This transcript was generated with the help of AI and may contain some errors.

Brad Fruth (00:00:10):
I’ve had to learn that when you talk about change, that you have to bring people along on that journey. A frustration can easily be, if you guys were talking about, let’s say, launching a new division of Element Three and you go in and you’ve been working on it for eight months and you get in and launch it into a leadership meeting and everybody freaks out or is like, I’m not with you. That would be discouraging. What you have to do is make sure that when you’re working on, I would say large transformation, that you’re bringing everybody with you and know that that’s going on.

Kyler Mason (00:00:44):
Whether you’re going to market through dealers, distributors, or some other partner channel, the mediated sale is complex. We call it B2B2X.

John Gough (00:00:48):
But the leaders in the industry are the ones who are making it look simple. I’m John Gough.

Kyler Mason (00:00:57):
And I’m Kyler Mason, and this is Why You Win presented by Element Three.

John Gough (00:01:04):
Brad Fruth is the Director of Innovation at Beck’s Hybrids and probably has the coolest job at that company. What might surprise you is that seed companies often also have this B2B2X model that we talk about on the show. And so a lot of Brad’s job is staying really, really close to the customer need and the dealer need so that as he is moving through the company and helping managers think about how to bring innovative new services or products to the market, they are always farmer first. I hope you enjoy the show. Brad, thanks for coming on the show today. We’re really happy to have you here.

Brad Fruth (00:01:39):
You’re welcome. Thanks for the invite, guys.

John Gough (00:01:41):
In person is a privilege. You guys are right up the road from us. So tell us about directing innovation at Beck’s. What does that mean?

Brad Fruth (00:01:49):
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So our innovation group actually started about five years ago at Beck’s. We went through a period of time where Scott Beck asked us to look at our four core capabilities at Beck’s, and we called it a disruption event. And so there was some time spent around what we thought we needed to do in the future. And so this was one of those great ideas. And at first when the whole topic of do you need an innovation group, it can be a little polarizing. And so what we had seen at the time was that there were a lot of people, it was kind of the trendy thing to have an innovation group. And we looked at some other groups that had them in the space. And what we didn’t want to do is that we saw some of them that thought an innovation group was a bunch of whiteboards on a room, a bunch of IKEA furniture, and then unicorn ideas come flying out the backend.

Brad Fruth (00:02:41):
And I said, I don’t think that’s really what innovation is at Beck’s. It’s not something where you have a culture that might be, if I could use the word toxic, that you have to take people out and do it separately. So what we had talked about is that at Beck’s, we pride ourselves on having a culture that promotes innovation from the ground up. So innovation at Beck’s, really my primary job and the primary job of our group is to be internal consultants. So in a growing and scaling business, when you’re growing by 15 to 20% every single year, it can be difficult to look at new things when you’re just trying to execute on your primary job function. So what we found is that there was a desire to create white space and to really help these managers in the evaluation and implementation of new technology.

Brad Fruth (00:03:32):
Now, what it doesn’t mean is that it doesn’t mean that we have a fancy process. It doesn’t mean that we have a four step thing that we run everybody through. We meet them where they’re at. So what I like to say is that we will work with the manager on everything from ideation, implementation. Some of them just want to be introduced to a startup company or do you know somebody in the industry that does X, Y, Z? And there’s some department managers, as I say, that don’t give me the time of the day. And all that is perfectly acceptable within our organization. So that’s kind of our primary job function. Now, I will also admit when we kind of rolled this out, what you didn’t hear is that we don’t do an investment. So a lot of innovation groups are also, or maybe have a CVC that look at doing investment.

Brad Fruth (00:04:16):
This is an unpopular opinion, but we actually think that there’s plenty of capital out there for businesses and companies that are making a direct impact to net farm income. Those folks don’t have any trouble. And so what we like to do is sit in between startup companies and new ideas and the people that have money and really be that voice of what’s working well and what’s not working well. So as I tell people, we have a bias point of view. We like our go-to market, we like our model, and so we’ll provide free advice on it.

Kyler Mason (00:04:48):
So you’re facilitating an ecosystem internally and externally. Am I understanding that correctly?

Brad Fruth (00:04:53):
Kind of. You know at Beck’s, we are high customer service and we like to think that we have a lot of trust of our customers and our dealers. We take that extremely seriously. Now, I think that we have that because at Beck says, I often talk about that we’re a farm that happens to own a business. So when you start talking about how close are you to the customer, do you know the jobs to be done? How fast you get feedback, we all have to eat our own dog food. A lot of us are involved in farming as well as the primary business. So because we have that a lot of investment people that sit in an office and as I say, eat avocado toast all day, they’ve never been on a farm in their life. And so what they’re wanting to know is what are the trends?

Brad Fruth (00:05:37):
What are people going to think about? Is there value that they’re proposing? Is it real or is it fake? And people just want, I think they’re just craving authenticity. And so there’s some people that we give positive feedback on. There’s some that we need to sit down and have a pretty tough conversation. We don’t avoid those. And again, we provide a bias point of view out in that marketplace. Now, just because we don’t do investment though, a lot of people are like, then why in the world do you spend a lot of time working with startup? And to be honest, it’s either one, I want to be an early adopter customer at Beck’s Hybrids or two, we have six value add that we provide that come embedded into our bag of seed. I want to embed you into one of those value adds to make them bigger.

Brad Fruth (00:06:22):
Because working with a startup company and a corporate partner, it should be one plus one equals three. So you have to be honest with yourself on what you’re really good at, and then you have to know what they’re good at. And then can you put a product together that has a product market fit that’s going to be awesome for your customers? So it takes a long time to get there. What I just laid out to you in the strategy of our innovation team, I’ll be really honest, is way different than what they told me originally when we started this. But it came through a lot of nos that we came to the point where we’re like, this is what we’re good at. This is how we’re going to impact the market.

Kyler Mason (00:06:57):
So if you’re not measured by avocado toast and how much you eat, what does the company expect from you? Are there KPIs?

