Glen Baker, owner of Baker Hydraulics. (Jack Jacobs photo)
During his stint working for Carter Machinery, Glen Baker’s last name was as eye-catching to some as seeing his then-employer’s excavators in action.
That’s because Baker was a scion of the family that founded and ran Baker Equipment, a local assembler of utility trucks, that was established in 1919 in Scott’s Addition by his great-grandfather Joe Baker.
“As you go out and you visit customers and you say, I’m Glen Baker, people look at you and they’re like, ‘I used to know a company named Baker Equipment,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, that was my family,’” he said.
The family business, where Baker worked for 15 years until it shuttered in 2013, made its name putting together utility trucks and installing truck-mounted hydraulic equipment. Basically, Baker Equipment would order a truck and equipment on behalf of a customer and assemble the vehicle, with a focus on crane trucks and bucket trucks.
“Customers would reach out to us and say, ‘I’d like to have a bucket truck built, here’s the specifications.’ And then we would order the Ford truck and manufacture their utility body with the cabinet doors and the boom that has the bucket on it. And we would assemble all of that equipment into a new unit,” Baker said.
Now, more than a decade later, the Baker family name is back in business, albeit with a slightly different name and focus.
Baker earlier this year launched Baker Hydraulics, doing service and repairs on cylinders, pumps, motors, hydraulics and similar equipment on utility vehicles.
The focus on service and parts allows the revived company to focus on a less capital-intensive business and take advantage of a larger customer pool, because the company can service more types of trucks.
“We kind of tweaked it a little bit where, rather than try to reenter a very niche market of bucket trucks (manufacturing), we focus more on component service and hydraulic cylinder repair, pumps and motor repair,” Baker said. “Those components are on bucket trucks but also so many other types of equipment like bulldozers or dump trucks or garbage trucks.”
Baker Hydraulics services and repairs cylinders, pumps, hydraulics and similar equipment on utility vehicles. (Jack Jacobs photo)
Baker, 40, started to work for the original family business as a teenager in the summers and while in college. After he graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 2007, he worked in production, service and sales. Toward the end of Baker Equipment’s run, he was running the company’s four service centers in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia.
The company closed down in 2013, due to shifts in the business where utility companies started to go directly to equipment manufacturers for their needs rather than go to a middleman company, Baker said.
“It was a lot of changes that were difficult for us to navigate,” he said. “That’s all I knew growing up and then it’s hard, you know, when your family business has met its end and you have to go through the closing experience.”
Baker then went to work as a service department manager and later a salesman at the Mechanicsville location of Carter Machinery, a dealer of Caterpillar equipment.
And while he liked working for Carter, it wasn’t quite the same as working for himself, which was going to be the plan at Baker Equipment after he took over from his dad.
“I grew up being groomed to be a business owner, when Dad retired he would pass the reins. I never really have been able to scratch that itch working for someone else,” Baker said.
Baker Hydraulics opened its workshop earlier this year, and traces its history to Baker Equipment, a local company that operated for nearly 100 years until it closed in 2013.
He weighed a relaunch of Baker for a couple years, and was encouraged by his wife. All the while, in the course of meeting customers and networking on behalf of Carter, he would run into people who were familiar with his family’s business and curious about what happened. Eventually he made the jump.
“I’m like if I wait another 10 years, I might not have the youth and energy, so let’s go for it,” said Baker, who turns 41 in October.
Baker opened an 8,000-square-foot workshop at 2115 N. Hamilton St. under the new company name in the spring. Baker, who owns the business with a silent partner, declined to comment on startup costs.
Looking toward 2025, Baker hopes to open a second workshop, possibly in Chesapeake or Maryland, with a longer-term plan to have multiple service stations across the country. Baker said that so far, there’s a bit of momentum behind the company’s relaunch thanks to its deep roots in the area.
“A lot of people know our family, or know of us, and are excited to see the Baker family reentering the business,” he said.