Landmark Excavating is a heavy civil construction contractor based in American Fork, Utah. Founded in 2003, the company has grown from a small startup into an organization of approximately 180 people with three divisions across Utah and work that extends into southern Nevada.
Landmark work spans utilities and pipe work, road and bridge construction and large-scale earthmoving in a region where schedules are tight, equipment is heavily used and job sites are constantly changing.
For Mike Brown, equipment director of Landmark Excavating, the pace of the work shows up every day. Brown oversees equipment, facilities and the shop organization that keep crews moving from job site to job site.
"The biggest challenge that I have in my role is making sure that the crews have everything that they need to keep moving," Brown said. "If we need a certain machine, I've got to source that … getting everything fueled, keeping everything running." In his words, "everything that comes in is either broken or needed really fast." Downtime, he added, "is a killer" that can quickly impact both cost and schedule.
Managing Fueling Complexity in Large Operations
That coordination becomes more complex as the business grows. Landmark frequently manages multiple active job sites at once, each with its own access constraints, timeline and equipment demands.
When equipment goes down, the impact is rarely limited to a single machine or crew. Delays compound quickly across schedules and sites, especially when fueling and daily service are not aligned with where work is happening.
"There's a lot of controlled chaos," Brown said.
Despite that pressure, Brown said the work itself is what keeps people invested.
"My favorite part is the people and the equipment working together and what we build," he said. "You can drive by years later and see what it is that we all had a hand in making."
That impact is visible throughout the areas Landmark serves. A current project in the Mountain Green area of Ogden shows the scale of Landmark's work and the logistics required to keep it moving. The company is excavating and repurposing an old pit as part of a multi-phase development effort.
"It's a long-term project," Brown said. "Right now, we are moving a lot of dirt rock out of the area. We're using that material for fill on other jobs. And the developer will come in later and we'll build a subdivision there."
Projects like Mountain Green require equipment to remain ready for action over extended timelines, across varied terrain and often far from centralized support. Fueling cannot become a bottleneck without slowing the entire operation.
Fully Integrating Fueling Into Operational Strategy
To support those demands, Landmark bought two Thunder Creek Multi-Tank Trailers, one supporting crews in the Ogden area and another serving Saint George and southern Nevada. They wanted diesel and DEF to stay with the work, not the other way around, and to reduce the time and labor lost to fueling runs.
Before the trailers, Landmark used pickup trucks with transfer tanks and made multiple trips per day between where it bought fuel add the job site. "It just wasn't efficient," Brown said. "The most we could carry on a truck was probably 500 gallons… kind of a hodgepodge deal." The company also runs a full-size fuel truck, but that approach requires a CDL driver, HAZMAT requirements and added regulatory burdens.
Landmark's Thunder Creek solution is a 920-gal. No-HAZMAT fuel and service trailer (MTT) that supports diesel fuel and DEF on site. Fuel is isolated in separate 115-gal. tanks joined by a common manifold. This approach, when paired with the right tow vehicle configuration, reduces reliance on specialized CDL and HAZMAT drivers and makes the unit easier to deploy as needs shift across job sites.
In the southern division, that flexibility matters.
Landmark's work is spread between Cedar City, Saint George and Mesquite — about three hours end to end. Brown says the trailer has changed how the team supports equipment across that footprint. A service tech can fuel it up the night before with diesel and DEF, then run a full loop, greasing, fueling and handling daily service tasks like blowing out air filters, with the tools and onboard air needed to keep crews moving. "It's been a game changer," Brown said.
Bringing fuel to the equipment also reduces production loss tied to machine movement. On many jobs, machines are working on top of stockpiles or spread across wide areas. Instead of climbing down, traveling to a stationary tank, fueling and returning to the work, crews can fuel where the machine is operating, reducing downtime tied to refueling logistics.
DEF handling was another daily pain point. "We were hauling jugs of DEF around everywhere in the backs of trucks. Making a mess," Brown said. "DEF … crystallizes. It makes a mess." With the trailer, DEF is kept contained and dispensed directly from a tote to the machine without being exposed to open air. Brown says the result has been cleaner handling and fewer issues tied to crystallization.
Most of Landmark's fleet relies on DEF. With newer emissions-compliant equipment in daily production, a clean, consistent DEF process helps protect uptime and reduce downtime tied to avoidable fueling and handling issues.
Responsiveness Key to Managing Through Change
For Brown, the value is ultimately about responsiveness.
Downtime is rarely just one machine. It shows up across crews and schedules, especially when equipment is spread out across multiple job sites. By keeping diesel, DEF and daily service mobile, Landmark reduced the time lost to fueling runs and machine movement, without having to build the day around CDL and HAZMAT constraints.
