rentals, parts, consignments, and service across construction, agricultural, forestry, tree care, landscaping, and outdoor power equipment.
Evidence of Kleis’ ongoing focus on company growth includes expansion to additional locations in Salem, Ohio, and Belington, West Virginia, as well as a fourth storefront set to open this summer in Avon, New York, featuring a new 14,000-square-foot facility. Kleis is looking to further grow the company by leaning more into the surging rental equipment market.
“We started from scratch, from zero,” he says. “I have personal goals about the relative size of the company. It’s a pretty big number, but we’re getting very close to it. If we continue to keep our noses to the grindstone and work hard, we’ll get where I want to be.”
Support From Sandhills
Helping the company get to where Kleis wants is the company’s use of numerous Sandhills Global products. In addition to hosting its website (KleisEquipment.com) with Machinery Trader, Kleis Equipment utilizes ads in multiple Sandhills print publications, lists rentals through RentalYard, and places customers’ equipment in auction sales on AuctionTime.com.
Experience That Customers Trust
While running his firewood and logging business, Kleis also attended college and later worked for 11 years at Merrill Lynch, where he gained significant finance experience. Combined with his background in logging, this gave him strong credibility with customers. The company serves logging businesses, tree care professionals, commercial landscapers, farmers, and others throughout the northeastern U.S.
“When they asked which machine made sense to buy, they trusted me, and that helped us tremendously on the forestry side,” Kleis says. Kleis Equipment’s offerings include forwarders, processors and harvesters, wood chippers, bunchers, dozers, tractors, excavators, and more from Bandit, Barko, Develon, Kioti, Ponsse, Terex Finlay, and other brands.
At A Large Scale
To get its assets seen by the greatest number of buyers, Kleis Equipment runs consistent half- and full-page ads in Machinery Trader, ForestryTrader, Tree & Landscape Equipment Trader, and RentalYard magazines. Each asset in its print ads benefits from an accompanying featured listing on the publications’ websites, collectively visited by tens of thousands of buyers every day.
Kleis Equipment has been advertising in Machinery Trader since 2011, when it was primarily selling Kioti tractors and Timberwolf wood splitters. “I had no salesman at the time; it was just me working solely off of Machinery Trader,” Kleis says. “We got some traction with Machinery Trader, and I realized if I could buy good used equipment, clean it up, and put it back out there, I could make a business of it. Obviously, we still advertise on a pretty large scale with Sandhills, and it seems to work well.”
Using RentalYard
Kleis sees equipment rentals as a major avenue for future growth. Kleis Equipment is increasingly using RentalYard, Sandhills’ platform for renting and leasing heavy equipment, trucks, trailers, and attachments. The company’s rental fleet includes high-dollar forestry and construction machines. Kleis says rentals through RentalYard.com help the company maximize ROI and keep utilization high.
“If you have these very expensive machines and they sit idle—and our specific market isn’t big enough to support them—we need to branch out and find rentals for them in other states or other areas where customers might not be thinking about us. So, RentalYard is helpful,” he says.
Looking Ahead
While Kleis has a clear vision for his company’s trajectory, he welcomes different perspectives, including those of the Sandhills sales representatives who have supported the company’s efforts over the years. “The reps we’ve had over the years are all very similar: young, energetic, and growth-minded. They help me forward-think about growing the company and utilizing the tools Sandhills offers to do it,” he says. “They’re good, honest, young people who maybe think a little bit differently than me, so it’s helpful.”
A version of this article first appeared in Sandhills Magazine. You can find current and back issues in the Sandhills Magazine Archive.