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On Sunday, July 6th Manitoba said farewell to one of our province's true leaders in the ag industry. Founder, President and CEO of Mazergroup, Bob Mazer, passed away quietly surrounded by his family after what seems an all-too short battle with cancer.
His passing comes just six days after the 10-year anniversary when all of the New Holland dealerships in Manitoba would fly the Mazergroup flag in 2015. He was 75 years old and leaves a legacy of entrepreneurship, leadership and community building on many levels.
“Bob was truly a farmer at heart and loved machinery and equipment,” shares Mazergroup Chief Financial Officer Wally Butler. “Bob would tell the story of when he saw one of the first Versatile 4-wheel drive tractors closer to Hartney, coming over the hill and seeing the twin smokestacks with smoke billowing out and pulling a cultivator. And so, he rushed back to Brandon and told his dad, ‘Dad, I have to become a Versatile dealer!”
In 1971, Bob did indeed become the Versatile dealer under the name of Mazer Farm Equipment, “and that was like a dealership inside his dad’s dealership, which was the Massey dealership,” adds Butler.
Bob’s love of farming started much sooner than that life-changing trip to Hartney.
In 1968 at the age 17, after leaving Vincent Massey High School, Bob began farming his first 3 quarters of land at Alexander and worked with his father (Ed Sr) at Brandon Implements, the Massey Ferguson dealership. In 1971 Bob became the Versatile dealer in Brandon, but working the soil continued to be a driven passion. He increased his farming operation to 4,500 acres by 1973, this in conjunction with his implement business and a grain trucking business. By 2001 Bob and his family were actively farming 6,000 acres, as Sundance Enterprises, growing potatoes, grain and hay.
In 1975, Bob and his brother, Ed Jr, purchased Brandon Implements from their father, amalgamating the dealership with Mazer Farm Equipment to establish Mazer Implements.
An interesting twist to the story is Ed Jr left Mazer Implements in '88 to establish the John Deere dealership, Countryside Equipment. This would eventually become Enns Brothers. That same year in 1988 Bob and Mazer Implements became the New Holland dealer.
“You can just imagine Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner!” chimes Wally Butler, who has been with Mazergroup for 28 years.
Butler calls Bob, ‘Bob the Builder’ because “from that point on Bob really started a process of looking at the best equipment that he felt would be good for farming, whether it was a Prasco air seeder, one of the very first air seeders at the time, but what equipment would be best for farming. Bob continued farming right up until we lost him on Sunday,” adds Butler. “He was still a farmer at heart.”
Through the 1990’s Mazergroup would acquire additional dealerships continuing a path of expansion, explains Butler.
"It was like, let's work together, try to do better for farmers, and each location kind of has its own story about how it became part of the major organization," he shares. "And so, Bob continued down that path at that time with his partner Dale Shepherd and continued to expand. It was individual names, individual locations, with the individual decision-making at the locations and that's really the philosophy that we continue to have today, even though throughout the late 2000s we tried to get to some common business practices to work together overall with our manufacturers and do the best for our customers.”
"And then in 2009, that's when we just decided to put it all into a big hat. So, all the local owner managers became shareholders and we created this single enterprise called Mazer Group, where we had one organization and multiple locations,” says Butler. “But we wanted to retain the original DNA where local decision making, local community, local support for farmers remained, and that's really the model we've been using ever since.”
Butler says one of the courageous things Bob did in ‘Bob the Builder fashion’ was when he invited business professionals from outside the Mazergroup organization to create a foundation base for the company in 2009.
"Bob felt it was important to get some outside eyes on our organization,” explains Butler. “So we did create a structure. We have a formal Board of Directors. We have some external advisors that we meet with twice a year. And that takes an incredible amount of intestinal fortitude for a majority-owner business leader to really let outside people in that had no interest," notes Butler. "Some of them have interest now, but to really bare your soul and talk about business and get some advice takes forward thinking.”
“And so we did that in 2009 as well, and that really helped us involve the organization and we continue to follow that model today. That really set the foundation for our structure today,” he adds, “and even though we're devastated that we've lost our Commander in Chief and our fearless leader and Bob the Builder, he's left the organization in an incredibly strong position. We have incredibly good structure. I believe we've got an incredibly good strategic plan. We have very good purpose and priorities where we focus on our customers and our team and our communities and because of what Bob's built, we're very excited about the future.”
Today Mazergroup proudly serves their customers from 18 locations making it one of the largest New Holland dealerships in North America. Eight of the 13 locations in Manitoba are in the southwest corner of the province. Five of the dealerships are located in southeast Saskatchewan, maintaining close connections to the farming scene of the Mazer family when Ed Sr moved his family from southern Saskatchewan to Brandon in 1959 when Bob was 9 years old.
Since the news of Bob's passing on Sunday, July 6th, the number of people and businesses that have reached out to the Mazer family and the organization solidifies the impact that Bob has had on many people's lives, says Butler.
“And as business savvy and as much as Bob the Builder was building organizations, he also had a significant impact on people's lives and building people's lives, as well as all his philanthropic activities. So Bob was never shy from helping. So, whether it was the Brandon Chamber of Commerce or the Economic Development Board or multiple times on New Holland's Dealer Council or part of the Manitoba Business Council or Chair of ACC a couple times, including more recently the Capital Fundraising Chair. Bob was Chair of Capital Fundraising for the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum, and these are just some of the many things Bob contributed to.”
Bob's wife, Patti's father, Ed McGill, trained as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. This inspired their shared dedication to preserving the stories of those who served with the Canadian military and held Brandon CATPM in the highest regard.
With a diagnoses of cancer in an area of his neck last fall, Bob underwent intensely targeted cancer treatment this past winter. Bob and his wife, Patti, spent recovery time in Hawaii and returned to Brandon in April.
“Unfortunately things took a turn for the worse and it wasn’t that much longer that it was just unrecoverable,” says Butler. “It was really taking its toll on Bob in May and June, and then here we are now at the beginning of July."
Continuing to support their customers in the ag industry as well as the communities they serve is central to the Mazergroup mission statement.
“We work on this every day, on trying to be better, better on all fronts. We really focus on our core and that's looking after our customers in all the communities that we're in, really being part of the community, in local decision making,” says Butler. “We've got great team members everywhere and so from the home office, we really try to support everybody in the local store level that looks after customers. And we're trying to find the best possible products to help our customers become more efficient and more productive. And that's kind of what we do every day."
"We think we’re four or five weeks away from harvest, and that will hopefully be another bountiful harvest for all the producers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and we'll help them get the crop off!” he adds.