Man in Motion
Published: 27/9
Longtime demolition industry dynamo Bruce Bacon has made a career out of connecting contractors with innovative, quality equipment. And he’s not about to slow down.
Speed, champion motorsports driver Mario Andretti once observed, is not something one can just dabble in. “You have to live it,” Andretti said. “You have to live it all the time.”
Of course, that philosophy entails constantly living with speed’s many, sometimes ruinous hazards as well. But as someone who is as comfortable taking a gamble on a new business venture as he is taking tight corners on his Harley Davidson motorcycle, demolition industry veteran Bruce Bacon believes the trade-off is more than worth it.
“What a great life it can be,” he says. “If you are willing to take the risks, appreciate the successes, and learn from the heartbreaks, why not bet on the longshot?”
For most of the past 35 years, many of Bacon’s longshots have paid off in the form of attachment manufacturing ventures that have influenced both how construction and demolition contractors do their work, and the way that equipment is conceived and built. From his start with the pioneering attachment innovators at LaBounty to his current role growing SAS Forks’ new DRKhorse division, Bacon relishes the experience of building up ideas from scratch, even when success is hardly guaranteed.
“We all love to root for the up-and-comer,” Bacon says, citing how the DRKhorse name embodies “that uniquely North American idea of cheering and betting on the come-from-behind long shot. That’s the American dream.”
Starting up
Bacon’s fascination with speed—and, indeed, most anything with engines and wheels—began during his childhood in Two Harbors, Minn., located along the north shore of Lake Superior. After school and Little League practice, Bacon’s afternoons were often spent hanging around his father’s Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge automobile dealership.
“This was during the ‘muscle car’ era, and racing and fast cars were part of the dealership culture,” Bacon recalls, adding that the presence of bulldozers, graders, and dump trucks on the lot complemented the work ethic parents instilled in their children. “Getting your hands dirty was part of the program,” he says.
After attending the University of Minnesota, Bacon decided to try his hand at the car business and started a Cadillac-Buick-Pontiac dealership—an experience he characterizes as “humbling” and, fortunately, soon taken out of his hands.
“I learned that not every venture or dream in life ends up the way you planned,” he says, “but also that there is always something to be gained—even in defeat.”
A far more positive and productive learning experience would begin in 1990, when Bacon landed a job with fellow Two Harbors natives, Roy and Ken LaBounty, who had turned an idea for pioneering contractor grapple into a national reputation for innovative equipment, including mobile shears, universal processors, and concrete pulverizers.
“I had known them basically my whole life, and remember when they started out in a very modest facility with just a few employees,” Bacon says. “When I interviewed, they were in their third or fourth expansion.” Harkening back to his wide-eyed boyhood at his father’s car dealership, Bacon spent as much time as possible on the factory floor with the LaBounty family and their engineers, absorbing all he could about the design and manufacturing process.
Bacon calls Roy LaBounty “a visionary and a risk-taker,” but also someone fully committed to standing behind products, regardless of whether they succeeded or failed, and always looking after the customer.
“When I look back at the projects and products he took on, I am still amazed at what they did,” Bacon says. “Roy and Ken never let setbacks bother them. They continued to innovate and dominate the industry. No one could touch them.”
Fallout from a change in LaBounty’s ownership eventually led Bacon and co-workers Curt Frahm and Kevin Bakke to leave the company in 1997 and launch Genesis Attachments. Ken LaBounty, Roy’s son was a founding partner as well.
To call their first few years “challenging” would be an understatement. Despite being undercapitalized, Bacon says, “we jumped in the deep end of the pool, built a new facility, bought used equipment, hired all the staff—then fought like dogs for four or five years to build this greenfield start-up against the dominant force in the industry.”
Luck proved to be on their side as well, as Genesis navigated the cycle of successes and failure to eventually patent breakthroughs such as the bolt-in tip for mobile shears, and many other innovations that help spur an industry-wide push to improve equipment maintenance, productivity, and power. Genesis would also benefit from the insights of Bacon’s mentor Roy LaBounty.
“Our competition laughed at us at the start,” Bacon recalls, “but they weren’t laughing a few years later, we were taking in $50 million in annual revenue.”
The best-laid plans…
There was little to laugh about at the outset of Bacon’s next business venture—Exodus Global, which he founded in an attempt to design and build a material handler that would compete with well-established German manufacturers. “Why I thought this was possible is beyond me,” Bacon admits, adding the 2008-09 economic crisis was hardly an opportune time for a new company to find its footing. “But then, I’ve always believed ‘anything’ is possible with enough will, vision, and execution.”
“Anything” did happen, as a relentless 18-month effort ultimately succeeded in fulfilling Bacon’s vision…and nearly ruined Exodus in the process. While an agreement with a leading equipment company offered both exposure and much-needed cash, the alliance was not meeting expectations. I was deeply concerned about long term commitment to the alliance.
Faced with the grim prospect of having nearly a hundred Exodus Global employees lose their jobs, Bacon says, “I knew we had to pivot.”