Brad Fruth (00:07:07):
That’s a great, great question. So we are not, because I’m not measured on investment or ROI of individual products, the conversations that I have with my manager are often what are the relationships that I’m building and the people that I’m talking to? So as a recovering IT guy, I never in a million years would’ve thought that the primary role of innovation is going to be meeting people. It’s going to be building relationships. A lot of people internally know I’ll talk to anybody at least once and the whole time that you’re talking with them, I’m trying to figure out what motivates you, what does success look like? How are you measured? And then if there are things that overlap with the things that we’re trying to get done or I have friends that are trying to get stuff done, that’s where great things happen. Sonny tells us all the time, and especially our sales team, always do the right thing. And if the customer rewards us with their business, great. If not, you still did the right thing. And when you build a long-term business over with long-term goals, those are the things that you do. So I’m measured on the relationships that I’m building and how am I building into other people in other companies.

John Gough (00:08:14):
I think that is so reflective of Beck’s core value proposition too. And I think talking to people at the organization, they say over and over and over again, Beck’s is about relationships, we’re about relationships. And the fact that the director of innovation is measured like his primary KPI is relationships would surprise probably most people who have a similar title to yours.

Brad Fruth (00:08:36):
Well, I mean if you look at what’s going on in the market right now, especially within the ag market, I mean it’s a bloodbath as far as CVCs, and people are like, wait a minute, these investments aren’t working. So it’s refreshing for us to know that we made the right choice in that. It’s not direct financial gain. Now, that’s not to say we haven’t been successful, but we have a lot of projects right now that are maturing where the secret sauce is actually, if you can figure out a way to work with a company and not exchange any money, then that means that there’s enough value on both sides. You can do that. And we have a number of projects where that’s coming to fruition. So while some of our friends are struggling with some investments that we might’ve done, and as the market tightens, that’s when actually it’s a great time for us to hit on the accelerator.

Kyler Mason (00:09:27):
So what are the partners that you’re working with looking for when it comes to an exchange of value from you guys, like access data?

Brad Fruth (00:09:34):
So there’s a couple different things I would say. One is we have an extensive on-farm research network. So they either want access to our agronomy trialing and on-farm research because we’re also farmers, so if we’ll go tear something up in a heartbeat. The second thing is to be really honest, they want our market access now that is the last thing that we give. We treat, I mean I will die before we give that up, but those are kind of the two things there. So it sounds really, really basic, but the number of partners that come to us and haven’t even done on-farm field trials is amazing. Now it’s difficult to do. You just can’t roll up the lane of a farmer and go, Hey, would you try my smoked juice or whatever you got. That is not an easy thing. So to have an organization that has some sophistication to it that can run side-by-side trialing that can help them refine that value proposition, that’s what they’re looking for. And then two is they want access to our market, which again is something that we guard extremely close to.

Kyler Mason (00:10:42):
So I’m kind of back to this, the culture you described and you don’t have a process, how do you prioritize? You’re meeting new people, you’re an internal consultant to the organization. How do you manage the list of opportunity, the people you need to talk to? Is it intuitive or do you have a system?

Brad Fruth (00:10:59):
Well, I am not necessarily an organized person. So organized chaos maybe is the best way to put that. I have great people on my team that specifically know that they’re the opposite personality of me to hold me accountable. A part of it is, so I’ve been at Beck’s for maybe too long. I’ve overstayed my welcome, but in the process, the relationships that I’ve been able to build internally means that I feel that I have a really good handle on what motivates our internal manager. So yes, I like to meet with them a couple of times a year, but there’s constant communication on what’s working well and what’s not working well. So having a handle on that and then also constant communication with our leadership team lets me know where I think I need to prioritize. Now you guys have heard the story often I tell people I’ve almost been fired 10 times at Beck’s working on number 11, the organization.

Brad Fruth (00:11:52):
Part of my role is to also respectfully challenge. So if somebody comes and says, I think we need to do X, and I’m like, you are not thinking big enough, this is self-serving, or you’re not really serving our customer, I think you need to be talking about why they’re relying on us to kind of do that. So we are balancing a finite resource that is our time. And then we are working on the projects that we think are going to make the biggest impact or that are going to provide transformational change. So I have a folder in my desk drawer called the Dead Dreams folder, and if you don’t have one, it’s called the Dead Dreams folder. Everybody should get one. But when you’re an old fart like me, the things that we might’ve pitched originally that didn’t get any traction go in the dead dreams folder.

Brad Fruth (00:12:40):
And so you’re always working on, even though it’s a no, that just means it’s a no right now. But I had a conversation just this last week with somebody internally where I had to go to my Dead Dreams folder and pull out something from five years ago and I go, remember this? Let’s talk about why that was a no. And so again, as the old fart in the room when we work with people, the other thing is that there aren’t necessarily new ideas. However, something around that idea might have changed. It’s help me understand why you think the environment has changed and why this would work now. And let me tell you about all the challenges originally, however, you’re more than happy to tell me that we’re nuts and crazy and you think that you can do it differently. So we do the same thing with startup companies, right?

Brad Fruth (00:13:28):
Someone will be like, oh, we need to do X, Y, Z. And I was like, okay, I want you to do research on these three companies. First, tell me why they failed and then come back to me. Because oftentimes people when they have an idea have not done the right market research to know that this has been tried. Now it was a different market. It might be different people, it might be a different product, but help me understand what you’re going to do is different than this idea that’s either in the Dead Dreams folder or failed.

Kyler Mason (00:13:55):
If there are, okay, say there’s a new potential partnership or you’re about to have a workshop with an internal team and there’s an idea bubbling to the surface, to the surface, are you the governing body of ideas?

Brad Fruth (00:14:10):
That’s a great question. So my team’s success is actually when we’re in the back of the room cheering on a person, launching a new product or launching new research, we are merely the cheerleaders and the organizers internally. So I do very little projects by myself. All the projects are sponsored by somebody else. So if there’s, to your point out of a workshop, if there’s ideas or we do a design thinking exercise and they select something that we want to chase, we’re working with that manager that is the leader and the sponsor to help them pull the resources to do that. So our team, I’m very blessed to work with very humble people that know that is what when we’ve had success is when we’re cheering on our teammates. And if we’re doing our job, nobody knows that we exist, but you’re seeing new products, new services and new things roll out that we might’ve had a little bit of a hand in or a heavy hand in. At the end of the day, we are supporting managers. So there is nothing that I think that we’re doing that should have Beck’s innovation stamped on it. You’re going to see product, sales, research, production, processing, all those folks. That is their stuff. We’re merely a facilitator that’s here to help them.

