Hawthorne Cat: How a Father-and-Son Dealership Became the Caterpillar Franchise for San Diego and the Pacific

Short-term equipment rental is so normal now that it's easy to forget someone had to invent the idea of a CAT dealer running a dedicated rent-to-rent business. That someone was James Thomas "Tom" Hawthorne, who co-founded Hawthorne Machinery Co. with his father J.B. Hawthorne in 1956 and, within a few years, started Hawthorne Rentals, decades before most Caterpillar dealers treated short-term rental as anything more than an afterthought. Tom Hawthorne ran the company as CEO for the next 50 years and was known within the industry as the godfather of the Cat rental program.

Hawthorne also broke new ground by establishing one of the first dedicated Power Systems business units at any Cat dealership, splitting generator and engine sales out as its own operation rather than treating it as a side function of the construction equipment business. From its San Diego base, the company expanded well beyond the mainland, eventually covering Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, and American Samoa, a Pacific footprint that very few CAT dealers in the continental United States can match.

Fourth Generation, Same Family

Tom Hawthorne passed away in 2022 at age 93, but the company he built stayed in family hands. Leadership runs through his son-in-law Tee Ness as chairman and grandson Dave Ness as president and CEO, putting Hawthorne Cat into its third and fourth generations of family leadership. The dealer's commitment to workforce development lives on through the Tom Hawthorne Diesel Technology Center at Miramar College, which grants scholarships to students training for careers as diesel technicians, a direct response to an industry-wide shortage of qualified service techs that affects every contractor who relies on a dealer's service bay to keep machines running.

San Diego's mix of coastal development, military base construction, and marine infrastructure work makes it one of the more specialized territories in the CAT dealer network, and Hawthorne Cat's service lineup reflects it: general building contractors, landscaping and hardscape crews, paving contractors, and marine construction outfits working San Diego Bay all show up on the dealer's customer list. A dealer covering an international footprint that spans an entire ocean, similar in scale to what we've written about at Finning, the world's largest CAT dealer, generally carries deeper parts logistics than a single-metro dealer, since it has to keep machines running on islands where a part can't just be driven over from the next county.

The Rent-or-Buy Call in a High-Cost Market

San Diego's construction costs run well above the national average, and that includes equipment rental rates. Given that Hawthorne itself popularized the short-term rental model, it's worth stating plainly: renting is the right call for a genuinely short, defined job, like a one-time grading pass on a small residential lot. But for a general contractor with a steady pipeline of commercial build-outs, or a marine contractor with recurring dock and bulkhead work, the math tips toward ownership fast in a market where rental rates run this high.

Equipment financing lets a contractor lock in a predictable monthly payment instead of being exposed to whatever a dealer's rental rate happens to be during a tight equipment market, which San Diego sees often given its limited laydown yard space and high demand. It also puts the machine on your balance sheet as an asset rather than a recurring expense, which matters the next time you're bidding a job that requires proof of owned equipment capacity.

If you're weighing a new or used excavator purchase against another season of rental invoices, our excavator equipment financing page walks through how that comparison typically shakes out, and it's a useful check before accepting whatever rate a dealer's in-house finance desk quotes you.

BFC Equipment Loans finances construction equipment for startups and established businesses nationwide, including San Diego and Pacific-region contractors buying through Hawthorne Cat or any other CAT dealer, 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.