According to Jeff Kuras, the kids are all right. Kuras, the founder of Team Kuras in Port Clinton, Ohio, says he marvels at how quickly the younger generation in the business learns about new equipment and new services.

“Today’s a different world,” he says. “I probably would have been a lot smarter if they had had the internet when I was a kid. Everything I learned was by hard knocks. Today you can get online and you can learn anything you want about how to do a job or about what machines are available.”

Kuras bought his first piece of excavation equipment in 1979.

“We couldn’t just get online and buy an excavator. You had to do a lot of driving or make phone calls to dealers.”

The technology for communicating with customers was different then, too.

“Back then, we didn’t have the internet, no cellphones.” Kuras says. “I would work all day and come home to phone calls. I would get on the recorder, call people back and line the jobs up and go look at them.”

As an example, last summer, Kuras’ son Justin Kuras persuaded him that the company needed to buy a hydrovac unit. They ended up buying a Vac-Tron hydraulic PMD-500GT excavator trailer, and it didn’t take long for Jeff to learn to love it.

“That’s a machine we should have had 30 years ago, and I didn’t realize it. I never knew much about them,” he says. “We just purchased our first one, and it has made our lives so much easier. It takes a lot of shoveling out of our work. You can hydrovac catch basins. If there is a gas line or waterline, instead of ripping them out or trying to dig with an excavator, you can back the dirt away from them safely.”

Kuras has also seen how his son and his friends who work for Team Kuras solve problems using technology.

“These kids have got all these phones and they’re finding stuff in two minutes. They locate a part and have it shipped to us before I could even find it.”