Kyler Mason (00:15:26):
An advisor, it sounds like too, I mean you’ve said jobs to be done, the voice of the customer and stuff like that. A few times I’m assuming you’re like, Hey, I’m cheering you on, but from the back, this does not sound like it fits a job to be done, or are we really thinking about the customer?

Brad Fruth (00:15:42):
Yeah, so one of the most valuable things that we also did was we worked with our education group. We have a phenomenal education group that does a lot of continuing ed stuff. And one of the gaps that we found is that oftentimes people are like, Hey, let’s take our best people. Let’s put ’em in a room. Let’s ask ’em to look at something new. And then what was happening though unfortunately, is that those ideas, either they had already been tried or there wasn’t enough juice for the squeeze there. And so we looked at that and said, we’re not teaching the right things. So instead of doing that, let’s teach design thinking. So we’ve ran for the last three years internal curriculum that instead of saying, what’s the one thing that you would change here at Beck’s? So instead of saying that saying, let’s teach everybody to think about how to do this and then let’s let that education, let’s let everybody be empowered to do that so they know if they come and want to talk to me to a project, what’s the problem that you’re trying to solve?

Brad Fruth (00:16:42):
Do you understand everything that you’re impacting and how does this change the customer experience? Those are the things that I’m going to ask about. And now I don’t have to sit down and be like, Hey, that idea sucks, or No, we’re not doing that. You want me to do a fix and you’re causing the customer all these problems, or this is a thousand dollars fix that’s going to cost us a million dollars to implement. I don’t have to do that anymore. So we have really tried to empower our organization so that those conversations are happening within the departments and I don’t have to be there. So my group is two FTEs. That’s it would be impossible for us to be the gatekeeper, and really we shouldn’t do that if we’re empowering all of our employees to solve these problems and fix these things.

John Gough (00:17:27):
So one of our strategy gurus is Roger Martin. We drink all the Kool-Aid, and I got this quote from one of his books recently that says, build processes to make decisions instead of processes that produce outcomes. And so when you said earlier, we don’t really have a framework or we don’t have a process for these decision makings, you have all kinds of processes and you have continuing education curriculum and you have design thinking and you have the jobs to be done framework, and we will talk about dealer design groups that you have. Those are all different processes, but what I’m hearing you say aligns with that really closely. Your processes are about how do we make good decisions, not we’re going to produce a particular deliverable every single tim.e

Kyler Mason (00:18:14):
Bureaucracy and all that crap.

Brad Fruth (00:18:16):
And so you bring up a good point. When I started in this role, I talked to some other people that had similar titles and that was normally one of the first questions they had. Well, what framework and process are you using? What we didn’t want is the old stoplight chart, your innovation only moves forward if you can save this many dollars or impact this many internal people that is not Beck’s at all. And so we wanted the freedom really to be able to do the right thing. And if it’s impacting whatever the decision is, and we want to be able to do that, and we don’t want it to be reliant on legal, finance or HR to say, well, here’s a stop gate and the spreadsheet doesn’t look that good or whatever. That’s what we were trying to avoid in putting all this in.

Kyler Mason (00:19:02):
How do you decide then?

Brad Fruth (00:19:04):
I do very little deciding. I do a lot of coaching, so again, I’m supporting managers. So one of the big things that we’ve been working on for the last year with our research team is a lot of research around roots. And if you’re a fan of Beck’s and you click and subscribe to all of our YouTube stuff, there’s a little plug. You will see a lot of stuff there. So we’ve been working with our research group to help them do that. So as we meet people in the industry, we were just on an international trip a couple months ago and met a phenomenal researcher halfway across the globe that we think is going to make some impact. I know that that’s a focus and I know what their goals are with that. It’s my deal to source things and put them together in a package that I can present them and say, do you want to do this? They’re making the decision though right now a little bit of the secret sauce is I might maybe put some money at risk, let’s say more than what they would, but that’s a decision. We sit down and work through it and talk about it. But that’s how we’re successful with those types of projects.

Kyler Mason (00:20:05):
To keep pushing a little bit. You don’t decide, but the organization has to decide at some level what we’ll do and not do, right? Or is it just decentralized to a department, two a head?

Brad Fruth (00:20:15):
It’s decentralized to a department.

Kyler Mason (00:20:17):
And things can just make their way to the market or to the customer through that lens.

Brad Fruth (00:20:22):
That’s the blessing and the curse that I will tell you that we have at Beck is that our department managers get to run the departments as they see fit. So there’s not a big meeting that happens every six months where we do this. We’re also given the freedom that when we see an opportunity, we jump in front of leadership and do that. So I brought up the investment thing. Our group also, there’s some m and a stuff that’s going on and a lot of moving and shaking in the ag industry. If there’s something that comes across our desk and we think that, again, I can add value, we can exponentially make that better, then yeah, we will jump in and talk to leadership about it. But yeah, we are strictly supporting the organization now. When you work for a family owned independent company, there is a gray area there.

Brad Fruth (00:21:09):
So we are also looking as a family owned company, how are we going to continue to serve farmers and as the ag industry changes? But yeah, we do very little things that are self-serving to just the innovation group. It could be supporting a manager. I’ll maybe add on to you on your comment towards supporting leadership as well as they’re looking to the future, but if we have something that we think is impactful, the door is always open to jump in there. Now you’ve got to be smart about how you do that so you don’t get eaten for lunch in the boardroom. But we learned through literally almost a hundred nos in the first year what they wanted to do. And so Sonny has also always told us, watch what people do, not what they say. And so you guys, as Element Three could say, we want to invest in companies, and if they bring 20 things in front of you and you say, no, you’re probably not really wanting to do that. So I spend a lot of time watching what people do, listening to what they say, asking good questions, but at the end of the day, action will tell you what motivates a lot of people.

