DAVID JONES (MCDONALD GROUP): We have a small presence in central Florida. We had a great 2022 on the bottom line. Our top line was great, but we didn’t increase our volumes over what we had done.
JAMIE JONES (CAPITAL AGGREGATES): The majority of our operations are in Missouri and northeast Arkansas. In 2022, sales were up slightly – record revenues – but that doesn’t necessarily correlate to record profits.
We have the same shortfalls with labor and equipment that everyone else had. We could have sold more product at a lot of our locations if we had equipment running. We had some supply issues and equipment go down. We were actually sold out quite a bit, so we spent the year trying to build up for this coming year and getting staffing right to be able to come out of the gates and have a record 2023.
JOHNNIE GARRISON (SUPERIOR INDUSTRIES): 2022 was a great year for us in terms of sales. It would have been better if we could have hired more people and shipped more product. Unfortunately, we had 2022 backlog roll into ‘23. But I think ‘23 is going to be very similar to 2022. The last time we were here (in June 2022) we were talking about six-month backlogs – which is unheard of in our industry. A lot of us are sitting here talking about a year. I think that’s a big difference.
CHRIS WORLEY (ASTEC INDUSTRIES): For us, 2022 was a good year. We had a record backlog because of challenges with the supply chain. We’ve done a lot of planning to help alleviate that. We’ve been working with all of our dealers as far as stocking equipment and planning ahead – well ahead – for the future.
GREG DONECKER (KEMPER EQUIPMENT): Our revenues were up in all aspects – engineered systems, the processing plants, our parts and our service. We’re not a small under-capitalized business, so we took chances in 2021 and 2022 to prebuy inventory. There was a lot of forecasting done, and we had a great year. But we could have had an even better year if the supply chain would have been better, whether it’s parts or from manufacturers of machinery. 2022 was truly a year of figuring out who your real partners in business were – both the suppliers and the customer base.
STEPHENIE DAVIS (DAVIS INDUSTRIAL): We’re based in Florida. We’re 50 percent service, 50 percent distribution. We supply a lot of the parts that [manufacturers] make or that [producers] consume. Our business was up – both top line and bottom line. It was a banner year for us all the way around, and we pivoted from being a small company.
From the distribution side, we saw supply issues. We have really tightened relationships with our vendors. If they don’t have what we need it, we formed new relationships and built other product lines that we can service [for] our customers.
We also doubled down on our inventory stocks, bringing in more conveyor belt and adding loose bearings, pulleys and things of that nature – just to make sure that, if our customers go down, we’re the one they call.