Bacon’s premonition of ultimately came true, but by then, Exodus Global had become firmly established in the attachment business, with highly respected brands such as ShearCore/Fortress, BladeCore, Oil Quick USA, and Connect Work Tools. Bacon praises current Exodus Global CEO Kevin Boreen, owner Murray Johnson, and their team for having sustain the company’s growth and development into an international player. Though proud to have played a role in the stories of both Genesis and Exodus Global, what pleases Bacon most is the companies’ combined economic impact on his home area, employing nearly 300 people in the Superior, Wisc., and Duluth, Minn., area.
“That these families are able to enjoy a great living and benefits outshines any ‘bright ideas’ we might have had,” he says.
Back in the race
The past few years of Bruce Bacon’s life validate Isaac Newton’s Law of Inertia, that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. His search for a new challenge after leaving Exodus Global in 2021 eventually led to a chance meeting with longtime friend Bill Van Sant, founder of Paladin Attachments and, now, executive chair of material handling specialist Biltrite Holdings.
Van Sant presented Bacon with an intriguing opportunity—President of Tenamec Goups’s Luxemburg, Wisc., subsidiary SAS Forks, maker of auto dismantlers, processors, and material handling attachments.
“The parameters of the job were simple,” Bacon says, “Grow!”
Bacon knew exactly where and how to begin when he took the job last year. The plan for DRKhorse would be to put together the world’s most respected demolition, scrap processing and construction equipment product lines, with service, support, and sales based at the SAS factory and offices.
Partnering only with highly respected companies in countries with fair trade practices with the U.S., Bacon says DRKhorse seeks to offer “a hand-selected group of products that are at the forefront of quality and design, offering dealers and distributors and users, a full portfolio under one roof and simplify support, communication, and frankly, in some cases better pricing on word-class tools.”
DRKhorse’s prime partners currently include attachment specialists Rotar of Holland and MBI of Italy, and South Korean hammer manufacturers D&A and JAB. Other products will be added in the coming years.
Sensing that the time is right “to build a powerhouse of products that no one-single company could develop and manufacture,” Bacon has set an ambitious target of tripling SAS Group and DRKhorse revenue in five years—a lofty goal to be sure, but one he feels is attainable with a team talented people and partners pooling their skills, resources, and commitment.
“I told our group, when the rest of the world sees what we are doing and who is doing it, they will come knocking, and that has happened,” he says, heartened by the initial response to the DRKhorse concept.
“At the customer and dealer levels, the doors have been opened and continue to open,” he says. “We missed a lot of the early-year buying season but we are building the foundation for growth and success.”
At the same time, even an inveterate risk-taker like Bacon knows well that DRKhorse’s growth should not be pursued simply for growth’s sake.
“We have opportunities to bring in a wide array of superb products from many family-owned, well-established, and very respected companies,” he says. “We must not run too fast as the foundational work of support, parts inventory, training, and distributor development are paramount to establishing the foundation that is required to succeed. We’ve already assembled a great, experienced sales team, for example, but there’s there always so much more to learn.”
If there’s a guiding principle behind the DRKhorse development strategy, Bacon adds, it’s a lesson learned long ago from Roy LaBounty: “the customer comes first.”
The road ahead
Bacon calls it “a gross understatement” to say the past year has been a non-stop effort to launch DRKhorse. Indeed, the dearth of that precious commodity called time is part of the reason why, after a career of taking risks, he considers this the biggest one of all.
“I’m not getting any younger and, God willin,g I have a long time to go,” he explains. “But as timelines shrink, risk increases. We never have any guarantee of anything in life and all we can do is move forward with every bit of will and determination we have for our dreams.”
Perhaps more important than his business accomplishments are the non-work dreams Bacon has realized along the way. He and his “pretty cool and long-suffering” wife, Lindsey, have a blended family of three children and ten grandchildren. He still enjoys fast cars, relishes time at his peaceful home and land out in the woods, cheers for the Minnesota Vikings during the NFL season, and rarely passes up a chance to hop on a Harley Davidson. At the time of this interview, he and his three brothers were planning a motorcycle tour of northern California that would include the Pacific Coast Highway, Napa Valley, the redwood forests, and Lake Tahoe.
“I’d just say that I am grateful for this life,” Bacon says, “even if it means having fought and dreamed and laughed and cried and spent a lot of sleepless nights fighting to make these companies succeed. But does that make me different from anyone else who’s been responsible for a business or a family? Not at all.”
Nor should anyone expect Bacon to live his life any differently, even at a time when so many of his contemporaries are slowing down.
“I can’t lay on the beach for more than a day,” he says. “So, I guess I’ll keep doing what I love—hanging around this industry and trying new adventures.”
Bacon’s Basics
PDa asked Bruce to share some of the rules that have guided him in business and life.
• Hire the very best people and let them spread their wings. Form them into a team that all pulls on the rope.
• Hire for intellect, attitude and ethics. You cannot teach these. Anything else can be learned.
• Do what you said you would do.
• Customer first. Always. We work for them. They owe us nothing.
• Strive to earn trust. That’s the greatest gift anyone can give you.
• Be grateful, kind, and considerate.
• Win. Winning is fun