John Gough (00:22:17):
I want to ask that question in the context of your dealers and customers, and maybe those are the same word and you should talk for a second about that, but I think what would surprise a lot of listeners to this show, we’re mostly talking to people who make things with wheels and motors. Explain just really briefly how Beck interacts with dealers to get to an end customer.

Brad Fruth (00:22:39):
So I would equate it to a lot of probably how the car industry works. We have a independent dealer network. We have over a thousand farmers across the central corn belt here that represent us that are not employees. They are delivering that in customer experience to farmers. So it works probably a little bit like a car dealership would be the best way to describe it. A customer’s can purchase from us. It is not the same probably as running through a dealer. It’s also how we’ve been able to scale as a business. So we’re providing an income to these dealers. Again, they’re not employees, however, we are looking for dealers that know how to provide a high-end customer experience. So a lot of that I would say in the ag side is also hyperlocal. So a lot of people in farming don’t get up and move.

Brad Fruth (00:23:36):
That’s not really a thing. So if you live in an area and you’re like, Hey, you’re an upstanding person in the community, you’ve got 10 or 12 people around you that you think that would purchase from you, that’s a great way to get into a dealership model. So also I would also say from a sales, what we’ve seen in the ag industry is that you cannot scale your sales organizations as fast as you want to probably. And then also there’s a cost in there. So most people that have a dealer network understand that and know that you can’t deal or don’t have access to the capital needed to do that. And we could argue probably you shouldn’t do that. So it’s been a very good model for us. It’s no secret it’s been the single thing that has helped us achieve our growth goals of 12 to 15% of growth every single year since the eighties as single handedly been attributed to dealers.

Brad Fruth (00:24:32):
We have the same, I would say, conversations that lots of other people do. How close do you put them? How do you deal with maybe conflict? I was actually speaking with one of our dealer managers the other day and they were saying that that’s one of the hardest conversations to have is that when you go to a dealer and you’re like, Hey, I know you’ve been a dealer with us for 30 years. I’m going to put another dealership 10 miles from your house. They get really chy every single time we’ve done that. It has raised both sales levels. So that competition sometimes is what people need to get out there and get after it again. So we run an annual business, you sell them one thing per year. So sometimes that’s enough motivation where we’ll put that competitive dealer or yeah, we’ll put a competitive person next door, they’ll grow in sales and the existing guy grows almost every single time. So there’s just something about that competitive nature of salespeople that when we take some of that away, then it creates a competitiveness. Not every brand does that, but we’ve seen some success in doing that. So our dealer team knows we’re doing as much background on financial and personality to get that right match, but we need to be growing by at least a hundred new dealers every single year. And that’s a huge part about our growth.

John Gough (00:25:48):
So part of your process now, we can kind of clip back into this idea of your access to the market through these dealers all the way to these customers. You have a sort of regular event that you run with these dealers. It’s the design event. Talk about that.

Brad Fruth (00:26:05):
We do a lot for our dealers, or at least we’d like to think so because again, they’re independent folks that if they don’t want to sell, they don’t have to sell. At Beck’s, we are also, we trying to manage our brand down to the customer. So just like a car dealership, you have a manufacturer that is trying to manage that down to the customer level as well as make sure that the dealer isn’t really going to kill ’em. But we run a couple of events every single year that are mainly sales in nature. So we have a big sales kickoff, and then around Christmas time we kind of have a event as our sales season is winding down in this annual cycle and it’s kind of the last go get ’em team, what are the things going on in industry that we need to do there?

Brad Fruth (00:26:51):
So those are big. We’ve also worked some of our innovation stuff in there. So I would say partners that we learned how to trust that understand the rules of engagement and aren’t going to be idiots. We have done some events with our dealers where we’re like, Hey, as you’re building out a full service dealership and seed as a part of that, here are some other partners that we think are doing some really interesting things that you could potentially add in there that we’ve gotten to know. Well. I would also add we’re seeing that our dealers are becoming more full service seed is just one part of that. So they might also have a precision planning dealership. They might also sell some biologicals. They might also sell crop scouting and drone services. So at Beck’s, those aren’t all under our umbrella. So having that trust at the farm gate means that if Beck’s is going to say, I think this is a good thing that we mean it, and there’s not some backend deal where everybody’s pockets are getting greased.

Brad Fruth (00:27:49):
And so our dealers kind of crave that. What do you like in the industry? To your point? We also have a specialized group. So dealers can sign up to be part of this Dealer Business Academy where they actually pay, and it’s a professional development that runs a full year. So we actually run them in one of those sessions. We run them through a full day of a design sprint and we pick a topic that is very pertinent to what they do. And there’s two things that happen there. One is that they get to understand this process of how to approach a problem through the customer’s lens. And two, we’ve also seen it build in empathy. So we can talk about order changes. The industry order changes just suck. And through the interview process, we bring in our supply people, we bring in our logistics people, we bring in our dealer managers, and now they get to hear what the order changes that they want to do, how it impacts our business.

Brad Fruth (00:28:51):
It builds an empathy around something that they never even thought about. And so what I love about the design thinking and where I think some companies get it wrong is that everybody is so focused on me and my group that it allows you to ask questions about what could be and then work your way back to it. So that’s a design thinking thing that we try to choose a different theme every single year. We ran one this last time around our digital customer experience and what do we think that they need because all of our dealers are also customers. So as we look at, yes, we need to serve customers and we need to support dealers, how do we do this? We learned some phenomenal things that once again, you get to a place of trust that you can really start to pull out of them. And so we secretly also use it right as huge input sessions. I mean these are dealers from across the nation. We get ’em for a couple days year where we can ask tons of questions, we can challenge them, they can challenge us, and those are invaluable. One that we get dealers that pay for us to take them through professional development and two, that they will in a trusting thing, give us feedback that we would not get.

