A Turnaround Plan for a Heavy-Equipment Automation Company

The client sells, installs and supports automation systems for excavators, dozers and graders, plus survey equipment. By the owner's read, his company and one rival dealer split the construction market about 50/50. The products are technical, and a single machine's system can run past $90,000.

The market moved on two sides at once. In survey, imported receivers selling for about $5,000 did the job of the $20,000 units the company had sold for years. In the owner's words: "we probably used to have 60% of that survey market. We probably have 10% of it now." In construction, the machine makers started shipping their own factory-installed systems, with easier financing, often a lower price, and a belief that a factory system must be better. "They are successfully chewing away at all of our rental business," he said, and "our customer goes there first because that's where they're buying their iron." The old website didn't help. Every product card said Call for Quote, some product links sent buyers off to the manufacturer's site, and the owner said explaining the return on these systems had always been the hard part.

I started with the choice the buyer makes. My read of the owner's account was that factory systems sold with new machines were a bigger threat than the rival dealer, so the plan sells the dealer: the people who set the system up, train the crew and answer the phone when a machine stops in the field. Then I studied how other dealers earn trust. The regional dealers I analyzed lean on named contractor stories, training, local support, explanations built around the job, financing and rentals, and live demos. None of the dealer buying paths I sampled published an installed price, so the plan does the opposite. Every build the site can price from a sourced figure shows its estimate up front, because, as the owner put it, "as a customer I know that I'm drawn to providers that give me some pricing up front." Then the plan teaches. Seven long-form comparison and education articles, six learning guides, six decision guides and twenty short explainers answer questions a contractor asks before buying. Five payback calculators and a profitability worksheet do the math the owner said was hard to explain. Twelve animation concepts, rendered as 48 cuts, put the products in motion. The plan points the company at an LNG project the owner puts at $55 billion of construction over about 780 miles. The company won't lay pipe, but surveying, access roads, pads, grade checking and excavation all need its equipment. A dedicated LNG page connects each phase of the work to the systems it needs and to a fleet review. The content plan sets a target of 60 to 100 posts a week. The first campaign put 62 posts on the calendar across Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube over ten days, alongside a library of 252 drafted posts. On the site, a capture path sends chatbot questions and quote requests to one database, and the plan's weekly review reads that log to choose what gets published next.

• Competitor and dealer trust research
• Buying site with estimate ranges and payback calculators
• Guides and explainers sourced from manufacturer documents and public references
• Remotion animation
• Metricool scheduling across five networks
• Question and quote capture for the weekly content plan

The company has a plan built on its owner's own read of the market and the pieces built to run it: a buying site with estimate ranges and calculators, a library of teaching content, an LNG page, a chatbot that answers from the manufacturers' documents, and a first campaign of 62 posts on the calendar across five networks. When the owner walked through the interactive site, his verdict was "I like that," and he loved the calculators.

For scale, one B2B social agency's published starting rate for organic social alone is $8,500 a month, $102,000 a year, before anyone builds a website, and one web agency's price guide puts a marketing website at $40,000 to $120,000. This plan covers the site, the teaching, the posting calendar and the question log in one piece of work, aimed by what buyers ask.

Find the alternative the buyer weighs. Here my read of the owner's account was that factory systems sold with the machine were a bigger competitor than the rival dealer, so the plan leads with the support and training a local dealer brings.