Irish was interviewed for Farm Equipment's 2010 special report "Dealer Pressures are Shortliners' Problem." At the time, Irish was the general manager of Brillion Farm Machinery. The following are excerpts from that interview.
Taking his soil science and ag economics diploma to the largest distributor of farm equipment in the Midwest (Lindsay Brothers) in the 1970s, Mike Irish was on the front line of proving — and introducing to dealers — numerous pioneering developments in shortline equipment. He joined Brillion Farm Machinery as marketing manager in 1990 and today leads the company as general manager.
“Dealer purity isn’t so much of a problem for our business, except in the corn and soybean areas where the dealer doesn’t need to offer a lot of product diversity. The bigger issue is dealer consolidation where a lot of the dealers that we’ve done business with for 30-40 years are now merged into one large operation and the personal communication is gone. Instead, you need to go through a couple tiers of decision makers before you can get to the owner again.
“When that rollup happens, most want to continue to keep Brillion because the brand has a good reputation and is a draw for them. The amount of time they have to promote the brand and products, however, is reduced because of the major’s emphasis on market share. So that forces us to basically create the demand for the market and drive customers to the dealers, hence the need for the market driven web site.
“When we hear that our line might be in jeopardy because of a rollup, we share with the new owners the sales history, both on wholegoods and repair parts and our niche player role. And if they’ve been a good dealer for a long time, they have a large customer base that is looking for repair parts. ‘Do you want to send 300 customers down the road to get repair parts at a competing dealership?’ A lot of the demand still comes from the producer going into the dealership who says, ‘I bought my equipment here, I’d like to buy repair parts here and I’d like to buy my next model here.’ ”
Irish was born on August 24, 1948 in Green Bay, Wis., son of the late Donald & Deloris (Kasten) Irish. He was a graduate of West De Pere high school, class of 1966. He furthered his education at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, with his Bachelor Degree Major in Soil Science and Minor in Agronomy. And as he always said, “I have never learned enough. I am always being educated.”
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