John Gough (00:30:09):
And back to your earlier comment about being in a business relationship that provides value on both sides. In this case you are paying them and they’re selling your seed, but the thing that you’re describing is a literal business value to them. They’re becoming better business people and you are getting better market feedback than you could get at any speed for any price, basically people telling you have all of your warts and problems. When you think about those dealer business academies, is there one that stands out to you or a person that stands out as most changed? You had to give a superlative to some person.

Brad Fruth (00:30:45):
I don’t know if there was most change, but the one thing from this last one that there was an a aha moment. It actually almost came in a break. These sessions that we run with dealers. So most of us in the ag community, especially those at the farm gate, they’re in their pickup truck or a cab. So to put ’em in a ballroom in a hotel for nine hours is like, it’s like going to dinner with your mother-in-law. It takes all it can to hold it together. So it is very, I would say, mentally draining for these folks to put ’em in this environment and go through this. And it was actually at a break and we were talking about what digital experiences, what are the things that you do that are, and I believe Ashley, our marketing manager, said she wants to make, what is it addictive or fanatical fans.

Brad Fruth (00:31:35):
So how do we do that? And one of the gals made this offhand comment as she was decompressing while she’s having her 10th diet Coke or something and says, well, all my husband does all evening and sit in his chair, watch TV and scroll auction websites. And I looked at her, I said, what did you just say? And so through that offhand comment, she had inadvertently shared that one of the things that her husband really valued was this idea about buying and trading equipment. And so that was one of those, hold on, we need to drill in on this. And so that was something like, okay, so how can we take this idea and how does Beck’s apply? And is there something that we could do digitally now to enhance this maybe new offering of is there an equipment exchange? And so we’re currently bouncing around a number of ideas in that space, but that was an offhanded comment made that all of a sudden somebody on the team said, hold on, we’re going to jump on this. Through that, we were able to say, okay, hold on. There might be something here. So there’s all those nuggets, but you have to be, again, even though it’s exhausting, you have to be listening all the time. You have to be responsive and you have to jump on things like that.

Kyler Mason (00:32:53):
Don’t give away any secrets, but what could you do about that?

Brad Fruth (00:32:56):
Well, so we currently have a team at Beck’s right now. We have a digital strategy team that honestly is going through this right now of what is that going to look like and what are the products and features that we need to do for the future as we’re looking at making some changes to our own internal system. Tech is very adaptable, and oftentimes it’s not the software that’s the limitation in my opinion. It’s the creativeness of the person designing the product, right? So I mean a software person, they’re great people, don’t get me wrong. They write code, they’ll write whatever you ask them to. I think the magic sauce in this is saying, okay, there’s a lot of other places you could go to look at equipment online. Why would they do it with Beck’s? Is it place? Is it people? What is there and how could we enhance that experience?

Brad Fruth (00:33:51):
I don’t have the answers for you. It’s something openly being talked about. That’s just one part of it. We have six value ads at Beck’s Hybrids. One of them is a trip program. Why would you go sit on a beach with 6,000 other Beck’s customers? We seem to have created these fanatical fans with trips that now people met each other on these trips. They now will only go on trips with each other, and the only tie that they have is that they’re Beck’s Hybrids customers and their farmer. Can we take that same thing from a user experience and are there other things that we could do like this that help us with it.

Kyler Mason (00:34:24):
6,000 go on these trips?

Brad Fruth (00:34:25):
I believe last year we had 6,000 people travel with us, not all at the same time, but within about a six week period. Those are the things that when you’re a customer service company that you have to think about. Sometimes, I’ll be honest with you, even internally, it gets a little jarring when to some people, when you say, we are a sales and marketing customer service company, they’re like, no, we sell corn, soybeans and wheat. I’m like, yes, we do. And we have good products. And I often tell people, we have good products. We have horrible pricing and great customer service. The value that we can deliver is unmatched in the industry. We have the highest customer retention and we can make farmers more money per acre than any other company can. So we sell good products, but at the end of the day, people become our customers because of the service and the value that we deliver.

Kyler Mason (00:35:14):
With all that said, who’s not a good customer for you?

Brad Fruth (00:35:16):
Somebody that wants to wheel and deal price and negotiate their way to zero, that is not a good customer for us. And there are many other places where they can be that customer. So it’s no different than if you look at the expansion of Walmart and Dollar General, right? I mean, I live in rural Indiana, and the joke is we got more Dollar Generals than we do. People right now. They’re popping up everywhere, but they’re eating Walmart for lunch right now, but they’re playing in that price space. So you walk into a Dollar General, you hope the door opens and doesn’t fall off of tinges, and there’s somebody working the register. I love Dollar General, please don’t burn down my house. That’s the experience. You don’t walk into a Dollar General expecting the experience you get at Cabela’s, right? Nothing wrong with either of those experiences.

Brad Fruth (00:36:01):
The same thing at Beck’s, if you think that you’re going to come in and negotiate your way through a big contract, that’s not how we go to market. Our sales programs are our sales programs, and we treat everybody pretty much the same. If you’re buying one bag or you’re buying a million bags, now we have volume discounting everything like everybody else, but if you want to come and throw your weight around, do that. That’s not the customer that we’re looking for. And there are other outlets in the ag market where we’ll be glad to give you some other names and we can do that. I’ll give you another example. We’ve ran a number of projects. Everybody has the idea that we should sell seed through an online brand. There are a number of other people that do that. We’ve looked at a number of times and the leadership of the family says, no, that is not what we’re going to do. We can’t do anything there that anybody else can. And our whole organization, everything that we do, our sales training is all around high value products. So why would we get into that space? That’s just how we look at it. And Sunny has told us multiple times, find out what you’re good at and do more of that.

John Gough (00:37:07):
One of the things that we have talked a lot about is your commitment rewards program, which is that if I’m not going to explain it to you, but this idea that if you’ll buy for a certain number of years, then you get access to tools, equipment, additional what you’ve called rewards. And I think that for that value or rather that price sensitive customer, very confusing, why are you in the game? You’re just inflating price so you can move money around. Your perspective on that I think is really interesting and different about how you can fit into a farmer’s value stream because you’ve decided to go to this customer service full bore. We’re going to help the farmer no matter what kind of idea, right?

