By Prioritizing Customer Service, EquipmentShare Helps the Five-S Group Protect Louisiana From Floods

In August 2016, a powerful storm camped above Louisiana for four days and dropped more than 30 inches of rain on much of the state. It caused flooding that claimed 13 lives and caused more than $10 billion in damage. The worst of the flooding occurred where the Comite and Amite rivers, which both reached record stages, meet just east of Baton Rouge.

Two years later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received funding for a massive flood control project that could protect the region from future disasters. When it’s completed, the Comite River Diversion Canal (CRDC) will be a 12-mile-long channel north of Baton Rouge that will reroute water from the Comite River west to the Mississippi River, which can handle the extra volume. 

The Corps of Engineers selected the Five-S Group, a rapidly growing civil construction company based in Baton Rouge, to be the prime contractor of Reach 1 of the CRDC. It’s a high-profile $37.9 million job with a two-year timeline. To finish on time and on budget, Five-S needed a full-service equipment partner it could trust. 

It chose EquipmentShare.

“Your service is fantastic,” said Mason McCullough, the Five-S Group’s project manager for the CRDC. “Our major concern when we’re renting equipment is we need to have amazing communication with the third-party client, and we need to have super fast tech services if anything happens to the equipment, which EquipmentShare has. Secondly, the price was the best we had overall, and that definitely plays a role when we’re getting quotes from multiple vendors.”

This is the story of how EquipmentShare can meet the full scope of a contractor’s needs on even the biggest projects — from conscientious retail and rental sales reps to a responsive service team armed with leading-edge technology. And it can provide all that at a competitive price.

“Ultimately, Five-S saw us as a one-stop shop,” said Dylan Bello, the general manager of EquipmentShare’s Baton Rouge branch, which is also a SANY dealership. “Not only were we able to provide the retail equipment for them but also the parts and service as well as rentals.”

Controlling the Comite River

The Five-S Group has grown from a small family construction company that specialized in site work for residential subdivisions to a major player in civil construction projects along the Gulf Coast, with four locations in Louisiana and Texas. For the CRDC Reach 1 project, the first task was clearing and grubbing about 60 acres of woodland to make way for a 1.5-mile stretch of the canal.

Once completed, the canal will be 280 feet wide and 40 feet deep with a 20-foot-wide bottom. After excavating the channel and grading the slopes, the Five-S team has been laying geotextiles across the north and south sides, filling the bottom with six inches of bedding stone and putting R90 riprap on top of that. In all, the Five-S Group will excavate more than 1.6 million cubic yards of material for the project. 

To successfully execute such a massive excavation effort, Five-S purchased two 120,000-pound excavators from EquipmentShare’s SANY dealership and rented four long-reach excavators, two small excavators and two trench rollers. 

EquipmentShare rental sales rep Buck Landry and retail sales rep Patrick Fleming both have deep roots in Louisiana and great familiarity with Five-S. Landry has worked for EquipmentShare for nearly five years. While Fleming has only worked at EquipmentShare since August 2024, in previous roles he sold oil and tires to Five-S.

“People down here joke about it being a good ’ol boy network, and maybe it is, but only if you provide the customer with the great service they need,” Fleming said. “Relationships might get you in the door, but you have to be able to do it all.”

For a project as big and time-sensitive as the CRDC, Five-S prioritized responsiveness from its equipment provider.

“Think about if a piece of a long-reach excavator breaks down because of an equipment error,” McCullough said. “We’ve got two of those excavators on each side of the channel. If one breaks down, the other one can’t keep up with the two on the other side, so that kills our production for the day. It’s super important that we have tech service basically on standby.”

Part of Landry’s pitch to customers is the added value of the T3™, which comes standard on all EquipmentShare^TM rentals. T3 is a comprehensive operating system that includes telematics, hardware, software and mobile apps, and it also gives contractors an easy button for service.

“Having T3 on our side puts us at an advantage,” Landry said. “Somebody can put in a service call by clicking a button, and a work order is made that goes immediately to our service manager and GM. The customer doesn’t have to call a sales rep, who might be in a meeting and can’t put the request in for a few hours, and the mechanic might be somewhere else when the sales rep calls. Next thing you know, it’s a whole day. Instead, they’re able to click in T3 and cut out a couple of middle men and save several hours in response time.”

EquipmentShare Offers Full-Service Support

To help Five-S avoid unforeseen work stoppages, David Davis, the EquipmentShare service manager in Baton Rouge, set up an aggressive preventative maintenance plan.

“On a big project like this, we like to assign a tech who lives close to the jobsite and make that their main focus,” Davis said. “So we’ll tell the tech, ‘We want you to stop by three times a week and make sure these guys are being taken care of. If there’s anything they’re having issues with or anything you see, let’s address it now.’”

When problems do arise on equipment either rented or purchased from EquipmentShare, Bello said it typically takes less than four hours to get a service tech onsite.

“In the world of big-earth, long-reach equipment — whichever manufacturer you’re talking about — a lot of times those service guys are scheduled weeks out,” Bello said. “So there’s a huge advantage of buying retail equipment from EquipmentShare, because we’re going to provide the service that’s customary in the rental world but not in retail.”

By offering the equipment, technology and support to help Five-S successfully complete a project designed to protect Louisiana from floods, EquipmentShare is showing its value as a full-service partner for contractors who are moving earth on the biggest jobs.

“This project is a great opportunity for us to show what we can do on a large scale,” Bello said. “Five-S is not showing any signs of slowing down, and we’re growing too, so it’s definitely a great partnership.”