Kurt Degueyter, owner and CEO of Bottom Line Equipment
As a leading provider of heavy equipment and specialty attachment rentals, Bottom Line Equipment is well-equipped to raise the standards of quality and safety for all of its customers along the Gulf Coast with an ever-present commitment to building better communities in the markets it serves. BIC Magazine recently sat down with Kurt Degueyter, Bottom Line's owner and CEO, to better understand the company's origins and continued growth.
BIC: How did Bottom Line Equipment get started?
DEGUEYTER: My wife, Kim Degueyter, and I founded Bottom Line Equipment in July 2005. Starting with just two pieces of equipment, a website and my Rolodex of contacts in the industry, the company was built from the ground up while initially working out of our home in Lafayette, Louisiana. As an undercapitalized startup, the long-term viability of this heavy construction equipment and specialty attachment sales and rental company was questionable, as we had a growing family with four young children to support.
Only a month after the company was founded, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of our country occurred when Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The combination of Katrina's destructive winds with the breached levees and failures of the hurricane protection systems created an unprecedented demand for heavy construction equipment and specialty attachments. Driven to be a part of the recovery efforts in the region, I took out a second mortgage on our home while also depleting our savings and retirement accounts. I went "all in" in order to raise the capital needed for our startup company to enter the chaos that was the aftermath of Katrina. I hit the ground running just days after the hurricane had passed and headed into storm-ravaged New Orleans in the hopes of finding a place to set up shop. I found a former gas station/convenience store on "Equipment Row," situated on Airline Highway in St. Rose, Louisiana.
Bottom Line was ever-present in the post-Katrina reconstruction and renewal efforts in the New Orleans region. Over the next two years, Bottom Line concentrated its equipment and attachments on the large-scale cleanup efforts in the area. After initially removing the debris and clearing the streets, Bottom Line began supplying equipment and specialty attachments needed for the demolition of heavily damaged homes, buildings and even entire neighborhoods. The rental fleet for Bottom Line was deployed throughout New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast -- none could question our commitment to rebuilding New Orleans.
BIC: What should readers know about Bottom Line?
DEGUEYTER: Bottom Line rents heavy equipment and specialty attachments to build better communities by raising the standards of quality and safety for all. We serve customers throughout the Gulf Coast from our strategically located service centers in St. Rose, Baton Rouge, Broussard and Sulphur, Louisiana, and in Beaumont, Baytown and Corpus Christi, Texas. Our growth is the result of outstanding partnerships with our employees, customers and vendors.
Our core values reflect our purpose and standards of doing business. Our six core values are "Make It Happen," "Do the Right Thing," "Work Hard, Smart, Safe," "We Care," "Be the Best" and "Own It."
We constantly focus on exceeding the rental, sales and service needs of our customers, which include industrial, heavy civil infrastructure, energy, commercial and demolition contractors along the Gulf Coast. We can meet most heavy construction equipment needs with our fleet of over 1,500 reliable, late-model pieces of heavy equipment and 500 specialty attachments.
BIC: What's on the horizon for Bottom Line?
DEGUEYTER: We are focused on continuing and amplifying our rapid growth for the foreseeable future. Our goal is to double the size of our operations and annual revenue by the end of 2024. By comparing historical charts of year-end revenue, total fleet size and employee count, we have found all three of these indicators grow together. We cannot accommodate this level of growth without first growing the size of our team. The Bottom Line team is the foundation that supports and drives our growth in additional revenue, service centers and the fleet needed to support an expanded customer base.
Bottom Line's growth not only puts us on a positive trajectory in terms of revenue, but also gives us a broader geographical footprint to make a real difference in the communities we serve. Our mission is to "rent heavy equipment and specialty attachments to build better communities by raising the standards of quality and safety for all." Since our inception, improving our communities has been our fundamental driving force.
BIC: What are some of your biggest accomplishments in this role?
DEGUEYTER: My daily drive is to make a positive impact on people's lives through our work at Bottom Line. One of the greatest rewards of building a team and company is watching individuals who join our company in entry-level positions learn our business and grow personally and professionally over time. In 2005, Bottom Line's team was just my wife and I, and now we have over 170 team members who are contributing to our continued growth and success. We take creating jobs and the financial success and stability of our team very seriously. Thus, we have never had a layoff or reduction in workforce in the history of the company. Over the years, Bottom Line has received a multitude of awards and top-tier rankings from trade associations, industry publications and peers. None of these accolades are possible without the Bottom Line team of people, who "Make It Happen" every day.
BIC: How is Bottom Line adapting to changes in your industry?
DEGUEYTER: Over the past decade, we've seen an accelerated pace of technology being integrated into the machines we rent and sell. GPS-equipped machines are becoming a standard feature of most manufacturers today. Bottom Line embraced this technology back in 2014 to better serve our customers and guarantee uptime on their jobsites. We created a platform, Bottom Line Link, that enables us to collect data from a multitude of manufacturer-specific telematics systems and monitor a multibrand heavy equipment fleet from one dashboard. Bottom Line Link enables our product health team to monitor machines for any error codes and proactively dispatch our service technicians to address any issues the machines are reporting, in some cases before the customer is even aware the issue is occurring. In addition to location and usage data, we can also provide our customers with productivity and fuel consumption data and analysis to help them better manage their equipment cost.
Another advancement in technology, as it applies to construction equipment, is the rapid growth of machineand grade-control technology on jobsites. A large portion of our fleet is machine-control ready, allowing our customers to plug and play their grade-control devices into our machines. We also have machine-control systems that we add to our equipment to supplement a customer's job when machine controls are needed for precision grading.
As a preferred equipment supplier on most major projects along the Gulf Coast, we're always looking to have the latest technology available, since our customers utilize these tools to increase their productivity. As we cater to our customers in this space, our solution today is partnering with some of the industry leaders in machine controls. For our customers that have their own systems and need to supplement their machine-control fleet, they can bolt their equipment to our machines or we can build custom packages that allow all our customers to increase productivity.
Bottom Line's specialty attachments niche is yet another adaptation of technology to increase productivity and safety for our customers. With over 1,500 machines and 500 specialty attachments, we can offer attachments that will not only increase productivity on the jobsite, but will simultaneously reduce risk to people as well. We also offer fully integrated hydraulic couplers that allow an operator to change tools without ever leaving the cab of the machine.
With such a significant assortment of specialty work tools, we can help solve our customers' needs no matter how unique the job, increasing productivity and safety for all, and that's the "Bottom Line."
For more information, visit www.bottomlineequipment.com or call (877) 332-7187.