Brad Fruth (00:37:54):
Yeah. So our commitment rewards program is one that we take the most shots with from our competitors. It’s often the most misunderstood product that we have as far as our value adds go. The whole point of the Commitment rewards program, and Sonny calls it our shareholder program because our customers, our shareholders, is that we want to have the highest retention of customers in the industry. So if you reward us with a multi-year deal of business, which by the way, you don’t know what the price is going to be in year two, in year three, then we will allow you to share in the value of bulk buying is essentially what that is. Farming is a highly capital intensive business, and so when you’re looking at things like a million dollar tractor, half a million dollar semi, to be able to save 20, 30% is a really, really big deal.

Brad Fruth (00:38:52):
And so people that aren’t in the program, and so focus groups and everything like that tells us that people outside of the program that don’t know anything about it use the words like gimmick, giveaway and things like that. People that are in the program use the word high value, loyalty and trust. So for us, what we have to do with that program is be able to adequately explain how it relates to your farm and how it’s going to make an impact. So yes, if you are looking at a new Ford pickup truck, you will go to a dealer and find a certain sticker price on it, and that’s the value that that pickup truck is. If we can deliver that for 30% less and you’re going to give us your business for three years, that’s a value exchange that most people are good with. I don’t remember the exact STA something in the 70 to 80% of all of our customers are in a multi-year deal because they’ve seen that value, especially when financial times get tough.

Brad Fruth (00:39:48):
What we’re going into right now with low commodity prices, if you are looking to keep your own working capital, let us do that for you. Now again, we’re asking for three years of your business, so if you will reward us with that, then we will do this. So it’s often again misunderstood, but it’s one that can bring high value and high impact. Now, you also, again, I’ve mentioned we have six value add that is one of them. As a salesperson and a dealer, your role, especially when prospecting is to be asking a lot of questions to understand which one of those is most applicable to them. So there are some people that listen to this or that listen to commitment rewards, and they might be used to negotiating a deal. They’re going to hate that. However, they might want a replant program. They might like all the free research that we do from practical farm research, and they might want to sit on a beach in January.

Brad Fruth (00:40:45):
So not every customer values the six value ads. Not all of them value them the same. So what our dealers and our salespeople have to do is listen and know how they can be valuable. And so again, I would not recommend to any of our salespeople or dealers lead with commitment rewards. That’s going to be a bloodbath. However, there are some people that if you know, Hey, we’re thinking about trading tractors, and it’s like, okay, part of this deal, we can work with either green or red, and here’s the value that we can deliver. If you want to look and do something bigger. And if you don’t, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t know if that explains it well or if that just confuses everything, but it’s very misunderstood. And again, it’s not gimmicky when people use the word value that are within that program.

John Gough (00:41:34):
I think you did a great job explaining it. And also I think your point about the dealer being the front line and understanding the value that the customer actually after, again, just goes back to your training that you’re putting back into these businesses and helping them succeed as be partners in the ecosystem.

Brad Fruth (00:41:53):
And I think you guys probably know this as a business, not every value add that you provide, does every customer put value on it? And so you have to be able to decide what that is and then how do you help them and how maybe there’s a new value add. But I can’t go in telling you, I’m going to give you free car washes if you drive a motorcycle, that’s not going to work, right?

John Gough (00:42:16):
Free car wash and a shower at the same time.

Brad Fruth (00:42:17):
Do you drive a motorcycle?

John Gough (00:42:18):
No, I don’t.

Brad Fruth (00:42:19):
Well, maybe you should go get one. Today’s a new day.

John Gough (00:42:21):
Thanks for the advice. There you go. I appreciate that. I’m going to send my wife this podcast.

Kyler Mason (00:42:26):
We have had a few convos with people in the industry, and I think you’re interested.

John Gough (00:42:32):
Yeah, the antenna are up.

Kyler Mason (00:42:33):
There you go. So one of the other value adds, you’ve listed a couple.

Brad Fruth (00:42:38):
So we have our replant program, so if anything happens to your seed, whether it was your fault or not, we will replace that seed for free. We have our commitment rewards program, our practical farm research program, which is we’re doing research in 10 to 12 locations, all agronomy focused, not product focused, and taking it all to a return on an investment. We have our farm server application, we have our trip program, and then we have a robust treatment program. So all of the seed that we sell is treated because we know that that will protect that seed and provide value to you. So those are kind of the six value adds that we have at Beck’s Hybrids.

Kyler Mason (00:43:16):
Great. So this shows about why you win. I’m curious, you’ve talked a lot about, I think the ingredients to that. Where are you losing, aside from the price conscious negotiating type of customer, where are you not winning where you should be?

Brad Fruth (00:43:32):
Yeah, that’s a good question. So we’ve been spoiled with geographic expansion through the last 10, 15 years. I would say. There are still brand loyalty is a thing in ag. And so I mean, there’s people I know that work on farms that have John Deere tattooed on ’em or Case IH. Those are the equipment side is also fiercely loyal. There are brands out there that have similar followings. And so those are ones that no matter what we do, they’re going to buy that brand because that’s what their dad did and their grandpa did, and that’s what we’re doing. So those are ones that we also maybe don’t do as well with.

Kyler Mason (00:44:17):
But your play there is like you’re adding more dealers. You want to have a local presence where there’s great relationships.

Brad Fruth (00:44:23):
It’s a pretty fierce competitive market on the dealer side. Now, our competitors also can’t really decide if they’re going to do independent dealers or not. So there’s some wishy washiness there. So consistency for us is our friend is that we’ve been a farmer dealer, we’re going to be farmer dealer. We’re not really changing there. This might sound really simple, but we do what we say we’re going to do. And when you’re competing with publicly traded companies, they change direction sometimes quarter by quarter, sometimes year by year. And so that consistency at the farm gate, the consistent message, even though we’re not the cheapest and there’s not some funny business that happens that maybe there does with other folks. I have seen dealers come around finally and been like, look, you guys keep showing up. Okay, you keep visiting once a year. I still get your stuff and I’ve told you no 10 times. And then they’re like, what is going on? Or what’s in the water is the comments that we normally get. So there may be Beck’s Kool-Aid or ice cream. I don’t know what it’s, it’s delicious, but you should try something. It’s amazing. But I hear that often in our outside locations is that our people are consistent and Beck’s does exactly what they say that they’re going to do. So those are two areas probably that I would say are challenges for us.

