‘The opposite of growth is death’: Why the founder of EquipmentShare is driven by process, not an end goal 

Startland News’ Startup Road Trip series explores innovative and uncommon ideas finding success in rural America and Midwestern startup hubs outside the Kansas City metro. This series is possible thanks to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which leads a collaborative, nationwide effort to identify and remove large and small barriers to new business creation.

COLUMBIA, Missouri — Ever since Willy Schlacks and his team founded EquipmentShare, they’ve been told to slow their growth, he recalled. 

“It seems too fast. It seems risky. But growth is the opposite of death, and we’re looking at expanding our footprint so that we can serve more of our customers’ needs on the distribution side. We’re at a size and scale at this point that growth is critical,” said Schlacks, a serial entrepreneur known for starting the construction fleet and digital solutions startup EquipmentShare with his brother, Jabbok.

The two co-founded the company alongside Brad Siegler, Jeff Lowe, and Matthew McDonald in 2014 after evolving the business idea at Startup Weekend in Columbia.

Since EquipmentShare’s storied launch, the company has onboarded 35 to 55 new team members a week to help support its growing client demand. It currently employs about 3,500 team members and operates more than 120 locations, according to the EquipmentShare website. 

Even with a team in the thousands, the company has been named one of the top Missouri employers on the list of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes and Statista for the past three years (2020, 2021 and 2022).

Schlacks’ secret: find a balance between creating processes that enable empowerment and giving employees flexibility.

“At EquipmentShare we have various teams,” Schlacks noted, “and we want to empower each team to have a lot of freedom in hitting their objectives; but in that freedom, they create their own culture too. So there isn’t this stamp of ‘do everything this certain way’ that stifles their organic and creative juices. It’s really about understanding what’s critical to the company but also giving freedom.”

Serving customers is at the forefront of EquipmentShare’s mission, Schlacks said, therefore it is the fundamental cause that unites the company. 

“That’s the thread that’s going to run across any team,” he continued. “Then there’s enormous variability and complexity when you think about every town and city, state and country that we are in. We really want those individuals using creativity to think about how they can serve the customer.” 

Click here to read more about why EquipmentShare was named one of America’s Best Startup Employers. 

EquipmentShare, Columbia, Missouri

EquipmentShare’s team will only continue to grow, Schlacks said, noting the company this past year launched its T3 — the only cloud-based operating system that brings together construction workflows and data from constantly moving elements in one place.

T3 is a comprehensive construction technology solution that digitalizes and connects the three verticals of construction productivity: assets, people and materials. It gives contractors real-time visibility into parts of the jobsite that are historically difficult to track and manage.

The company launched T3 after raising a $230 million investment round in 2021. 

“We will continue raising money for our balance sheet that we need to continue to grow,” Schlacks noted. 

Click here to read more about EquipmentShare’s $230M investment round.

Willy Schlacks giving a tour to Missouri Gov. Mike Parson in 2021 at EquipmentShare in Columbia

With EquipmentShare headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, Schlacks hopes the company’s journey so far will empower entrepreneurs to make an impact — no matter where they are located, he shared. 

“This ambition, this idea they have is not a pipe dream,” Schlacks said. “More people can see what it looks like to have an idea and then have a large outcome for that idea.”

Certain constraints that Schlacks perceived of growing a company in the Midwest have even been proven wrong through the years, he said. 

“Finding good people is difficult anywhere — that doesn’t change whether you’re in Columbia or in New York or wherever you may be,” Schlacks said. “But the ability and the power that we have from being in the Midwest, or particularly Columbia, is that there’s an ethos that we resonate with: we had to ignore the litmus of a resume and instead take a harder look at ‘What does it mean to have aptitude and strengths? And then hire for that. I think it’s enabled us to move faster and grow and do things that we didn’t anticipate.”

For Schlacks, his ultimate goal for EquipmentShare is always evolving, he noted.

“The end goal is the process, and the processes change how you grow; it becomes an infinite circle at that point, which is wonderful,” Schlacks said. “If there is an end in mind, then that end is achieved effectively in the mind. If there is no end in mind, then there has to be something else that drives it — it’s the process.”

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