CCS Equipment Sales, a family-run construction equipment dealership in North Carolina, maintains success by staying true to its roots. Recent ownership changes have not altered their commitment to providing top-notch service and a wide selection of machines. Despite industry trends, CCS Equipment prioritizes customer satisfaction and plans for continued growth.
CEG photo
First opened in July 1998 in the town of Youngsville, northeast of Raleigh, CCS Equipment today serves most of the eastern third of the Tarheel State. Seen here is a 2002 Takeuchi TL150 compact track loader.
Every day brings news of more corporate mergers in the United States or, at the least, smaller companies losing their identities from having been acquired by bigger firms looking to broaden their sales territories.
In the process, family-operated companies that have operated for decades are becoming increasingly scarce. While the owners of the smaller outfits may end up realizing a tidy profit from the sale of their businesses, what often happens is that their customers lose the neighborly, hometown service they had long enjoyed.
But one North Carolina-based company recently saw fit to make a small ownership change while retaining the friendly one-to-one service that made it successful in the first place.
And make no mistake, the owners of CCS Equipment Sales have always been extremely proud to be a family-run company.
First opened in July 1998 in the town of Youngsville, northeast of Raleigh, the full-service construction equipment dealership today serves most of the eastern third of the Tarheel State.
From CCS Equipment's three locations in the communities of Youngsville, Angier and Ayden, the company offers an impressive roster of machines including excavators, loaders and attachments to meet every construction need. In addition, the dealership is noted for staffing itself with expert service, rentals and parts professionals to best support its customers.
Among the product brands offered by the company are Takeuchi, LiuGong, Wacker Neuson and Toro. Besides CCS Equipment's extensive selection of new machines, it also specializes in selling well-maintained used construction pieces, too.
The partnership of Charlie Snyder, Charles Davis and Steve Jeffries initially owned CCS Equipment, but Davis's son, Logan, was recently able to purchase a quarter of his father's shares in the business to become its newest proprietor along with the elder Davis and Snyder's son, Todd.
"I have a lot of respect for my dad and Todd because over the last couple years, as I have gotten closer to this buyout, they have allowed me to explore new opportunities and look at new ventures, something that says a lot about them, especially my father, who is in his mid-60s — a point at which you often get more conservative in your business," Logan Davis said. "But he has just let the horses out to run."
The younger Snyder said he and his newest partner take inspiration from how CCS Equipment's original ownership group built the business from the ground up and see no reason to change the down-home method by which they operated it.
"Those three guys were some of the best salespeople you would ever find," he said. "They really set the foundation for the company and how to properly treat folks. They are also why we have the opportunity to sell to people and prove that we can support them just as well."
Top Products, Branches Boost Fortunes
After having started out as a distributor of used construction machines, CCS Equipment brought on the Gehl line of products in 1999. Shortly after that, the dealership began to market and service Takeuchi-manufactured equipment.
Since then, several other model lines have been added to its inventory, according to Logan Davis, but the Japanese-based maker of excavators and compact loaders has remained the dealership's flagship lineup.
"Takeuchi has definitely been our mainstay, although we have had a revolving line of different offerings," he said. "We have been a Toro dealer for quite some time now, as well as Wacker Neuson and have distributed LiuGong since 2017. We have also had some other ancillary products like Multiquip, which has been a partner of ours for a long while."
Further evidence of CCS Equipment's growth came in 2015, Davis said, when the company opened the first of its two branch locations in the Harnett County town of Angier, followed five years later by its new Ayden location further east in Pitt County.
Although each CCS Equipment branch was positioned to be convenient for customers in growing areas of the state, the Angier and Ayden stores, in particular, are in very rural areas of the state.
"We are not in downtown Raleigh or around high traffic, high volume areas, but we are found in places where it is easy to get back to where builders are working," said Davis.
When the main facility in Youngsville first opened its doors, it, too, was squarely within a largely rural area of the state. But due to its proximity to Raleigh, a city with a population approaching a half-million people and being a part of the much larger Triangle region, the town is now more suburban.
