A Favor with Bobcat Loader Launches Family Business

The phone call itself was an ordinary one. It was the kind of simple request that one friend makes of another any given day. Can you do me a favor? But when Ken Cavendish picked up his phone that morning in the fall of 2009, he could not have imagined that his helping hand would be the seedling of a thriving new construction business of his own.  

“A buddy of mine, Kenny Spencer, needed help,” Ken says. “He was injured and couldn’t work, so he asked if I would clear some trees, shrubs and dirt at his house.” 

Ken’s only apprehension was stepping into a different machine, his friend’s Bobcat® 773 skid-steer loader. At the time, Ken had spent decades in a family construction business, so he knew his way around a jobsite. But his friend’s loader was new to him, and he wanted to do the job well.   

Love at First Site 

If there were any jitters, they quickly vanished as he got acquainted with the loader. “It was so simple,” Ken remembers about the hand and foot controls and the overall handling. “A couple of hours in, I felt like someone who had been doing the job for 20 years. I loved it!”  

His friend paid him for the work, but Ken soon realized that he was the one who turned out to be the true beneficiary of the favor. 

The one-time favor lit a spark, and Ken thought about the project constantly in the days that followed. This is not a bad side business. I can do this, he thought. Only one week after helping his friend, he decided to pursue a new business opportunity. For that, he would need to invest in equipment of his own. He had already made up his mind where to look.