Foley, Inc.: The New Jersey Car Dealer Who Became a Caterpillar Dynasty

Edward Foley Jr. spent his early career building a reputation in the automobile business in Newark, New Jersey. In 1957, after acquiring the assets of Caterpillar dealer Smith Tractor in Union, New Jersey, he made a career pivot that would define his family for three generations: he founded Foley Machinery and became a Caterpillar heavy equipment dealer. Today, Foley, Inc. serves New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Northern Delaware, Staten Island, and, unusually for a U.S. CAT dealer, Bermuda.

A car dealer turned CAT dealer isn't the typical origin story in this series, and it's worth understanding both why that pivot worked and how the company built out one of the more geographically distinctive territories in the entire Caterpillar network. From a single Newark location to a multi-state, multi-generation operation with its own offshore territory, Foley's path is one of the more unusual success stories in the CAT dealer world.

From Newark Showroom to Heavy Equipment Dealer

The jump from selling cars to selling bulldozers is a bigger leap than it might sound. Automobile retail and heavy equipment distribution share almost nothing in terms of financing structures, parts logistics, or customer relationships; a car buyer walks in once every few years, while a construction company's relationship with its equipment dealer is closer to a long-term infrastructure partnership. Edward Foley Jr. made that transition successfully enough that, after just a decade of growth, Foley Machinery outgrew its original facility and relocated to a larger headquarters in Piscataway, New Jersey in January 1967, where the company's headquarters remain to this day.

That early relocation says something about how fast the business grew in its first ten years. Moving headquarters is never a small decision for a dealer with parts inventory, service bays, and a sales floor to transplant, and doing it within a decade of founding suggests Foley's pivot from cars to CAT iron wasn't a cautious experiment: it was working, and working quickly.

Expanding Into Pennsylvania Through Giles & Ransome

Foley's territory didn't stay confined to New Jersey. The company expanded into Pennsylvania by acquiring Giles & Ransome, a Pennsylvania-based Caterpillar dealer, bringing eastern Pennsylvania's construction, highway, and energy-adjacent markets into Foley's combined footprint. That kind of adjacent-territory acquisition is a familiar growth pattern across the CAT dealer network, the same basic strategy Warren CAT used repeatedly to build out Oklahoma and West Texas, and it let Foley serve a combined Mid-Atlantic territory rather than staying a single-state operation indefinitely.

Today Foley's territory runs New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, and Staten Island, backed by 21 separate parts-drop locations spread across towns including Downingtown, Reading, Quakertown, Toms River, and Flemington. That kind of dense parts-drop network, far more granular than a handful of full-service branches, is a deliberate choice to shrink the distance between a down machine and the part it needs in one of the most densely populated, traffic-constrained regions in the country.

The Bermuda Territory: An Unusual Footnote

One detail that sets Foley apart from almost every other dealer in this series: the company's territory includes Bermuda, an island roughly 650 miles off the U.S. East Coast with its own entirely separate logistics challenge. Serving an island territory means shipping parts and machines across open ocean rather than down a highway, a genuinely different operational puzzle than anything a mainland-only dealer deals with. It's a small piece of Foley's overall business, but it's a distinctive one, and it says something about the dealer's willingness to take on unconventional territory when Caterpillar offered it.

Three Generations and Counting

Foley, Inc. has now spanned three generations of the Foley family. Today, Jamie Foley serves as CEO, Ryan Foley sits as a Director on the Board, and Kim Foley, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1967 to 1971, holds the role of Chairman of the Board. That leadership structure, spreading authority across multiple family members in distinct roles rather than concentrating it in a single owner-operator, tends to be a sign of deliberate succession planning rather than an accidental handoff.

Compare that structure to Puckett Machinery, still closely family-run since 1982, or Cleveland Brothers, which built an entirely separate family-run dealer dynasty just a state away in Pennsylvania. Foley's three-generation structure, now operating a Machinery Division carrying the full line of CAT construction products, over 300 machines by the company's own count, is a mature, well-staffed version of the same family-dealer model that's worked across the CAT network for decades.