"One of the things that Todd and I have certainly discussed is to look at all three facilities to see what needs to be done to sustain the company's growth over the next 25 years. If that means building something new, then it will certainly be considered."
Logan said that the product support side of CCS Equipment offers full service at all three of its locations and employs a total of 11 technicians working both in-house and out on the road.
"We operate a fleet of five Dodge Chrysler Ram 4500/5500 crane-body trucks, so there are very few things that the techs are not trained well enough to handle when they come to a job site," he said.
Although CCS Equipment carries large and small excavators, many of its loaders are compact models. When asked if providing service to those latter machines was a little uncommon, Davis had a ready response.
"It is, but I think we have actually figured out, first and foremost, how to do it very well, and we found that those customers had a real need for it because if you look at some of the other compact equipment specialists, I don't know that they service them at quite the scale that we do," he said.
"As a result, we keep those techs really busy, and there is a ton of demand for their skills," Davis added. "And our service people in the field have been excellent in keeping machine downtime low and getting the equipment back up and running as quickly as possible."
In describing the capabilities of the in-house service departments at each of the company's branches, he said that in Youngsville, "we have a seven-bay shop, each with high overhead doors so that we can get anything up to a 60,000- to 70,000-pound excavator inside for service.
"The Ayden and Angier shops are also very similar," Davis added. "Each one has two bays in their service areas that could probably hold slightly smaller excavators. Anything compact-sized — skid steers, mini-excavators, loaders — we can certainly accommodate."
Despite being a relatively small distributor, its size does not seem to be a hindrance to CCS Equipment as those contractors and companies that work with it end up being very satisfied with what it provides them, according to Snyder.
"We have dealt with the single-operator guys in the field as well as some of the larger contractors in Raleigh/Wake County and have proven that we can take care of them all," he said.
Davis agreed and added, "We feel confident that we can walk into somewhere and even if we don't know that contractor, more than likely he has heard of us or knows of our good reputation, and that is something we take pride in."
Simple Lessons Lead to Success
As the dealership's owners look ahead to the next few decades, Snyder and his partners are in lockstep that company growth must continue, including maintaining the success that CCS Equipment has always had with its top equipment producers.
"I think that with the partners we have now, such as Takeuchi, and the products they build and the programs they offer, have helped set us up well for success," he said. "Takeuchi has a big facility down in Spartanburg, S.C., now where they assemble their track loaders after they come in from Japan. With that plant being close by, it will help us more quickly supply our customers with what they need."
In addition, he said it is imperative that CCS Equipment continue to identify and hire talented people for not only its service departments, but all other aspects of the business.
Considering the fact that with so much more development and new home construction happening in eastern North Carolina, Davis said the company also is very well positioned in a vibrant area suited to growth.
"Todd and I are pulling in the same direction on this; we deeply care about the company and are big believers that you cannot just be stagnant. You must continue to grow."
At the same time, though, they are intent on keeping CCS Equipment a family-run concern.
"We like and want to keep it that way," added Snyder. "There are not many businesses like this anymore and we're proud of it."
To explain how a relatively small outfit like CCS Equipment has managed to not only survive but flourish over the past 27 years, Snyder again recalled what was learned from its founders.
"When people trust you and realize that you can take care of them, they will keep coming back to you." CEG
(All photographs in this article are Copyright 2025 Construction Equipment Guide. All Rights Reserved.)
Eric Olson
A writer and contributing editor for CEG since 2008, Eric Olson has worked in the news-gathering business for 45 years.
Olson grew up in the small town of Lenoir, N.C. in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he began covering sports for the local newspaper at age 18. He continued to do that for several other dailies in the area while in college at Appalachian State University. Following his graduation, he worked for, among other companies, the Winston-Salem Journal, where he wrote and edited the newspaper's real estate and special features sections for 10 years. Since 1999 he has worked as a corporate media liaison and freelance writer, in addition to his time at CEG.
He and his wife, Tara, have been happily married for almost 40 years and are the parents of two grown and successful daughters. He currently is in the employ of two dogs and three cats, a job that he dearly loves.
Read more from Eric Olson here.
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