COO

Chris Conte

COO of Broken Tractor’s Ohio operations, based in Kimbolton. The guy who handles whatever needs handling that day — pricing, shipping, sourcing, site fixes, domestic and overseas ordering, and everything that ends up on the to-do board.

CC

Chris Conte • COO — Ohio Operations • Kimbolton, OH

Before Chris Conte ran Broken Tractor’s Ohio operation, he spent twenty-some years on the other side of the desk — dealing with Chance Carpenter as a customer, vendor, or both. The relationship was friendly enough that Chris used to give Chance a hard time about how easy he had it.

“I teased Chance, saying he had an easy job. About a year or so later, after dealing with him for over 20 years, he offered me a job.”

Chris took it. That was eight years ago. Together, the two of them built out the Ohio side of Broken Tractor. The team has grown from four people to twenty-seven. Most of that growth has happened on Chris’s watch in Ohio.

Three words his team would use

Direct. Busy. Hectic.

That’s the job. Christy runs Louisiana with a different kind of energy — astute, methodical, detail-oriented. Chris runs Ohio the way Ohio needs to be run: in motion, on the floor, fixing the next thing while the last thing is still going. Two COOs, two operating styles, one company that gets parts on trucks every single day.

What a typical day actually looks like

The day starts with a to-do board. It rarely survives the morning.

“I start one of the items on my board’s to-do list. Then I get pulled to fix a price, resolve a shipment problem, correct or add site information, and handle domestic and overseas ordering.”

That’s the COO job at a working company — eight things in motion, four things on fire, and somebody has to make calls. Pricing decisions. Shipment resolutions. Vendor coordination. Inventory commitments for the Ohio warehouse. The website doesn’t fix itself, the overseas order doesn’t place itself, and the customer who got shorted yesterday is calling back today.

Chris handles all of it, or hands it to the right person and follows up. He started his time at Broken Tractor working on every kind of job in the company. That’s how he learned which lever to pull when the day goes sideways.

The standard he won’t budge on

“Do it right the first time.”

That’s the operational standard at the Kimbolton warehouse. Not “fast.” Not “cheap.” Right. Because the cost of a wrong part shipped today is bigger than the time saved getting it on the truck. Twenty-plus years in the parts business taught him that the hard way, and now it’s the rule his team works by.

What customers don’t see

Chris’s answer to what happens behind the scenes is short and revealing:

“They catch anything that isn’t right and we fix it before it becomes a problem.”

That’s the whole quality story in one sentence. Every order that goes out clean is the result of someone catching something that wasn’t quite right — a wrong serial number, a missing component, a packaging issue, a routing mistake — and fixing it before it hit the customer’s door. Customers experience the absence of problems. The presence of problems being prevented is what Chris’s team does all day.

Off the clock

Fishing. Farming. And — tellingly — building stuff for work. Even his weekend projects touch the company. After eight years running the Ohio operation, the line between “at work” and “away from work” isn’t very thick. That’s how a family business gets built. Somebody’s always thinking about the next thing.

What he’s really focused on

Ask Chris what his job is really about, and the answer isn’t about people management or operational metrics:

“My job is really about figuring out the next best-selling part.”

Eight years in, that’s where he’s spending the strategic energy — identifying the parts customers don’t know they’ll need yet, and getting them stocked before the calls start coming. The catalog grows because somebody is paying attention to what’s about to break next.

— Chris Conte, COO — Ohio Operations