Opening the Door: Bottom Line Equipment Turns 20
Photos by Bottom Line Equipment
Kurt Degueyter’s earliest memories as a child are of construction equipment. Some men’s earliest memories might be a puppy or a toy horse, but Degueyter remembers backhoes and wheel loaders.
Degueyter’s father was a manager and eventually became the owner of a construction equipment dealership. As early as he can remember, Degueyter worked at the dealership. From the time he was old enough to push a broom, and by the time he’d graduated high school he had worked on the washrack, in preventive maintenance, and just about every other task at the dealership.
After high school, Degueyter went to college for a year and half but at that point he wasn’t finding what he was looking for. He moved with a friend to work construction in Richmond, Va., thinking he’d do it for a year and then go home. After meeting his wife, Kim, Degueyter got married and welcomed a new baby.
He hadn’t really figured out what his future path would be, but he knew he didn’t want to be an equipment operator his whole life, so he called his father for advice.
“I called my dad up and said, ‘I realized something,’” Degueyter says. “’I don’t know everything I thought I did when I was 18 and I’d like to go back to college.’ My dad said, ‘Good luck’ and hung up. I finished getting my bachelor’s degree the hard way, continuing credits at night and on the weekend. My dad saw that I was serious about completing college and he offered me a position at his dealership after I received my degree.”
With his degree in hand, Degueyter and his wife, Kim, made the move to Louisiana with their two daughters where he began working as a salesman for his dad’s dealership.
“When it came to renting equipment, my dad was a typical dealer in the early ‘90s,” he recalls. “The trade-ins, the stuff they had a surplus of, some older equipment, some independent stuff, that was what made up the rental fleet.” Going up against rent-to-rent companies with diverse, late model fleets, Degueyter was frustrated trying to do business without competitive inventory. He was familiar with companies such as Associated Rentals, which had large fleets of new or late-model equipment, and he saw their equipment on every job site.
“I called my dad and the general manager and told them I wanted to take them on a field trip,” he says. “I took them to jobsites, refineries and plants, and showed them what a real rental business looked like, with late-model equipment. My dad was sold, and let me run with it.”
Degueyter expanded the rental portion of his dad’s business. Eventually, Degueyter thought about a pathway to owning the business in the future. “We started talking about succession planning,” he says. “I said, ‘Give me a five-year plan, a 10-year plan, a 20-year plan, any kind of plan.’ I just wanted to see what I was working towards.”
Starting his own business
When it became apparent to Degueyter that his dad had no interest or intention of retiring, he saw the writing on the wall. He decided to go into business for himself.
He signed a non-compete agreement that restricted him from joining another dealership, but there was no restriction on him starting his own business.
In July of 2005, Degueyter started Bottom Line Equipment with the intention of buying and selling used equipment, a few pieces at a time. “This was June 26, 2005,” Degueyter says. “I formed an LLC, I printed my own business cards, made my own website, and I was reaching out to every contact I had within the industry.”
Katrina Blows In
Shortly after Bottom Line was founded in July of 2005, the biggest catastrophe in Louisiana history – Hurricane Katrina – made landfall in New Orleans on August 29th. While the historic hurricane did massive damage and brought significant tragedy to the region, it turned out to provide Bottom Line with the opportunity that put the company on the map.
“In my hometown of Lafayette, it wasn’t even raining but as I watched the devastation on the news, I realized the magnitude of the destruction this storm was causing.” Degueyter says. “Using funds from a home equity loan, I bought $100,000 worth of specialty attachments, buckets for skid-steers, grapples, anything for moving debris. My wife was terrified, but I said, ‘Nobody in New Orleans is going to buy debris-removal equipment today, but in a couple of weeks when they’re trying to clear the debris from this storm and the manufacturers run out of attachments, I’ll be set up and ready to rent.’ ”
Degueyter made his first mission into the outskirts of New Orleans, and was able to secure land to store his attachments.
