Founder & Owner

Chance Carpenter

Founded Broken Tractor in 2006 when he noticed nobody was selling heavy equipment parts online with a website worth using. Twenty years and 20,000 parts later, he still answers the phone.

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Chance Carpenter • Founder & Owner • Baton Rouge, LA • Est. 2006

My grandfather sold parts. My father sold parts. In 2006, I started Broken Tractor.

Three generations in the aftermarket parts business, and none of us ever really figured out how to do anything else. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination. Or maybe it’s what happens when the work actually matters to you.

The gap nobody was filling

The idea for Broken Tractor came from a simple observation: nobody was selling heavy equipment parts online with a website worth using. In 2006, if your backhoe went down and you needed a part, your options were a dealer who might have it, a phone book, and a lot of luck. Catalogs existed. Websites existed. What didn’t exist was something that actually helped you find the right part for your specific machine, on your schedule, without a three-day phone tag marathon.

That was the hole. Chance decided to fill it.

What started as one phone, one guy, and a cardboard box of Case parts has grown into 20,000 SKUs across 30+ brands, two warehouses in Baton Rouge and Kimbolton, Ohio, and a team of people who have spent most of their careers learning which part fits which machine. The website got better too.

The name says everything

“Broken Tractor isn’t a brand. It’s a description of who’s on the other end of the line.”

We get asked all the time: why’d you name your company that?

Because it’s never the guy whose equipment is running fine. It’s the farmer at 5:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in April with 400 acres of beans to plant and a transmission that just let go. It’s the contractor whose backhoe died 90 minutes into a retaining wall pour. It’s the operator who needs the part today, not Thursday.

Broken Tractor is the name because broken equipment is the moment. And somebody has to answer the phone.

The hardest stretch

Ask Chance about the hardest period in the company’s history and he doesn’t hesitate: COVID.

While most businesses were shutting down and waiting it out, Broken Tractor got busier. Equipment kept breaking. Jobs still had to move. And for a stretch that felt longer than it was, Chance and Christy ran the operation almost around the clock — processing orders, shipping parts, managing suppliers, keeping the team going. Husband and wife, side by side, 20-hour days.

It didn’t break them. If anything, it proved the model. The company that answers the phone when your machine is down isn’t going to stop answering the phone when times get hard.

Built together

Broken Tractor is a family business in the most literal sense. Chance handles the catalog, the supplier relationships, the expansion — the what and the where of what the company carries and where it’s going. Christy, as COO, handles everything else: the people, the process, the operations that make the whole thing run every single day.

The next generation

Chance and Christy have four daughters, ranging in age from four to fourteen. All of them have grown up around Broken Tractor — seeing what it looks like when both parents are fully invested in something they built together. Whether any of them follow the family line into aftermarket parts remains to be seen. But watching their parents work as a team has already taught them something the parts books can’t.

The next twenty years

Ask Chance what winning looks like in 2046 and the answer isn’t about size. Broken Tractor will stay family owned. The focus stays on what it’s always been:

“We are committed to empowering machine owners by providing high-quality, affordable aftermarket parts — ensuring every customer finds the right part quickly and accurately, with the support of industry-leading technology and exceptional customer service.”

The catalog will keep growing. The technology will keep improving. But the phone will keep getting answered by a real person who knows what they’re talking about. That part doesn’t change.

Off the clock

The man who built a company around other people’s broken equipment has developed an unlikely set of hobbies for someone who stares at parts diagrams all day. Chance reads constantly, tends a garden, and farms mushrooms. He uses heavy equipment — backhoes specifically, the same kind his customers call about — to plant trees and restore land. He collects historical artifacts.

It’s the profile of someone who is genuinely curious about how things work and how land behaves over time. The same instinct that saw a hole in the parts market in 2006 is the same instinct that turns a weekend into a restoration project. Pay attention to what’s broken. Figure out how to fix it. Do the work yourself if you can.

That’s the whole company, actually.

— Chance Carpenter, Founder