Proven Power was founded by father, Bill Brooks Sr., and son, Bill Jr.

From a young age, Bill Jr. fixed anything he could get his hands on – from motorcycles to jet skis to lawn equipment and everything in between – all out of a little milkhouse in one of his dad’s dairy barns. Almost 27 years ago, and with just four employees, he and his father purchased a John Deere dealership.

Since then, their business has grown to two stores with 45 employees. We sat down with Proven Power’s General Manager Andy Flint to learn how adopting ASPEN transformed their dealership operations.

Top ASPEN Features:

• Overall reporting functionality
• Ability to drill down to finer details

What are some of your favorite features in ASPEN?

Andy: In my current role, the reporting is definitely going to be my favorite feature. Just being able to see things from kind of a top-down view of how the company’s doing, but then you also can drill down into a lot of finer details.

If you’re looking at it on a weekly basis at the top-down view, you can keep an eye on things. But if you need to drill down further than that, you can go down and look at every single transaction for a part.

If you want to find out why something went wrong or if everything’s going smooth and nothing stands out, you can just do the above-ground view and keep an eye on things.

What are some long-term goals for the dealership and how do you envision ASPEN helping you achieve them?

Andy: We would like to continue growing. We’ve been very, very fortunate that the COVID years have been good to us.

I think everyone probably agrees that the COVID years weren’t real, it’s not average, it was abnormal. But if we’re only looking at the last couple of years you might think, I need to order way more than I’ve ever had to before. Everyone’s quickly realizing that’s not the case this year. Still excellent, but not anything like the massive growth that we saw during the COVID years.

So, being able to look back at a longer period of time, especially since we’ve been on ASPEN long enough, we can go back, and track things now and then use all the different reports to strategize moving forward.

What’s something no one tells you about working in a dealership?

Andy: The pace. As far as pace is concerned, the fact that in a lot of areas of the country it’s so seasonal.

So basically, if you’re in the northern United States, you’re going to be seasonal. You’re going to get hammered a couple times a year – once during planting, once during harvest. Or if you’re a lawn and garden shop, when the grass is growing and then also when it’s time for winter, so just to be prepared.

And then the other thing is what are you going to do when it’s quiet? So, we’ve got a couple trade secrets that I might not let out right now.

Fun Fact:

Andy: The most fond thing for me about the business is just the fact that it’s basically run like a big family. We spend more time with each other than we do with our own families.

The team that we have put together here, they do an amazing job, and they work really, really hard. So, for me, when I think about the business, that’s the thing that really has kept me staying here for a long time because I was going to be a police officer before I started here.