Butler Machinery at 70: The Contractor Who Became the Dakotas' CAT Dealer

A lot of equipment dealers get started by a salesman who knew machinery. Butler Machinery Company started with a contractor who was tired of unreliable support on his own jobs. Francis J. Butler founded the company in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1955, and seventy years later it's still family-owned and still carrying the Caterpillar line across North Dakota, South Dakota, and Clay County, Minnesota, a territory where grading contractors, pipeline crews, and farm-equipment operators all depend on the same dealer network for parts and service.

"Francis J. Butler, himself a contractor, understood the challenges and the importance of reliable equipment and support firsthand," says Twylah Blotsky, the company's current President and CEO. That founding detail matters more than it might seem. A dealer built by someone who ran his own jobs tends to design its parts and service operation around uptime, not just sales targets, and Butler Machinery's growth pattern backs that up.

Seven Decades of Deliberate Expansion

Butler expanded into western North Dakota in 1964 by buying Schultz Machinery, then pushed into South Dakota in 1988 with the acquisition of Kearns Machinery Company. In between, the late 1960s Bismarck Oil Analysis Lab gave the dealer an early foothold in predictive maintenance, decades before fluid sampling became standard practice across the industry. When Caterpillar launched the Challenger rubber-track tractor in 1986, Butler used it to re-enter the agriculture equipment market, eventually spinning that into its own Butler Ag Equipment division serving the Dakotas plus parts of Nebraska and Montana.

Leadership has stayed inside the family through four CEOs: Francis J. Butler from 1955 to 1970, Matt Butler through 1998, Dan Butler through 2019, and Twylah Blotsky since. That's a pattern we've seen play out at other long-running CAT dealers, including the family succession at Warren CAT in West Texas and Oklahoma, where multi-generation ownership tends to translate into a longer-term view on parts inventory and technician staffing than a dealership under short-term private equity ownership typically takes.

Why a Dealer's Ag-and-Construction Overlap Matters for Financing

Butler Machinery's combined ag-and-construction footprint is worth noting if you're a Dakotas contractor shopping for a dozer or excavator, because it means the dealer's lots cycle through a broader mix of trade-ins and off-lease machines than a construction-only dealer sees. For an excavation or pipeline contractor, that often translates into more used-equipment options at a given price point, which changes how you should think about financing.

If you've got steady work for six months of the year and nothing lined up after that, renting a dozer for a single job keeps your balance sheet clean. But most of the grading and pipeline contractors we work with across North Dakota and South Dakota run equipment close to year-round, weather permitting, and for that workload pattern, equipment financing usually beats renting on total cost once you run the numbers past about four to six months of use. A used machine coming off a dealer's own fleet, with documented service history, can also make a stronger financing case than a comparable private-sale machine with no paper trail.

Before you sign anything at the dealership, it's worth comparing a dealer's promotional financing against an independent quote on your own excavator equipment financing needs. Dealer floor-plan promotions often come with credit-tier and down-payment conditions that a straight equipment loan doesn't carry.

BFC Equipment Loans finances construction equipment for startups and established contractors nationwide, including crews buying through Butler Machinery or any other CAT dealer in the Dakotas, with good credit or bad. Visit our home page to learn more, head straight to our equipment financing application if you're ready to move, browse our equipment for sale marketplace to buy or list equipment, or subscribe to our blog for more coverage like this.