In August 2025, the owners of Duo-Lift Manufacturing Co., Columbus, Neb., completed an asset purchase of Linco Precision, El Paso, Ill., a shortline dealership whose primary lines consisted of Duo Lift, Brehmer, New Leader and Walinga.
Linco Precision was one of 3 businesses owned and operated by Illinois-based Skip Klinefelter, whose businesses interests included being Bottom Line Solutions and 2025 Precision Farming Dealer’s award-winning dealer group, ASTG.
Ben Hellbusch
Strategic Direction: Entering the Dealer Space
Ben Hellbusch: “We’ve been talking about a dealership for 20 years. We've ended up with a wholesale distribution and independent rep company, which is the middleman between a manufacturer and a dealer. We never lost the appetite for a dealership, but we're super focused on it either. Here in the last 6 months, an opportunity presented itself that gave us a chance to get into the dealership world. And coincidentally, it was a dealership focused on fertilizer equipment, which is Duo Lift's main business.
“It presented a unique opportunity that we could take a business that we already know and enhance it with other products and other things. But we also were working in a core space with our manufacturing products that made this decision easier than pursuing a major-line dealership. It's a shortline oriented business and we're a shortline manufacturer. We deal with a lot of other shortline manufacturers.”
Why a Shortline Dealership?
David Hellbusch: “Linco has been one of our customers for over 40 years. They've always been on the top echelon of our customer base for our fertilizer products. If we were going to go down the dealership path, this was comfortable; we’ve known a lot of the people that work here for a long time.”
Ben: “Duo Lift's business is about 65% fertilizer, 25% ag and 10% commercial. While our dad and president, Jim, bought a small business in 1995, this is the first time David and I have done it; we've always started businesses vs. buying them.
“I've been involved in the sales side for most of my career, doing sales at the manufacturing company and then eventually starting the distribution business, Busch Equipment Co. From a vertical integration perspective, this was the next natural progression -- to get to the final retail point of sale for our equipment.
Shortline Companies’ Recent Attempts as Dealers
Shortline manufacturer Duo-Lift’s entrance into the dealer business recalls Great Plains Manufacturing’s founder and Shortline Legend Hall of Famer Roy Applequist’s attempts to do the same in the Illinois market, an area his firm had been largely locked out of by the major-line dealers.
Applequist started Clinton Equipment Co., in 2006, and even added a tractor line, New Holland, before calling it quits a few years later.
Kinze Manufacturing started an equipment dealer on its Williamsburg, Iowa, campus – known as Blue Equipment, following the retirement of a local dealer in 2019.
According to retired Farm Equipment Manufacturers Assn. (FEMA) director Charlie Glass, distribution challenges of small manufacturers' became so great amidst dealer purity attempts -- and dealer consolidation -- that the idea of establishing dealerships was raised at the national level. "We discussed subjects that included the possibility of establishing shortline dealers to market FEMA members’ products in areas where there was a void in sales," says Glass, who led FEMA's Dealer Relations Committee from 1998-2005. "The discussion included the location of sites for such a dealership and how to approach them to establish a successful enterprise."
“We have a lot of great relationships with independent resellers and we don't plan to change that. But in areas where we could do something different or don't have representation, this provides us a way to get into some of those areas. Now we have a platform to build from.
David: “Yes, the vertical integration has always been appealing and being able to see it all the way through to the end. Sometimes, as a manufacturer, your product gets lost because there are 1-2 middleman involved. You don't exactly know who the end user is, where it went, all those things. This gave us that opportunity to see the sale all the way through to the end and get that opportunity to touch the end user.
“Another thing is that manufacturing facility in El Paso. That was intriguing to us as these guys were building and manufacturing other products. That spoke to us because we're a manufacturer first and a sales group second. We have a shop we can utilize, and we have the sales arm that goes out and sells.”
David Hellbusch
How Busch Equipment Fits
Ben: “There's certain items that Busch Equipment has in Illinois for a territory, so that's a natural fit. Through Busch Equipment, we've met a lot of great companies and even if we don't represent a certain line of equipment, we know who to talk to and get it if we think it fits. We already have a lot of direct lines of communication with a lot of manufacturers -- domestic and foreign. We've got a lot of that work done. One of the values that we'll bring to D.L. Shortline is a different look at the equipment profile along with different ways of doing things that we do.”
David: “The other thing is that, because it has the facility that it has here, we’re able to do some assembly for our Busch Equipment lines. We can cut down on freight costs. We can be a staging warehouse or assembly warehouse and be able to service customers in this area better. Rather than coming from Nebraska to this part of the world, we ship it here and out of here.” (Busch’s equipment lines include Akron, Ashland, Belltec, Conveyor, Duo Lift, Geringhoff, Mandako, Namco, Poly Tech, Rief Design, Rite Way, Roto Grind, Strobel Manufacturing, and Televair.)
Ben: “As you grow and reach further, a satellite location like this is tremendously beneficial to allowing us to efficiently ship and use freight as a positive. With the new facility in El Paso, we have 31,000 square feet, overhead cranes and a paint booth, and we can do a lot of things over there that a traditional dealership cannot do.
David: “Another important piece is a full-service shop. We're able to bring equipment in, fix it and get it back out. Those technicians we have here are skilled and have a lot of background and experience in lots of different things. We retained almost everybody through this process.”
Ben: “The location is also very good. It's on I-39 and Highway 24, just north of Bloomington, Ill. There’s ample space around the dealership as well, with room for equipment storage and inventory. We want it to be a walk-in location, so we’ll have a plethora of parts and we're going to work to market ourselves as the go-to place to get farm parts, farm repair and also help everybody understand that we're going to specialize in fertilizer equipment.
