News

Sandhills Publishing Celebrates 40 Years, Announces Plans To Hire Hundreds More Employees At Offices Worldwide

February marks 40 years of business for Lincoln, Nebraska-based Sandhills Publishing. The company, which primarily serves the construction, agriculture, commercial trucking, and aviation industries, is behind such brands as Machinery Trader, CraneTrader, TractorHouse, Truck Paper, AuctionTime.com, RentalYard.com, FleetEvaluator, Controller, Executive Controller, Charter Hub, and numerous others. The 40th anniversary milestone comes amid a period of substantial growth, including the recent addition of multiple domestic and international office locations, a number of brand extensions and new product launches, and a hiring push aimed at filling hundreds of open positions in Lincoln and at offices worldwide.

Sandhills Publishing’s global headquarters sprawls a 68-acre campus in Lincoln, Nebraska, where founders Tom and Rhonda Peed (along with 65 of its Iowa-based employees) relocated it in the early 1980s. The company’s first trade magazine, Machinery Trader, quickly found a niche in the construction equipment market. Over the decades that followed, Sandhills continued to grow, distributing trade publications for the agriculture, commercial trucking, aviation, and technology industries. In the 1990s, the company took its brands online, and by the early 2000s had identified an unyielding need for hosted technology services and software solutions among dealerships, manufacturers, brokers, and other businesses operating in its core industries.

Today, Sandhills Publishing and its international subsidiaries employ over 1,000 people worldwide with office locations in Nebraska, California, Arizona, Florida, South Dakota, Illinois, Ireland, the U.K., France, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Its trade publications and websites connect buyers and sellers in markets all over the world, receiving nearly 19 million visitors each month on average. Sandhills also facilitates access to wholesale and auction markets, hosts a range of technology services (from custom websites to native mobile apps), and offers a suite of cloud-hosted business apps and solutions—serving nearly 37,000 customers worldwide.

“Our focus has always been on serving the needs of buyers and sellers in our markets,” said Sandhills’ Chief Operations Officer Shawn Peed. “As our operations have evolved, we’ve remained committed to strategic reinvestments that ensure sustainable growth and the short- and long-term success of the company.”

In the last six years, Sandhills Publishing’s Lincoln campus has expanded to include a state-of-the-art data center, a second IT facility accommodating 122 additional employees, and another facility (finished last year) equipped for 240 more workspaces—all LEED gold rated by the U.S. Green Building Council. A simultaneous expansion of its Lincoln press facility included infrastructure upgrades that nearly doubled output capacity. Meanwhile, a series of acquisitions led to the addition of over 20 new trade publications and websites, expanded regional editions of existing publications, over a dozen new office locations worldwide, and numerous software solutions for both the equipment and aircraft markets. Recent noteworthy brand extensions and product launches include RVUniverse.com, CraneTrader, and NeedTurfEquipment.com. Other product evolutions have leveraged the company’s high-capacity technological infrastructure and massive store of real-time market data—namely asset valuation and market assessment tools FleetEvaluator and MarketTrends.

“More than anything, these developments and milestones are telling of the hard work and dedication of our people,” said Peed. “It is both humbling and exciting to reflect on the ways our products and services have evolved to serve markets all over the world, and to consider what’s to come over the next 40 years.”

Interested in being part of Sandhills Publishing’s next chapter? Visit www.Sandhills.jobs to view career and internship opportunities in sales, marketing, web and software development, customer support, administration, and more.