#Toro100

Not long ago I addressed all of John Deere’s North American golf/turf dealers about the state of the industry, market trends and what customers (i.e., you guys) are thinking. As always, I made up a bunch of stats, spoke loudly and pounded my fist on the table to demonstrate the importance of what I was saying… and they seemed to buy it.

During the Q&A, one dealer asked me for my opinions about Deere’s competitors. I said Jacobsen is aggressively working to regain its position in the market and doing a lot of things well. And Toro? Well, I said, Toro is just a beast. They’re focused as hell and they almost never make mistakes.

The Toro Company is, quite simply, the most respected supplier in our industry, according to our study a few years back. But that study merely proved the obvious.

For 100 years, Toro has been single-minded in one pursuit: creating better tools to maintain golf courses. And, over a century in which golf maintenance has evolved exponentially, no company has done more to support technology, training and professional development for superintendents.

Corporate anniversaries are generally more interesting to the company than customers, but this one is noteworthy because Toro’s story is really the story of the evolution of the golf business. They started by providing better versions of the simplest equipment during simpler times early in the 20th century. As demand for better conditions grew, Toro grew more sophisticated. As irrigation became standard, they expanded to create solutions. As technology became more complex, they provided training and put more people into the field to work with customers, observe needs and bring ideas back to the engineers in Minneapolis. And, as golf globalized, they became a worldwide brand serving the needs of turf managers everywhere on the planet. Today, as facilities must reinvent their business models, Toro is focused on a pitch-perfect message: Turfonomics.

It’s fitting a big part of Big Red’s centennial celebration has been to ask customers to tell their Toro Story. My Toro Story has to involve the legendary Dr. Jim Watson.

Doc Watson – one of the many World War II vets who shaped our business – was part agronomist, part engineer, part salesman, part market cheerleader and part corporate executive (he hated the executive part). But, when you put those all together, they equaled “Mr. Toro.” He was the face of the company in the business for nearly half a century. He was tough-minded but always had a quirky smile on his face and a devilish twinkle in his eye. His job – as far as I saw it – was to be a conduit between the needs of customers and the brains of the people who created solutions back in Minnesota. He was, above all things, a Turfhead (before that term existed) who fought for fundamental agronomy and constantly looked for ways to make courses better.

In short, Doc personified Toro: determined, customer-focused, steadfastly sticking to a long-term plan and always looking for a better solution.

It’s a happy accident that Toro’s birthday falls in the same month when we focus our entire issue on water and what it means to golf. Precision turf management and the irrigation technology it demands will be critical to the future of the game. It’s reassuring to have a company like Toro quietly leading the way to solve those problems before water becomes a crisis in our business. That’s not pandering … it’s just a fact.

So, enjoy the big birthday bash Toro … and then get back to work! As always, we’re relying on you.