“I ended up in a parking lot of an old gas station near the airport that had been shut down prior to Katrina,” he says. “I got a couple of hours of sleep waiting on the sun to come up. I woke up and I saw a sign saying ‘for lease’ in a facility that was also vacant.” We were using Nextel radios, so I radioed my wife and asked her to research the address and phone number of the owner, who happened to be working right down the road. He was in the fuel business, and he was onsite quarterbacking all the people that were delivering fuel. I said, “’I need to lease that building,’ and he said he didn’t have time to mess with me right now and to call him back in a couple of weeks. I said, ‘I want to lease it today.’ ”
“He said, ‘Here, call my brother the attorney.’ I called and we made a deal on the spot. It was a miracle that I was able to lease that property which was essentially on equipment row. It shared a fence with a Deere dealer, there was a Case dealer across the street, and a rental business down the road. We were officially in business.”
Bottom Line set up shop 30 days after the storm, bringing in attachments, a $10,000 skid-steer, some brand new grapple buckets. “We purchased a couple of RVs to allow us to live onsite,” he says. “We rented and sold and kept re-investing the capital. We reached out to the dealers that had captive finance companies and utilized OEM manufacturing finance arms to move the fleet and kept on re-investing.”
Bottom Line continued with the emphasis on debris cleanup. After a couple of years, that started to wind down and the company sold those assets and re-invested in demolition tools for the next phase of demolishing the massive number of damaged structures. The Hurricane Protection System was formed with the purpose of re-building the levees that were damaged by Katrina or were deemed inadequate after Katrina. It was the largest earthmoving investment in the history of the United States, a $10 billion funding. We continued to expand our earthmoving fleet, with big dozers, big excavators, anything that moved dirt.”
Time to diversify
At that point, Degueyter was getting concerned that, although the company was growing, it was too concentrated. “Ninety percent of our business was federally funded work,” he says. “We were renting to contractors working on federal contracts. If there was a cut in funding on these corps projects, or another big storm and all this fleet came back at one time, we would not be in a good position. We saw the need to diversify our customer base. We identified other business segments to target such as pipeline work, infrastructure, and oil and gas projects. The equipment we were renting on the levee jobs – big excavators, dozers, Cat trucks, material carriers, road brooms, were the types of equipment utilized by these industries, so we were able to diversify without the need for more capital investment. It was good timing because infrastructure, pipeline, and infrastructure projects really started moving at that time.”
In 2011, after Bottom Line deployed more than 50 machines on a project in Lake Charles, La., a competitor contacted Degueyter to join forces for a big industrial project that was expected to start. They set up shop in Sulphur, La., and purchased a large amount of additional equipment to prepare for a big project that was to start in July 2012. All the equipment was ready to go, but, unfortunately, the job was delayed until October.
“We couldn’t afford to sit and wait for that customer to call, so I started leaning on the sales group to rent those machines, and it’s a good thing I did because we didn’t deliver the first piece to that job until December 2014,” Degueyter says.
Meanwhile, the sales staff followed through and got it rented. At the end of the year, while doing an inventory review, Degueyter realized that the company had more than 100 machines working in the Houston area, almost three hours from Lake Charles. I called up the salesmen and asked,” What are y’all doing, why are you renting this equipment in Houston?” He said, “You said rent it, you didn’t say where!”
The company had no choice but to open a branch in the Houston market to support the customer jobsites in the Houston area. “That was January 2013, and by August of that year, we went from about 100 machines to almost 200, and at the high point, we were renting close to 500 machines out of that market,” Degueyter says. Bottom Line engaged in a rapid expansion from 2013 through 2018 to fill in the gaps between locations.
“The next move was in Baton Rouge. We were already in New Orleans, it’s just 50 miles down the road, but those two industrial markets are very different, and if you say you’re coming out of New Orleans to a Baton Rouge plant job, you could just as soon say you’re coming out of Florida! We had to put a satellite yard there.
“Our next move was to Beaumont, Texas. Then in 2019, we had a big industrial project that had just finished in Freeport, Texas, south of Houston. The same contractor was starting another job in Corpus Christi, and they wanted us to be their supplier. So, we then made our move into Corpus. We set up a temporary yard there around January of 2020.”
From Corpus to Covid
When Covid hit, the company made it a priority to keep its employees and their families healthy, while still keeping the company financially strong. In 2019, the company set a goal to double in size in five years, in terms of revenues, fleet size, and geographical coverage.