John Gough (00:45:43):
Thinking about that description of commitment and consistency speaks to the values of the people that you are selling to, certainly. And also as a strategy question, just sort of in love with your willingness to make a choice, take a bet and then live into that with a lot of regularity. It sounds like Sunny and Scott have been stalwarts of We’re going to do the right thing. We’re going to follow our strategy. We’re not going to deviate from this thing just because we’ve got shiny objects of which I’m sure there are many in the landscape. We know who we are.

Brad Fruth (00:46:23):
I mean, I often describe Beck’s as a farm that happens to own a business when you are a farm. I would say people appreciate the integrity because when they’re making those decisions very often it’s not self-serving. And whether we’re launching a new product or we’re not launching a new product, they’re doing it because it’s the best thing for the farmer. That’s a difficult thing to describe. Only if you go through something like that, I think, can you truly appreciate it. So the decisions that they make, I’ve seen time and time again where they’ve always given the customer or the dealer, they’ve let them have the value first. Our sales guys, we also go to market with a choices message. We sell a lot of different genetics and traits, some that come from us, a lot that don’t. Our salespeople do not know the gross margin of those products that they sell.

Brad Fruth (00:47:15):
And I will tell you, there are wide differences in them. The reason is they want that salesperson to put the best product on the farm so that farmer wins. And then we trust that when we do the right thing, that the majority of them are going to reward us with their business. I’m not aware of too many other people, and I live in a bubble. Okay, I’m a Beck’s baby. I’ve never worked anywhere else. I’m spoiled. I’m not aware of too many other people that do that and that say, we’re always going to give the customer or the dealer, we’re going to default on the side of them. So yeah, that’s why I think when we make decisions that people are like, and we’re convicted on them, it’s because it is the right thing. And I think people appreciate that.

Kyler Mason (00:47:55):
That’s incredible that they don’t know the margin on the seed.

John Gough (00:47:58):
You talked earlier about the hyperlocal nature of the business, and I think hyperlocal is something that I think a non-ag person probably wouldn’t really appreciate. You could feel like, all right, northern Illinois, southern Indiana, climate’s different, the ground’s different, that kind of thing. But it’s way more hyperlocal than even that, right?

Brad Fruth (00:48:17):
Yeah. So I mean, the county that I live in, we have four dealers. Each dealer is a little different. One of the things that we also do is we team sell a lot on the Beck’s hybrid side. Again, there’s a lot of brand loyalty, there’s feelings, there’s emotions, and there’s personalities. And you might only have 50 opportunities in a farmer’s lifetime to sell them seed. And so what we found is that you might hate my guts, right? I just rub you the wrong way, but you might like my friend Bob. So we do a lot of team selling. It’s the same thing on the dealer side, but a lot of these dealers are selling in a 10, 15, 20 mile radius, and that’s the opportunity for ’em. So when we say hyperlocal, that’s where it is. A good dealer for us, again, is an outgoing person that is your typical sales person that’s respected in the community. But we have very few people that are selling amongst wide swaths. Now, we do have some dealers that do that, and instead of focusing on geography, they might be focused in either on a niche or a certain kind of farmer, but a lot of our dealers are selling in a region, in an area, and that’s the opportunity. So I mean, we’re talking counties at that point.

John Gough (00:49:30):
When you’re selling in that hyperlocal way with a thousand different dealers, how many different dealers?

Brad Fruth (00:49:35):
A little over a thousand.

John Gough (00:49:37):
Right In there. You also have to have an internal mechanism. You’ve got agronomists, you’ve got seed consultants. You’ve got people on the Beck’s sales side who come in with those dealers in a way that I think reflects both the location in a really important way, and then also the expertise to know what product needs to go into what place. You have so many traits and genetics and all that stuff.

Brad Fruth (00:50:02):
So I would best describe it. I used to do a lot of the IT buying back in my IT days. It’s a lot like an IT VAR type of relationship. I don’t know how many there are. I should probably calculate that. But the six value ads, we also have products. We have traits. There is every dealer has a slew of internal specialists that they can call just like in the IT side. And so our salespeople, in my opinion, are good relationship people and then have all those resources. So a dealer should know now, they all come in for a new dealer training, a big three day event. When they sign on, it’s overwhelming. They meet a bunch of people. But every dealer has a regional person that for every single one of the value adds, for accounts payable, for product, for agronomy, for all kinds of stuff. That is their person and their specialist that they can choose. So we have a lot of tools to support those dealers. Again, they’re independent, so if they want to go just absolutely tear down every door and need help, we are there. If they want to sell to 30 of their friends and that’s it, we’re there. So there’s an enormous amount of resources that are around them to help them succeed should they want to be aggressive.

John Gough (00:51:22):
And your willingness, Beck’s willingness to develop that capability and that support mechanism for the dealer instead of just saying, all right, you’re our sales arm. Go crazy and we’ll be over here. Doing science and making seeds, I think is the handshake that is a real differentiator and reflects again, that customer service mentality. We are going to service our dealers, we’re going to service our customers. We’re going to do the right thing.

Brad Fruth (00:51:45):
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, a dealer calling on somebody is better. They probably have a relationship. They know more about them than us taking an FTE salesperson, plopping ’em in there, not knowing what in the world that they’re doing. It’s the relationship side that you’re doing. And so pretty much everything that we do, especially from a sales and financial side, we’re also hyper aware of how that’s going to affect our dealers. So we don’t tinker a lot with our programs. You also need healthy, sustainable dealers as well. So you can’t do things one year where you’re taking away large chunks of income or affecting them in a way. I mean, we need financially healthy dealers, so we’re also very aware of what that looks like and how we’re sharing in that. We do a lot. We have a dealer advisory council that’s done by region, A lot of feedback, a lot of stuff around marketing about how we’re going to help those dealers.