It's also worth noting what a multi-role family leadership team typically signals compared to a single owner-operator nearing retirement with no clear successor named. A CEO, a board director, and a board chairman drawn from three different points in the family tree suggests responsibilities have been deliberately distributed rather than concentrated in one person who could leave a succession gap. That kind of structure tends to hold up better through a founder's eventual retirement or death than a business still entirely dependent on one individual's daily decisions.

What a Parts-Drop Network Actually Solves

It's worth dwelling on Foley's 21 parts-drop locations for a moment, because it's a different model than the handful of full-service branches most regional dealers run. A parts-drop isn't a full dealership; it's a smaller logistics point where a contractor can pick up or drop off a part without driving to a main branch. In a territory as densely populated and traffic-constrained as New Jersey and the Philadelphia suburbs, where a thirty-mile drive can easily eat an hour in traffic, that kind of distributed network matters more than it would in a rural, low-traffic territory where distances are longer but roads are empty.

It's a logistics strategy built around the specific constraints of a dense Mid-Atlantic market, not a copy-paste of what works in open country. A dealer that designs its parts network around its actual territory's traffic and density patterns, rather than a generic branch-every-fifty-miles model, tends to deliver faster real-world turnaround even when the map distance looks similar.

The Rent-vs-Own Decision in a Dense, High-Cost Market

New Jersey and the greater Philadelphia and New York metro areas carry some of the highest real estate and labor costs in the country, which changes the equipment math for a lot of contractors. Site-prep and excavation work in these markets is often squeezed into tight urban or suburban lots, meaning every day a rented machine sits idle because of a permitting delay or a scheduling conflict is a day of pure cost with nothing to show for it. A contractor running steady work across multiple jobsites in this territory, grading a commercial lot in one county this month, prepping a residential development the next, benefits from owning the equipment that defines their core business rather than scrambling to book rentals in one of the most competitive equipment-rental markets in the country.

Financing for New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Mid-Atlantic Contractors

BFC Equipment Loans finances and leases construction equipment nationwide, for startups and existing businesses, with good credit or bad, regardless of how competitive or expensive your local market runs. That matters in a territory like New Jersey and the Philadelphia metro, where margins get squeezed by land and labor costs, and the right financing structure can be the difference between a contractor that owns its growth and one that's perpetually renting around the edges of someone else's fleet.

• Site-prep and excavation contractors working New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania's dense suburban markets

• Commercial development subcontractors across the greater Philadelphia and New York metro areas

• Highway and infrastructure contractors working New Jersey and Delaware's state transportation programs

• Growing fleets looking to move from rental dependence to equipment ownership

Whether the machine comes from Foley, a private sale, or a used-equipment listing, the financing conversation is the same: a structure that actually fits your business's margins and cash flow in one of the country's most expensive construction markets, not a generic formula built for a cheaper region. That's the conversation worth having before your next purchase.

An Unlikely Origin Worth Remembering

It's easy to assume every CAT dealer started the same way: a family already in the equipment or construction business who simply picked up a dealership along the way. Foley's story is a useful reminder that isn't always true. Edward Foley Jr. built his name in automobiles first, and the decision to pivot into heavy equipment in 1957 was a genuine leap into an unfamiliar business. Sixty-nine years, three generations, and an unusual Bermuda territory later, that leap looks like one of the better bets in the history of the Mid-Atlantic CAT dealer network.

Ready to Put This Machine to Work?

Whatever brought you to this page, the next step is the same: see what you qualify for. BFC Equipment Loans finances and leases construction equipment nationwide for startups and existing businesses, good credit or bad, in all 50 states. Apply for equipment financing and get real numbers back, not a runaround. Looking to buy or sell a machine outright instead? Browse our equipment for sale and financing marketplace. And if you want more of this kind of coverage in your inbox, subscribe to the BFC blog for weekly equipment and financing breakdowns.