New Lee County Flint Ag & Turf dealership hosts grand opening

LEESBURG — Lee County Chamber of Commerce President Winston Oxford tells the story with a familiar gleam in his eye.

“I don’t know if Chris (Cannon) would want me telling this, but about six years ago he and I were having lunch at Booger Bottom on Lake Blackshear and he asked me, ‘Do y’all have any land where I could put my store?’” Oxford said. “I told him we had the corner lot at Oakland Meadows, and he said that’s the kind of location he was looking for.

“Over the next few years we got things worked out, and now here we are. It’s funny how things are sometimes, funny how an innocent conversation can turn into something really big.”

Oxford’s conversation with Cannon, the president/CEO of Flint Holdings LLC, was the initial step in the relocation of the outdated Albany Tractor Co. facility on South Slappey Boulevard to a state-of-the-art “superstore” at 741 U.S. Highway 82 West in Lee County. Cannon and dozens of his employees welcomed John Deere officials and hundreds of customers and invited guests to the new facility for a grand opening ceremony Thursday.

“I sure hope this is a big day for us, but it’s a bigger day for our customers and our employees,” Cannon said. “When all is said and done, we built this for them. We’ve been here a couple of months now, working the kinks out, and it couldn’t be better. What we wanted was a functional training facility for our personnel and our customers. We have that.”

There were no arguments from the dignitaries, invited guests and customers who enjoyed food in the sheltered area adjacent to the new Flint Ag & Turf’s massive service area after taking tours through the Flint facility and cheering a joint Lee County/Albany Area Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting.

“This is really about our customers and about providing a good, professional work environment for our employees,” Flint Holdings CFO Tony Sammons said. “They both deserve that kind of facility. We think it’s properly sized and in a good location for our technicians to repair equipment and includes a retail facility that equals the quality of John Deere products.”

The Lee County Flint Ag & Turf location also has become more of a retail hub for parts needed by the seven other Flint Ag & Turf dealerships in the region.

“It’s pretty exciting to come from where we did to this,” Flint Ag & Turf General Parts Manager Don Bowman, who has worked with Flint Holdings for 40 years, said. “It’s a much simpler process for our dealerships (to order needed parts), and because we now have the space we’ve increased our parts inventory by as much as a half-million dollars.”

Flint Chief Operations Officer Jimbo Pace said the new facility, which actually opened to the public on Aug. 24, is notably better by degree.

“Everything that was good about this company is still very good,” Pace said. “But there’s a lot of exciting new energy in the way we do business.”