Building Success Through Excellence
PRESS: Construction Equipment Guide, November 2023
Full Article: Business Builds Success Through Unique Purpose-Built Attachments
“A&D Equipment is often referred to by its customers as “the real deal,” “top notch” and “a true customer’s dealer.” That’s because the company sets out to learn just what its customers need.”
“We have a great offering of unique purpose-built attachments, but what really sets A & D Equipment apart from its competition is its heritage,” said Donna LaFata, president of the company. “My husband, Anthony, and I are second-generation excavating contractors. His dad was an Italian immigrant who started the company from very humble beginnings, who ultimately turned his thriving excavation business [today known as LaFata & Son Excavation Inc.] over to my husband, and it was taken to the next level.
“Every product we sell is a product that we use just about every day on the job site, so when we recommend an attachment for a specific application, we already know how it’s going to perform,” she added. “Everything we sell has been field tested here in Connecticut on some of the toughest job sites you can find.”
Anthony likes to tell the story of how A&D started.
“As a contractor in the 1990s, we started to look for new technologies that would help us process aggregate materials on site,” he said. “New England contractors led the industry in that technology. Typically, we would bring a crushing or screening plant on site to process materials. But what we could not do was move that plant to process small amounts of material; it just wasn’t cost effective.
“We experimented with a couple of different screening attachments, but they were really not all that productive; that is until we came across a manufacturer in Europe making an excavator attachment called Rotastar,” he added. “This product turned out to be an amazing piece of technology that allowed us to screen all types of materials, wet or dry, in significant volume, and transportation and setup time were no longer an issue. The Rotastar is durable, productive and affordable. After using the product for a significant amount of time, the thought occurred to us that perhaps we could sell this attachment and that’s essentially how A & D Equipment got its start.”
The Rotastar screening bucket comes in a variety of sizes from skid steers up to 34-ton machines and uses lightweight pliable polyurethane stars that rotate and separate materials without crushing, allowing for an uncontaminated, usable product.
“A & D Equipment has successfully marketed its attachments not only in New England, but also across the United States. Most attachments are not particularly complex, so supporting attachment sales a thousand miles away is something that can typically be handled via a phone conversation.
A & D recently achieved Women Owned Small Business status, which has put it in a very competitive position when bidding on government contracts. The foundation of the company is nonetheless strongly built on passion for and expertise with attachments. And as the saying goes, at the end of the day, helping contractors do their jobs more productively and efficiently is, according to A & D, what it’s in business to do … every day. “
– Construction Equipment Guide, November 2, 2023
Read more about all the product lines A&D Equipment offers in November’s edition of ConstructionEquipmentGuide.com
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