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Heavy Metal Family
How the Reinhards found a niche servicing and repairing construction and farm equipment
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Business New Haven
4/15/2002
By: BNH
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After years of working for others, the Reinhard brothers of Orange decided they had had enough, and with their wives began to brainstorm about what they might do on their own.
Bob Reinhard had worked as a mechanic/welder for a construction company; Brian was a U.S. Navy diesel mechanic. Bob's wife Virginia (Ginny) knew a spark plug from a gas filter and could be a go-for if necessary. Brian's wife JoAnne had some experience in business. It wasn't difficult to decide what they should do.
“It was something we both knew how to do, so it made the most sense,” Bob Reinhard says of the siblings.
After some research, the two families founded the Reinhard Corp. - with the women as owners and the men as the workers - in 1987.
What was different about their company was that they outfitted a truck so they could make house calls wherever heavy equipment and machinery broke down. This was an efficient use of time and man-hours for their clients because the Reinhards didn't need to keep a mechanic on the payroll.
The construction industry was on the upswing, but since the brothers had grown up on a farm in Cheshire they were familiar with farm machinery and equipment. Eventually, most of the calls the company got were from farmers who had older equipment that they needed to keep running so they could run their farms.
The brothers before long realized they couldn't service (and really didn't want to service) the state-of-the-art construction equipment being bought and used by the big construction companies, so it was apparent that their niche was going to be farmers and, more specifically, bedding plant farmers across the state.
Although Connecticut is the second-smallest state in New England with 4,872 square miles of land area, it tops New England in the production of bedding and garden plants.
In 2000, bedding and garden plants represented $52 million worth of business of the roughly $900 million generated by all agricultural production in the state, according to the state Department of Agriculture and information from the Statistical Reporting Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Today, there are approximately 3,900 farms occupying some 360,000 acres in Connecticut. For bedding plant production, the state is tops in New England in net farm income and No. 1 in cash farm income per square mile.
That's enough activity to keep the Reinhards as busy as they care to be. “Right now, we work six days a week and on Sunday if necessary,” says Bob Reinhard.
“We used to have a contract with a company where we were on call [24/7],” says Ginny Reinhard, “but as soon as it expired we decided not to renew it.”
“The guys concentrate on fixing bulldozers, backhoes, all kinds of farm equipment, tractors, trucks and snow plows,” Ginny Reinhard says. “A lot of farmers can't afford the new machines and they need someone who can fix the old ones - and that's what Bob and Brian can do.”
Charlie Kurtz, owner of CK Greenhouses of Cheshire, agrees.
“I wouldn't use anyone else,” says Kurtz, “and if there was anyone else out there who could do this I never had a reason to look for them because [the Reinhards] do such a great job for us.”
Bob Reinhard acknowledges that residential construction in the state undergoes periodic pendulum swings. “But the farms we service are only getting bigger,” he says, “so it looks like we'll have plenty of business for a while.”
And, there's no real down time for the Reinhards because even in winter months farmers must move snow and other things around their farms, explains Bob Reinhard, while other tasks need to be performed rain or shine or other nasty weather.
“When there's a lot of snow, the farmers' trucks' hydraulics break down and they need to get them fixed quickly,” Bob Reinhard notes.
While their plate is plenty full right now, the Reinhards say their company could expand its scope of operations if necessary.
“We're lucky,” says Ginny Reinhard, “because our business doesn't depend on the weather like some other [businesses]. There's plenty to keep us busy - and plenty more we never even tried to tap into.”
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