“We wanted to spread out even further into geographical locations that weren’t so dependent on energy to help diversify our customer base,” Degueyter says. “In 2022, we opened a location in Greenville, on the east side of Dallas, and in the summer of 2023, we opened another location in Aledo, on the west side of Dallas-Fort Worth. We also finalized an acquisition to acquire a permanent yard in Corpus. Additionally, we opened locations in San Antonio and Brownsville. In July of 2023, we opened four new locations in that 30-day period.
Bottom Line’s bottom line
Today Bottom Line has a footprint of 11 locations -- seven in Texas and four in Louisiana -- with a very diverse customer base. “When you look at our top 20, we cover energy, green energy, traditional energy sectors, infrastructure, commercial development, subdistrict developments, roads, bridges, petrochemical,” says Degueyter. “There’s really not a sector we’re not touching.”
Now, the fast-growing Bottom Line has an outstanding team of more than 270 employees. “At the very beginning it was just me, with my wife, Kim, at home doing accounting, and a few warm bodies that I hired in the first couple of months,” says Degueyter. “It was a small group of us the first few years, 10 or 12 employees maybe. With me and a couple of key managers. But as we’ve grown, the success and the growth can be attributed to bringing quality players into the business, they helped us do it. This, along with the great relationships we have with our customers, our suppliers and our creditors is what allowed us to thrive during our rapid growth.”
Bottom Line’s niche has always been earthmoving equipment, as well as specialty tools and attachments. “We look for innovative ways to perform tasks that improve the safety of people on the ground, tools that can perform faster, safer and be more efficient.”
Other attachments in Bottom Line’s inventory include:
CTL attachments, shears, pile drivers, concrete breakers, barrier lifters, oil-quick couplers, compactors, grapples, thumbs, mowers, mulchers, dump trailers, sweepers, brooms, vacuum lifters, pipe lifters, multiprocessors, and pulverizers. Some of Bottom Line’s top suppliers include: Morooka, OilQuick, Vacuworx, Bomag, JLG, John Deere, Kobelco, Broce Broom, and Link-Belt.
The company now has more than 1,500 units in its fleet, along with more than 800 specialty attachments, at an original equipment cost of $340 million. Over the years, Degueyter has had numerous offers to acquire Bottom Line, but he has shown no interest in selling. He has multiple family members working in the company and as he has repeatedly said, the company is making money and he’s still having fun.
Degueyter sees his region as very strong for the foreseeable future with oil and gas and green energy being of such primary importance. And Bottom Line has some unique capabilities that make it a strong independent.
“We’re big enough that we can fleet up for a project,” says Degueyter. “What we’re good at is large-scale projects with a large number of machines at one time. We’re the best at supporting these large jobs, and customers know that. We’re known for high-quality, late-model machines, and our fleet age looks a lot like a dealership. We’re not a rent-to-sell, we’re a rent-to-rent business, and we have a holding period. We’re disciplined about not selling early, we keep a much shorter lifecycle than the national chains and that keeps our fleet newer, fresher, and more reliable. We respond more quickly than the bigger companies in terms of how fast we can service the equipment. We have diagnostic capabilities and can self-perform the diagnostics and the repairs onsite, so we are not reliant on third-party services.
“Through our growth, we’ve evolved to a national account status with most of the major OEMs, allowing us to buy direct and to receive factory training and support.”
Specialization
Another differentiator is the unique attachments that the company has. “If somebody has a tough application, somebody from one of the big companies might say, ‘[Those guys] have all the weird tools that nobody else has,” he notes. “We’re known to help solve problems and that’s a differentiator, that’s our ‘Make It Happen’ mentality. That’s what makes us stand out among the rest, and the specialty tools and attachments that we offer get us on a jobsite first. Once we get in the door, we probably have everything they need. In a lot of cases, it’s a door-opener, it allows us to get in front of the customer and gives us the ability to offer other products once we’re in the door.”
And once Bottom Line opens the door, they perform well enough to stay.
Bottom Line Equipment is based in Broussard, La., and ranked No. 41 in the 2025 RER 100.