The dealer family —
more than genes
As a family business, STIHL cultivates partnerships on equal terms. This connection is particularly deeply felt among long-standing specialist dealers, who themselves often operate as family businesses too. They are a decisive factor in STIHL’s worldwide success. Two USA-based dealers tell us how they combine a passion for chainsaws with family cohesion and an instinct for business success. After all, in North America – the “lumberjack continent” – leading the market requires a particular emphasis on customer loyalty, trust and service, as well as excellent products.
As Wayne Sutton shows the photo of a silver necklace, his voice reverberates with enthusiasm. “Do you see the little chainsaws hanging on it? It’s a chainsaw necklace.” The 68-year-old American has devoted his entire life to one theme: STIHL chainsaws. He had the necklace made specially for his wife – so it is really a double expression of love. “My wife never wore the necklace because she doesn’t really do jewelry. But still, she knows that it was a gift of love,” says the long-standing STIHL dealer.
The necklace with little chainsaws attached is a symbol of Wayne Sutton’s love for chainsaws as well as his wife.
Wayne Sutton’s love of sawing started in the forest. His father was a lumberjack with his own farm. “Whenever I could, I would sit on a tree stump and watch Dad fell huge trees, many meters tall.” Wayne was given his first chainsaw at the age of seven. Chainsaws were my daily bread as a child, they were all around,” he says. So, it’s no great surprise that as a young man, after five years in the US Air Force, he returned to the saw to begin his next career. Newly married and in need of money, he presented himself to the local chainsaw dealer. “And within two weeks, the old owner decided to sell the business to me.” The training at his father’s timber farm paid off.
Wayne Sutton Long-established STIHL dealer and area manager for STIHL USA“My father taught me how to sharpen chains – it’s less a science and more of an art form.”
The forest as a training ground
Sam Madsen is often thinking about woodland; his eyes light up when he talks about his own forest. “I call my approach to forest management ‘conservation.’ It allows me to use resources, but in an environmentally responsible way,” explains the long-standing STIHL dealer – one of over 10,000 in the USA alone. Now 69 years old, he has owned Coal Creek Tree Farm for around 20 years. He ran it alongside his chainsaw business until his retirement. “The official reason for buying the farm was as an investment: I grow trees to sell the wood. But in all honesty, I’ve always wanted to get my hands on the power tools we sell in the shop. The farm gives me a chance to use them. I became my own best customer!”
Sam Madsen’s other customers also benefited from that: Using the power tools himself meant he knew them inside and out and could therefore really guarantee the excellent service for which STIHL is known. This passion for the product and attention to detail is what makes STIHL dealers special – and it is why Madsen’s Shop & Supply Inc. has been successful across multiple decades and generations.
Sam Madsen essentially grew up in his grandfather’s shop and developed an early enthusiasm for chainsaws.
The business allied itself with STIHL as far back as 1970.
Madsen’s Shop & Supply thrived under Sam’s leadership in the 1980s.
Growing up among chainsaws
The business, which is now a major STIHL dealer, was founded in 1946 by Sam’s grandfather, Danish immigrant Magnus Madsen, in Centralia, a small town in the south-west of Washington state. Under its original name, Madsen’s Repair Shop, the business started out as a car repair shop; from 1952 it also sold chainsaws. Sam’s father Ralph took over the business after the death of Sam's grandfather and made the company a STIHL dealer in 1970 – four years before the US subsidiary STIHL Inc. was founded. In 1980, Sam Madsen joined his parents’ business – and got rid of the automotive business to concentrate entirely on saws.
The decision freed up resources. The family-owned company grew continuously over the following decades and now has around 3,000 square meters of display space. When Sam Madsen talks about how he sold the business five years ago and retired, it is with a touch of sadness. It’s no longer owned by the family. “But the company is its own family,” says Sam Madsen. “It is more important to me that our customers continue to be served and that employees who have given us their working lives can remain employed than that the business continues in the hands of someone I am genetically connected to.”
STIHL in the US
STIHL has representatives in over 160 countries, with its own sales companies in 44. Accounting for around one third of sales, the USA is the most important single market for STIHL. Though that wasn’t always the case: The first set of local contacts recorded by founder Andreas Stihl when he visited in 1937 was destroyed in the Second World War. The first sales partner for STIHL in the USA was finally able to start work in 1958. As the first STIHL Manager Pacific North West, Virg Hatfield took on the task with gusto in the 1960s and expanded his sales network to eight states – around which he traveled in his own propeller plane. This laid the foundation for the establishment of the STIHL-owned US subsidiary in 1974: What initially occupied a rented area of 1,800 square meters grew to today’s STIHL Inc., encompassing a total of around 1.48 million square meters and with around 2,700 employees.
Sam Madsen Long-standing STIHL dealer“My favorite proverb originates from ancient Greece: A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. I’m literally one of those old men planting trees.”
Dealer family
Wayne Sutton has also retired. Back in the 1970s, his initially small chainsaw business sold various brands. “But I soon realized that there was only one I could really rely on,” he says. As an exclusive STIHL dealer, the small shop in Amboy, Washington started to grow and was soon selling 600 saws a year – in a town with 250 inhabitants. STIHL became Wayne Sutton’s second family. The dealers in the region would meet regularly, take outings together, and organize competitions. “After 45 years they are my closest friends. They all have something to do with STIHL.” In his case too, the sense of family is not defined by genes, but by connection and cohesion.
At STIHL dealers, a love for the product is combined with a focus on service. All around the world, they go the extra mile to provide good service. In more remote areas of North America, they even sometimes used aircraft to do so.
So Wayne Sutton fit perfectly into the global STIHL family – which by this time had reached the third generation of the Stihl family. His business could not just keep growing forever, so after 20 years he decided to make a change: He sold the shop, responded to an advertisement from the STIHL Northwest sales organization, and became a salesperson himself. For the 25 years until his retirement, he worked as a Territory Manager and Application Specialist, with responsibility for the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska – “a wonderful time,” he says, which he looks back on with great fondness.
Wayne Sutton has particularly special memories of his encounters with Hans Peter Stihl: “He’s a very serious man,” recounts the passionate STIHL dealer. “But he is also curious, with a lot of different interests – and we share many of those interests. Every time we met, we could chat about everything you could think of – whether it was livestock farming, cars or motorcycles. It felt rather like he was my father.” Since 1980 Wayne Sutton has been collecting chainsaws, and since 2000 displaying them in a special building which has earned the name “Wayne’s Chainsaw Museum” over the years – even though it only has space for around half of his collection of more than 4,000 chainsaws. His favorite saw is a gift given to him by the head of his chosen family: A Model BL, sent by Hans Peter Stihl himself.
Long-serving STIHL leader Hans Peter Stihl is a father figure for Wayne Sutton (pictured on the right).
Wayne Sutton loves guiding visitors through his collection and is passionate about explaining both the technology and STIHL’s history.
Connection through passion
Sam Madsen also emphasizes the significance of STIHL’s family values for his long-term loyalty to the company. “For me, the decision to choose STIHL made sense both economically and regarding family values. Hans Peter Stihl was not only the owner of the company; he also knew about every little technical detail. We imitated that approach at Madsen’s: We always wanted to completely take care of our customers, by being technology-focused, competent and always precisely tailored to the individual usage situation.” These evolved connections are an important foundation for the global expansion of the STIHL brand – founder Andreas Stihl was already pushing the export business forward even in the 1930s. So, it is no coincidence that Sam Madsen became a STIHL dealer and forest owner at the same time. A forest generation takes around 50 years to mature, he explains: “Trees grow ring by ring; companies grow customer by customer.”
