Weathering The Storm
Cousins Turn Heartbreak Into a Business Partnership That Just Keeps Getting Stronger
They say, “tragedy makes you stronger.”
For Jake and Nick McClure, those words aren’t a cliché. They’re the God’s honest truth.
It was May 3, 1999, when Jake and his dad, Alan, were driving through central Oklahoma, returning home to their farm in Augusta, Kansas, after picking up a truck in Texas. The two were in separate vehicles and had pulled over in an attempt to get out of the path of an approaching tornado.
Jake made it through unharmed, but Alan’s car was picked up and tossed by the F5 twister, killing him. He was only 45.
At the time of Alan’s death, Jake was just about to finish high school, and his cousin, Nick, was graduating from Kansas State University with a degree in animal sciences that he wasn’t quite sure what to do with.
“This was just thrown into our lap,” Nick says. “It was a little overwhelming.”
Big shoes to fill
“This” wasn’t simply dealing with the untimely death of their father and uncle. It was also stepping up to take over the family business: Alan’s Excavating, the commercial excavating firm Alan had founded 20 years earlier and built into a successful company.
“I used to come home from college on weekends and run a truck for Alan,” Nick says. “I always admired him — he was one of those people who could read the signs and see where there was money to be made. He got his start building mobile home parks from the ground up, streets and utilities and everything, then renting out the spaces.”
That led to the formation of Alan’s Excavating. With a Cat® wheel loader, a backhoe and a dump truck, Alan took on light residential jobs like digging basements and building pads. As the company grew, he expanded his fleet and embarked on bigger projects: housing developments, commercial site prep, utilities and demolition.
Then, suddenly, Alan was gone — with only the two young cousins available to attempt to fill his shoes.
“We just took the bull by the horns, hired some good people and kept it going,” Nick says.
Dirt work, farm work and stone work
In the 22 years they’ve been in charge, Jake and Nick have grown Alan’s Excavating to 20-plus employees and a fleet of about two dozen machines.
They’ve expanded beyond Augusta to take on jobs across the greater Wichita area and beyond. The projects have gotten bigger, too — all the way up to heavy highway work and site prep for new Wal-Mart Supercenters.
Their success boils down to three key factors.
First is diversification. In addition to running Alan’s Excavating, Jake and Nick are responsible for two other businesses: the family farm raising corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and 300 head of Black Angus cows, and a nearly 150-year-old limestone quarry, Silverdale Quality Stone, that they purchased in 2018.
“One thing we’re proud of is that we’ve never had to lay anyone off at Alan’s Excavating,” Nick says. “The farm and the stone business come in real handy in that regard. If one crew is slow, we can always find something for them to do somewhere else. Believe me, there’s always something to be done on the farm.”
Success factor number two is technology. Alan’s Excavating jumped on the grade control bandwagon long before most other contractors, buying its first GPS system for a Cat 14H motor grader in 2003, and never looked back.
“When we started out in this business, our foreman literally spent entire days driving stakes into the ground, using a level to get them straight and writing the cut-fill measurement on each stake,” Nick says. “GPS changed everything. It’s just so much faster, so much less labor, so much more accurate. We’ve got grade control on our dozers, our motor graders, our excavators, everything we can get it on that makes sense.”
And the final key to success? It all comes back to family.
The ultimate family business
Growing up, Jake and Nick attended the same schools and worked on the family farm together. But they were four years apart in age, so they weren’t overly close as kids.
Running a business together — make that multiple businesses — changed all that. Nick now calls Jake his best friend, and they’ve turned that friendship into a successful partnership. Jake handles the daily running of Alan’s Excavating and Silverdale Quality Stone while Nick manages the equipment side of things for both operations, dispatches operators where needed and works the farm day to day.
“The family thing — I think that’s really the only way you could ever make something like this work,” Nick says. “Jake and I just know what each other’s thinking. We both know which way to go.”
Where they want to go is to keep growing but not at the expense of Alan’s Excavating’s small, family atmosphere, which sets the company apart from other contractors.
“We just finished a school job that had to be done between Christmas and New Year’s,” Nick says. “The general contractor couldn’t believe we got it done so fast, but we just called everyone in and hammered it out. We’re fortunate to have a good group of employees. Everybody here knows how to work hard — there’s no slacking off.”
A partner that’s got their back
The McClure cousins won’t tolerate any slacking off from their machines, either, and that’s a big reason they’ve become loyal Foley Equipment Customers over the years. They rely on the dealership not just for new equipment purchases but also for parts, fleet maintenance, component rebuilds and undercarriage inspections for a fleet that includes Cat dozers, excavators, motor graders, wheel loaders, skid steers, scrapers and articulated trucks.
“We’ve tried all the others, and when it comes to service and parts availability, Caterpillar is just hands down better,” Nick says. “The team at Foley comes through if we’re broke down or need anything.”
As an example, Jake and Nick recently purchased a new Cat D6 XE — the world’s first high drive electric drive dozer — for Alan’s Excavating after the Foley sales team let them demo the machine multiple times.
“Nobody else is going to do that for you — let you take the machine off the lot and use it until you figure out if it’s going to work for you,” Nick says. “Stuff like that’s a big deal for a company our size. Foley’s always got our back.”
Just like Jake and Nick have had one another’s since 1999. Surely Alan would be proud.