Bob Walker with Walker Mowers | Equip Expo 2025: transcript
This automated transcript accompanies the original Turf Talk recording. Names, figures, and speaker identification may contain errors; check important details against the audio. Timestamps refer to the episode, not advertisements.
0:00Speaker A I am here with the legend, Mr. Bob Walker with Walker Mowers. And sir, I just want to tell you what a privilege it is to come and speak with you. As you know, my father bought the first Walker Mower from Levon in North Carolina.
0:17Speaker A I'm thinking it was probably, would you say 83, 84, somewhere in that time.
0:22Speaker B started working with us back in the yard in 84. 4 or 5 somewhere A along in
0:27Speaker B that in that point yeah
0:28Speaker A But that was one of the first machines I got to jump on as a young man and work with mom and dad and their business. And so my heart is very true to Walker. My dad, I can't tell you how many he purchased later on in the business, but we were cutting an 88-acre site. It was a Methodist retirement home and
0:55Speaker A we were running four walkers to cut that and we would cut all the residential homes in one day. We still had a lot of field mowing and stuff, but we would get it all done with four walkers. Early morning and late night, but we got it done.
1:09Speaker B That's uh... Set really satisfying to us as a manufacturer to have designed something that you can actually say this is we were able to take care of this kind of property of this size and it wasn't yeah it helped us have an opportunity to do carry out the service that you were trying to trying to provide that that's gets exciting to us to hear these stories so yeah
1:35Speaker A Good deal, good. Good deal. Well, tell us a little bit about how Walker got started. We spoke about it the other day, you and I, but we want our listeners to know about the late nights in the garage and things like that.
1:48Speaker B First of all, we were a contract manufacturer of other products that weren't related to lawnmowers. But in the spring of 1977, my father and I purchased a couple little riding mowers for our own private use. It wasn't anything we had any grand plan of being in the mower business. We already had this other contract work we were doing. But my dad and I bought two of them, one for him and one for me. And then after a few weeks of using these little rear engine riding moors with a steering wheel and a gear shift on it, we started talking to each other and said, you know, these moors aren't working out too well for us. We've got a lot of landscaping on our private property,
2:36Speaker B trees and flower beds and other things to mow around. And so we said, you know, we think we can build a better machine than these we've bought. Let's see what we can do.
2:49Speaker B And there was no, again, no grand plan to get into more business, but we built our first prototype. In 1977 and by that summer we were mowing grass with our own little mower. We sold the other mowers and got rid of those and using our own machine.
3:04Speaker B The next two years we built two more prototypes and finally by 1979 we had a prototype that was working quite well for us and we thought it's time we took we went to a farm show in Kansas. We came from a Kansas originally. We understood that farmers usually can judge equipment pretty accurate because they use a lot of equipment and so we sure enough we went to the farm show and the farmers were interested in our machine. We had nothing to sell them. because it was just a prototype we were showing them but anyway we came home in 1980 the very next year we built 25 machines 25 was just a number we pulled out of the area that seemed like a good number to get started with
3:49Speaker B and It took us about a year to build 25 because there was a lot of hand building, not a lot of tooling available to us at that time, and then it took us two years to sell the first 25 because we had no customers, no dealers, distributors. So it was a very slow start. All the while we're doing this other contract manufacturing, that was paying the bills while we experimented with lawnmowers.
4:16Speaker B But then finally we got began to get some orders. My parents made a few trips around the United States showing the machines and then in 1983 we lost our contract. The contract that we'd been manufacturing under came to an end. We had to go full-time into lawnmowers to survive. There was nothing else for us to do. That very year in 1984 we made 450 machines and we sold every one of them and got paid for every one of them. And so that really helped us get in, we got into the business then.
4:56Speaker A No looking back. We're looking ahead. But anyway, it's interesting. I like to tell people it was 10 years. So 1977 up to 1987 before we made any profit out of the lawnmower business. A lot of people say, how come it took so long? Well, it's hard to explain. It's just the way things are to finally get the business up and to know. how to build the machines, how to sell them, how to take care of them for the customer. And it sounds like, again, you were part of that early, those early customers that bought the machines,
5:43Speaker A put them to work, and then as people discovered what the machine would do for them, we began to get some momentum in the market. You know, people began to hear about the machine and... Yeah, the customers that were satisfied, we became, many of them were repeat customers or referrals. They would tell other people about the machine and so that's how we got started.
