For the past two months, a sign and accompanying tractor sat beside Route 3 just south of Waterloo has teased at a big development for local John Deere dealership Sydenstricker Nobbe Partners.

Jared Nobbe, general manager of the company’s Illinois West division, explained what local farmers and other customers can expect with the business’s new location.

Offering a brief look at the company’s history, Nobbe said Sydenstricker Nobbe was formed in 2020 from two John Deere dealerships that each had long histories in the area.

On his side, William Nobbe & Company was started locally by his great-grandfather and his brother in 1907 while the Sydenstricker half was established in Missouri about 80 years ago.

As Nobbe described, the merger occurred very recently as the two companies considered how best to serve customers for the future.

“The families had always been close,” Nobbe said. “We worked together quite a bit. And in 2020 we elected to merge in order to really prepare ourselves for how we support customers as we go forward. It wasn’t about getting bigger, it was more about making sure we can provide for what our customer demands are in the future.”

Nobbe added that there have been a number of additions and improvements to the business made as a result of the merger, noting a program which trains technicians before spreading them out to stores in the area as well as a call center which he said wouldn’t have happened if not for combining the scale of two businesses.

He further expressed that the new location is also meant to act as an improvement on the business’s work and customer service, clarifying that this upcoming expansion is a move rather than simply an addition to the current dealership.

Nobbe said there are two big improvements expected to come from this new location. For one, both the dealership and Sydenstricker Nobbe offices will be housed under one roof.

For some time, the local business has consisted of the dealership outside of Waterloo and an office within the city, which Nobbe said has made communication and working between the locations difficult at times.

This new building, he added, will have a first floor centered around the dealership and customer service with offices and support on the second floor.

Space has also been a fundamental issue for the dealership for several years now. As Nobbe explained, the current building just wasn’t designed to handle the kind of work that needs to be down nowadays.

“When we built the current dealership in the 70s, we were building it for equipment that not only was shorter but that had a different footprint to it,” Nobbe said. “Back then, the combines fit very nicely into our shop and still had plenty of room to work around. As the equipment’s gotten bigger over the years, the footprint that it takes up in our shop made us more challenged to get equipment in there, and ideally we’d love to be able to have more equipment in our shop so we can work on more things at the same time under-roof.”

Nobbe further said that the dealership has been close to the breaking point on this issue for some time, with space being perhaps the biggest reason for wanting to move at this point.

“It’s been more exasperated over the last couple of years,” Nobbe said. “It’s just one of those things where we kinda got to the point where we had to do something or it was gonna hamper our growth.”

Nobbe also spoke to the future of the building. While he acknowledged that it’s impossible to know whether or not the company will run into more space issues in another 50 years, he is hopeful the building will be able to take care of their customer’s needs for some time.

As an example, he noted the number of John Deere products that are now electric, saying the dealership should be able to adapt to these sorts of developments.

“We’re building the building in a way that allows us to continue to not only service just what we need to today but to be able to look ahead five, 10 years and figure out what we’re gonna need to service,” Nobbe said.

While many of the details about the new location’s construction are still in the works, Nobbe spoke quite positively about the building’s potential and when it should be up and running.

“I feel very comfortable that we’ll be in by the early part of 2025, and that’s probably giving myself a little bit of room for delays,” Nobbe said.