Authored By Chloé Morrison

Local business Nichols Fleet Equipment Inc., which recently celebrated 25 years in business, has outgrown its current location and is expanding into a new service facility. The company takes incomplete vehicles—just a chassis and cab—and turns them into complete units. The company has outgrown its 2401 E. 31st St. location and have opened a new service facility in St. Elmo. Company leaders also have plans to eventually move to an 11-acre spot at the Riverport Industrial Park. Until then, the company is operating out of both the 31st Street and the St. Elmo location. [The St. Elmo] building will be dedicated solely to the servicing customers' cranes, hydraulics, cylinders, air compressors, liftgates, etc.," the company's Vice President Nick Nichols said via email. "Our E. 31st headquarters is now dedicated solely to the installation and production of new trucks." The team is working on design plans for the new building and hope to have the new industrial park facility up and running in the next 18 months. The company has seen steady growth and increased demand since the end of The Great Recession. The business' core customers deal with heavy equipment used in projects such as road and home building and other construction projects. All of that slowed during the downturn, but now that the economy has rebounded, so has the work, Nichols said. "If you look around Chattanooga right now, there's obviously a ton of such work going on and that's the general trend in a lot of places," he said. "We send trucks all over the country, so there's a lot of demand we needed to have the capacity to meet right now."