Building a Differentiated Municipal Equipment and Service Platform
MacQueen Equipment is a distributor of environmental and emergency equipment serving municipalities and contractors across the Midwest, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota. With deep OEM relationships and a service-first reputation built over decades, MacQueen had what most competitors lacked: genuine customer trust and the technical expertise to back it up.
A durable market with a clear gap to fill
Municipal fleet services is a needs-based, recession-resistant market — the kind of essential equipment that governments and contractors can’t defer. But the market was highly fragmented, and most OEM dealers, particularly on the emergency side, offered little beyond the initial equipment sale. No repair services. No parts programs. No recurring relationship after the transaction.
MacQueen was different. It had the OEM relationships, the growing service infrastructure, and the culture to build something that pure-play equipment dealers simply couldn’t replicate. Through thematic research, we identified the opportunity to accelerate that differentiation and use it as the foundation for a scaled regional platform.
The challenge
The infrastructure to support that ambition wasn’t fully in place. Formalizing operations, integrating acquisitions, building out the service network, and professionalizing commercial functions all needed to happen in parallel without disrupting the customer relationships that made MacQueen valuable in the first place.
The landscape
Fragmented dealer markets with low sophistication and a clear service gap created a compelling consolidation opportunity for a well-capitalized operator with the right foundation. Aftermarket repair services and routine wear items like brushes, nozzles, hoses, and snow components, represented a significant recurring revenue stream that most competitors were leaving on the table.
Closing the gap between what MacQueen was and what it could be
We’re looking for founders ready to professionalize and scale—and we know you’re assessing fit, too. This means honest conversations about goals, capabilities, and what success looks like. When it aligns, our entire team commits alongside you. This includes our deal team led by two Rotunda partners, our value creation team, and operating executive network.
MacQueen’s service-first culture was its biggest asset and its biggest risk if left informal. We worked with management to codify that philosophy into a repeatable operating model, giving acquired businesses a common framework for customer experience and execution from day one.
Hired a Chief Sales & Marketing Officer to unify outreach and elevate the commercial function. Rolled out the 5-4-3-2-1 sales model across legacy and acquired teams, bringing discipline to pipeline management and activity tracking across the entire platform.
Grew the Emergency segment significantly through both organic initiatives and six strategic acquisitions. Introduced new aftermarket services, like breathing apparatus testing, and an extensive “loose goods” strategy to build stickiness and recurring revenue across the customer base.
Hired a Business Intelligence Engineer and built out Power BI dashboards to support forecasting, workforce planning, and ROI-based decision-making, giving leadership a real-time view of performance across every location for the first time.
From family distributor to scaled regional platform
When Rotunda exited in 2022, MacQueen was a fundamentally different business: more diversified, more sophisticated, and built on a recurring revenue foundation that set it apart from other competitors in its market. The service platform, integration playbook, and data infrastructure created something durable well beyond the investment period.
“Rotunda pushed us to invest in ourselves by adding to the management team, implementing technology improvements and adding service enhancements while staying true to the ‘MacQueen Way’. These infrastructure investments allowed us to expand rapidly in the first year of our growth journey through both acquisitions and organic growth.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. The quoted statement reflects the opinion of a portfolio company executive and is not necessarily indicative of the experience of other portfolio companies. No compensation was provided for this testimonial, and there can be no assurance of future results.