Most ribbon cutting ceremonies in the county feature the business owners and members of the LaGrange-Troup County Chamber of Commerce calmly standing in front of the store and cut a plastic ribbon with a large pair of scissors. At Nickell Rental’s ceremony, its owners replaced the scissors with a 6-foot trencher machine and the ribbon with canvas Thursday afternoon.

“We didn’t want to do just your standard ribbon cutting,” Nickell Rental CEO Josh Nickell said. “We have all kinds of toys out here.”

This is the fourth location the equipment rental business has opened. Nickell said LaGrange had the right market for the business.

“It’s a really good town with a lot of people who like to do work themselves,” he said. “There’s not really a company that serves that market around here, the do-it-yourself kind of market.

The company rents equipment for contractors and homeowners working on large projects, Nickell said.

“We’ve got a lot of equipment for industrial plants down to someone wanting to put an organic garden or work on their yard,” he said. “It’s really any kind of equipment so anything from pressure washing a house and aerating or tilling a yard all the way up to some really big equipment that you would see at an industrial plant or building a high-rise.”

The business was founded in 1998 in Newnan before expanding to Griffin and Hiram, according to company founder Tom Nickell.

Josh said he had planned on opening a location in LaGrange around 2004, but things kept getting in the way.

“We actually planned to come to LaGrange actually before our third location, all the way back in 2004, we started planning for LaGrange,” he said. “It wasn’t until we had the opportunity, found the right piece of property, got the right manager last year that we really were prepared to come down.”

John Muzio, LaGrange Nickell Rental manager, said plans finally started again for the new location in December 2015.

Tom said when he founded the company he wanted to make it community based and patterned it off of Chick-fil-A.

“When I started seeing how Chick-fil-A ran their business, how they treated their customers, their employees, how involved they were in the community, I thought ‘Man, is there ever a better way to start patterning your business?’” he said. “We do some things our own way too, but just a great model.”

Josh said the company still makes the community its priority.

“Anyone can rent equipment. (At Nickell Rental) we consider ourselves consultants,” he said. “We’re here to help people get their jobs done, not just give them a piece of equipment.”

Nickell Rental, located at 1902 Roanoke Road, is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.