His love for playing ball - he played baseball in high school and college, and even served as a manager of the Worthington Cubs for several seasons - actually led him to his career with Worthington Ag Parts. By the time he transferred to Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall in the fall of 1985, he had yet to travel outside of the Midwest.Īfter earning his bachelor's degree in accounting, Winter worked for Gerber & Haugen CPA in Slayton as an auditor for cooperative elevators. Winter started working at Hy-Vee while in high school, and continued there through his two years at then-Worthington Community College. "I walked beans as a kid and detassled corn and spent some time on the farm, but I grew up carrying brick and block and helping my father build a lot of the businesses (and homes) that are standing in Worthington, Minnesota," he said. He was the youngest of five kids and spent his youth working alongside his dad and doing a bit of farm work from time to time. Winter grew up in Worthington, the son of a bricklayer and a production line worker at Campbell Soup Co. Worthington Ag Parts exported product to 32 countries in 2010. Those containers can take up to eight weeks on the water en route to their destination - time that a farmer usually doesn't have when he needs a replacement part during the harvest season. "Parts on the ground will be instrumental," said Winter.Īt this time, everything ships from the company's export facility in Sioux Falls, S.D. The company hopes to have a warehouse established in eastern Europe by the end of this year and is targeting a new location in western Australia for 2012. Today, Winter said Worthington Ag Parts is looking at further expansion. And it should - his oldest sister, Jane, has lived in Sydney for 30 years. "I've gone there so many times, it feels like my second home," said Winter. He has since made nearly 30 trips "down under" and tries to check on operations there at least once, if not twice, per year. The business has six retail stores located up and down the eastern seaboard.Īs the controller for Worthington Ag Parts at the time, Winter served on the acquisitions team. It began with the acquisition of Neil's Parts in Australia in 1996. "It will show you where the parts are in stock, real time," said Winter.Īs the business evolved on the World Wide Web, it became evident that overseas expansion was necessary. They can search the site by equipment type, make and model. retail sites is photographed from four different angles, allowing customers to get a good look at the product. Every piece of salvage brought into any one of the company's 10 U.S. Through the Internet, Worthington Ag Parts is accessible to customers around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "We started to get inquiries on our website and build relationships with people." "(The Internet) opened up the world for us to sell product - for customers to know who we were," he said. Winter was the systems manager at the time. "Every day our stores get customers who see something on the website," said Winter, adding that Internet sales are difficult to measure because farmers see something online, then call Worthington Ag Parts to make sure it is in stock.Īnd to think, Winter still remembers the day about 20 years ago when he showed then-president Mike Dudley what an e-mail was. Not only does it still sell those sometimes hard-to-find used parts for everything from tractors and combines to skid-steers and cotton-pickers, it has a growing business in the after-market new parts sector, found success in remanufacturing parts and is a fairly new entry into distributorship, handling exclusive export sales to the Ukraine of U.S.-manufactured Hagie agricultural sprayers and Capello corn heads, which are manufactured in Italy.Īs technology continues to make the world smaller, Worthington Ag Parts has continued to expand via the Internet - both domestically and internationally. Worthington Ag Parts, established as a used parts business in 1964 on the south side of town, has evolved into a company that embraces the global marketplace. Their visit, he said, could end with about a half million dollars in sales for the company in 2011. On this particular visit, Winter was to meet with a group of South Africans interested in purchasing used, late-model agricultural parts. WORTHINGTON - On a late February day, Worthington Ag Parts President Mike Winter paid a visit to his hometown to check in on the business, but it wasn't just to make sure the salesmen were busy on the phone - they were - or to watch the dozen workers busily dismantling tractors out in the shop.
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