English
Starting from scratch
Winter 2014
Starting from its humble beginnings with just one machine, Yvon Talbot, owner of Talbot Excavation, has become a well-known success story in Saint Jerome, Quebec, where in 2012 his company celebrated 25 years in business.
Settled in the mid-1800s, Saint Jerome is located approximately 25 miles northwest of Montreal, in the La Riviere-du-Nord region. The population of the town has increased considerably in the past 10 years, due to the urban sprawl of Montreal and its northern suburbs. As the city has expanded, so too has its need for new and larger infrastructure, schools, commercial shopping centers and residential developments. Talbot Excavation is kept busy by the considerable construction activity in the area. According to Operations Manager Denis Belanger, the company does the engineering and construction for projects in a 20-mile radius of Saint Jerome.
"There's a lot of construction around here," he says, "and we don't need to work much further than our region. We're involved in a lot of infrastructure projects, civil and government work."
As evidence of the growth, Bombardier, a Canadian aerospace and transportation company, recently announced plans to build a new plant not far from Saint Jerome, and it will employ an estimated 3,000 people.
"That requires additional residential, institutional and infrastructure work to support the growing population," Belanger says. "We are working on a new school, doing all of the excavation for the building ... basically everything right up to when they start the building structure. We've done the engineering, infrastructure, mechanical, plumbing and electrical (underground) on the site."
Right-sized Doosan excavators
To do all of this excavating, the company has invested in a fleet of Doosan crawler excavators, dating to 1999 when it purchased its first 30-metric-ton model. That number has grown ten-fold in the past 14 years, and now includes multiple 30- and 35-metric-ton Doosan excavators, including the 213-horsepower DX300LC and 281-horsepower DX350LC.
"The DX350LC is a very versatile size," Belanger says. "It's a good digging machine, but it has good lifting capacity, too. We do a lot of pipe placement and we need it to lift and place the pipe, and the DX350LC does it very well. It's still small enough to get into some of the residential areas where we work, but it's tough enough that it can deal with the rocks and the blasted material."
Transporting heavy equipment is routine for employees of Talbot Excavation, and Belanger says the weight of the DX300LC and DX350LC makes them a popular size for their operation.
"The DX300LC and DX350LC are the most productive machines for their weight, and are easy to transport," he says. "It's not over the load where they need additional work, nor does it increase the cost to move them from site to site. In Quebec and a lot of northern areas, we have what we call the spring-time thaw period where the load restrictions are very severe. This size of Doosan machinery is not as restricted during that time. The restrictions are so severe that they can double the cost of moving machines from site to site."
Among the features of the Doosan crawler excavators — in addition to their size and lifting ability — that Belanger and his crews like are operator comfort, good all-around visibility and ease of maintenance.
Belanger says one of the things that stands out with the newer Doosan excavators is improvements to the operating station.
"Doosan excavators have always been comfortable, but we've noticed that with the newer models, the comfort has improved, as well as the visibility, specifically the sight lines from the operator's point of view," Belanger explains. "The operators appreciate the air-conditioned cab and the nice joystick controls for more comfortable operation, especially when they're in the machine all day.
"Doosan excavators are easy to work on, and they're not complicated. The machines are well engineered. When our mechanics open the panels to access the service items, it makes sense to them. Also, in some cases, our mechanics will call the mechanic at Gauvin Equipment and they can resolve a problem on the phone. The responsiveness is very good; we never have to wait long."
Exceptional dealer support
The excavators were purchased from the local Doosan heavy equipment dealer, Gauvin Equipment, which shares some similarities to Talbot Excavation's small business culture, according to Belanger.
"We like doing business with Gauvin Equipment because it's a family company," he says. "With other local dealers that we work with, we are treated more like a number. With Gauvin, they recognize us by our first names. It's much more of a personalized relationship, and the level of service that we receive from the dealership is better than the service we receive from another local dealer.
"Gauvin Equipment is more responsive to our needs than other dealers. Denis Gauvin has worked very hard to build his business, and a lot of his customers, like us, have had the same experience. It's a very personal and emotional thing to us, and Gauvin understands that. When we celebrated the company's 25th anniversary last year, Gauvin was invited and he came here to congratulate us."
Belanger explains that working with the same sales specialist is important to the business dealings with Gauvin. "There's a personal aspect to our relationship, as well," he says. "We're like buddies, asking ‘how was your vacation,' and it's not just business."
Rock crushing and reusing materials
In addition to his excavating business, Talbot has a 12-acre portion at his headquarters that is set aside for processing aggregate for infrastructure projects. He says they produce about 100,000 metric tons of material per year, and it is native material that is extracted and processed. Roughly 80 percent of the material is handled for their projects, and the remaining is sold to customers. Most of the material processed at the facility is granite, which is processed in three-quarter-inch or less pieces for a top layer before compaction.
"We produce material between zero and six inches, which is used as the sub-base for road construction, and gives a strong base," Talbot says. "The material gets smaller as the layers are added. We have zero to two-and-a-half-inch that goes next, and between zero and three-quarter-inch material, which is the top, just before the asphalt goes on."
A Doosan excavator with a bucket loads the rocks, up to two feet in diameter, into the crusher. Talbot says the first machine takes the bigger boulders and crushes them down to about six inches, and then it goes into a sorter where it may need to be crushed again to create the end product. When it gets to the end product, a Doosan DL400 wheel loader places the material in trucks headed for one of Talbot's jobsites.
"A lot of the material that we process doesn't come from a quarry, it comes from projects where we've blasted," he says. "We create a lot of our own material and reprocess it from our jobsites where we're excavating. Other contractors bring their material to us, too.
"It eliminates a lot of travel time because we're taking the material, extracting it from the excavation site, rather than dumping it somewhere and having to get it, and we're bringing it here where it is processed. Then, it can be sent from here to a jobsite where it is used as a base. It saves our company a lot of fuel from less transportation costs."
Having a diversified excavating business that stretches from residential to infrastructure projects, and being able to process most of his own aggregate at his facility, are reasons why Talbot and his company continue to do well.