6:12Speaker B Awesome story. Hard work paid off, didn't it?
6:15Speaker B There were some late nights in that garage, wasn't it?
6:18Speaker A There were some, yeah, we worked the hours we needed to. to to get to get things done yeah we
6:27Speaker B As you, like I said, you know, my dad put me on one when I was a young man and learned how to perfect it. And one of the best striping mowers that you will find out there is a walker mower.
6:42Speaker A we laugh the little saying it's a little marketing slogan slogan fast easy beautiful and Though all three of those words describe some of attributes of the machine, we want a machine that would cut cut quickly, so fast, uh easy is uh easy to use, easy to control, uh easy on the m and then finally beautiful is the what the strikes and the the the the beautiful cut that you get. So
7:10Speaker A all three of those play together to we think to give us you know to give an advantage to the customer that wants to have a machine like that will do that not every mower is even designed for I mean some of them and there's all different kinds of mowing some mowing is just let's just control the growth we doesn't care too much how it looks like just let's knock down the grass and make tall grass short grass you know but There are places where the owners or the caretakers have put a lot of, invested a lot into have a beautiful place, a beautiful, and either their private residence or sometimes a park or other location where the appearance when it's finished is something that's important.
8:02Speaker A And that's where, that's kind of where we fit into the. in the picture yeah
8:07Speaker B Yeah, yeah. Well, you see them everywhere now. We live near Wake Forest University and we see those guys out there using them on their property and like I said, we use them for years and years. There would be times that we'd take our Walker mowers in on a 16 foot trailer. We'd have the trailer so packed full of grass we'd have to send another trailer to pick up the mowers.
8:32Speaker B And then bring the trailer back to the farm, unload the grass with a skid steer and feed it to the cows until we bought the walking floor trailer that was, I wish I could remember the gentleman's name we bought the trailer from that designed it just for walking. It carried two up front. Had the basket that dropped down on it. We'd back right up to it We put automatic dumps on the walkers
8:56Speaker B And so we'd back right up to it hit the button they would dump we'd pull off and then we'd hit another button and that basket would just kind of slowly make its way up dump into it And then we would take it back to the farm and and just unload a just a massive block cube of grass
9:12Speaker A We've seen people sent us videos that also told us the camera The cows in their pastures get trained so when they hear Well, sometimes if you have to hear the lawnmower, that's their signal. It's time to
9:25Speaker A Time to eat.
9:28Speaker B But they would, they'd come running, they'd see us pulling in the pasture. We had a place we could just pull right in and especially with the new trailer we've got and just unload it, they'd all be standing there at the back and we'd fill it up again the next day. Well, it has been a pleasure. We would love to visit the manufacturing plant, my wife and I.
9:51Speaker A There's a standing invitation for you. We love having people come for tours. It's one of our favorite things that we do besides manufacturers is to show people how it's
10:00Speaker B How it's done.
10:01Speaker A done. We're very proud of the fact we're a true manufacturer. We don't outsource, we insource. We make a high percentage of the parts that go in to make up one of our machines are made right at our factory. We don't have other people do that for us. We do it ourselves. We like to control the quality and
10:21Speaker A the schedule and all of that that goes with doing it yourself.
10:25Speaker A So anyway we'd love to have you come and visit
10:29Speaker A our our place. We're you can bring a camera and shoot pictures where we don't have anything to hide and
10:39Speaker C Well, maybe we can bring the roadcaster and we can sit down and do a pretty good length.
10:43Speaker A The Polinkie Podcast.
10:44Speaker D Well, that'd be fine. I'd like to do that too.
10:46Speaker C Good deal. Mr. Walker,
10:48Speaker C it's a pleasure.
10:50Speaker D you, Eric.
10:50Speaker C you so much. Yes,
10:51Speaker C My name's Eric Jones, Turf Teacher here with Mr. Bob Walker. I'll see you in the next lecture.
11:09Speaker E That wraps up another great interview. You're tuned in to our live coverage of the Equip Expo 2025 from the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Kentucky. If you missed any part of this interview or any of our live coverage, you can catch it all on the Equip Expo live podcast. Stay locked in. More live interviews and industry action are coming your way.
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