John Gough (00:52:42):
Yeah. When we do direct dealer research. That’s one of the things that is maybe the most consistent drum that an unhappy dealer will beat is the OE is just wagging me all the time. The program’s always changing. Their expectations are different. They’re trying to squeeze these crazy margins out on me and they don’t understand my business and how it relates to their business.

Brad Fruth (00:53:05):
Hopefully we’ve taken care of that, or at least we’re aware of the levers that we’re pulling and what the impact is.

Kyler Mason (00:53:12):
It sounds like you have a pretty involved betting process. How often are you turning down prospective dealers?

Brad Fruth (00:53:18):
That’s a good question. I don’t, the stats around that. It does happen, and there’s a variety of things. Again, we want upstanding people in the community that are financially sound. It’s great if they have selling experience and know how to do that. We are getting a pretty big slew of, I would say, competitive dealers right now that are coming over, especially when we’re going into a new territory. Those really aggressive folks that are hungry tend to be the first people that call in. So I always said if I was going to be in sales, I would jump into a new territory. For the first couple of years, people are calling you and you’re just trying to do that, and after two or three years, then you’re having to make outbound calls there. But I would say we spend a lot of time getting to know the person as an individual. So you also want to make sure that what they’re telling you is authentic and true. No different than a job interview. So if you come in and you’re like, oh, I got to make more money and that blah, blah, blah, it’s like, Hey, let’s sit down and do you know how to value sell? Do you understand what you’re signing up for? Do you understand who we are, what our culture is, and does that align with what you want to achieve? So normally knows are something that happens around that conversation. Just like an employee.

John Gough (00:54:31):
You guys have all kinds of different products and even your product nomenclature is encoded about the genetics and the traits and all that stuff. One of the things that we talk a lot about is product launch and through the lens of mostly organizations that have a lineup between 10 to 20, maybe 25 products, 25 would be kind of on the high end. You guys are way past that. What’s the Beck’s hybrids approach to launching new products?

Brad Fruth (00:55:01):
That’s a great question, and so I might be a little over my skis, so you’ll have to forgive me if I say something wrong. Fellow employees, there’s been a couple things. We’re very aware of how many products and SKUs that we have, and so one of our strategic capabilities we think is how do you still have regional product but yet have a national reach? And so we still have the strategic capability of running small lot seed and we have 15 to 18 different product selection zones. So we are choosing products, let’s just say like Michigan, right? There are products that work really well there that don’t work well in Indiana, that don’t work well in Kentucky, and sure as heck don’t work well in Arkansas. So our product team is constantly evaluating what are the potential of sales and where do those right numbers need to be.

Brad Fruth (00:55:55):
One of the things that we’ve tried to do, so we have genetics and traits. Those are two things that come together in a bag of corn specifically. So the genetics, what our team has tried to do is not only do we have a lot of SKUs, but we have turnover in those SKUs. So no longer are the days of a farmer trying something out for a year or two in a product living for 10 years. That doesn’t happen. Two to five years is roughly now how products are moving out. That took us five to seven years to develop, by the way. So what they’ve tried to do on the genetic side is work off of families. So while you might not know what six, I’m just going to make this up, right, 62, 88 is if you grew 62, 87, then by the numbering nomenclature you’ll know that this looks a lot like it.

Brad Fruth (00:56:43):
It’s just the quote, new version. It might have a new male or a new female. Also then with traits, so we don’t build traits, we source them from our competitors and friends, our frenemies. That is another part of that component. So we’re able to do a little bit of matchmaking there. So those two things are why we have a lot of SKUs. And so product launches are either geared normally towards traits and new traits. So we’re working with our partners so that people understand them. There was a time a couple years ago where I think three years in a row there was a new soybean trait that came to market and it was very stressful, but everybody knew the value that those we’re creating. The trait partners handle a lot of the education around the trait side, and then through field days, which are a big thing at Beck, we’re kind of handling a lot of those product launches, but that’s kind of how we’re handling it now, is working in families and traits have helped to get farmers educated because no longer can they try a product for two years and then expect to then have it on their farm.

John Gough (00:57:55):
Yeah, there’s a lot of selling the invisible that goes into that kind of moment because you really are literally selling futures, right? I’m going to sell you the seed and it’s going to perform in this way, and it has these traits and genetics that you sort of know about because you’ve seen things that rhyme with that.

Brad Fruth (00:58:12):
Yeah. Now this is an unpopular opinion that I’m going to share, but I mean, I think in the future it’s going to be more about those characteristics and less about the number is my personal viewpoint, not necessarily maybe the viewpoint of my employer. So instead of concentrating on the number, it’s going to be more like, Hey, this interacts in this way. It’s this maturity. So instead of focusing on the exact, this is like 62, 88, instead of saying, I really like 62 8. Well, what do you like about it? Well, I like that it’s 110 day hybrid. I like that it’s drought resistant, that it has this. That’s actually what the customer talks about. They equate that those characteristics of the product with the number 62, 88 when we’ve literally made the number up. So the discussion is what they really like are the characteristics. So do we talk about that or do we talk about this random number that gets assigned that just describes the characteristics?

Kyler Mason (00:59:09):
Why is that controversial?

Brad Fruth (00:59:11):
Farmers have a lot of, again, brand loyalty to the number, and that’s how we all talk about it. It’s the sling of the industry, and so people are attached to it. There’s some competitors of ours that have had very, very successful numbers that have lasted 10, 12, 14 years. Everybody’s chasing those of products and they live in infamy. I don’t think those days are ahead of us. They’re probably on the backside, but we’re seeing right now a bushel to bushel and a half of genetic gain per year on new products, and they think that it could be with DNA editing as much as two to four bushels per year. So when you’re doing that, again, you have to be able to get your customer to adopt new products because the product, by the time they want to grow, it’s obsolete. And so to deal with the obsolescence problem, you have a lot of SKUs. I think that we’re going to have to talk more about characteristics and less about the actual product number, if that makes sense.

Kyler Mason (01:00:10):
Makes perfect sense.

John Gough (01:00:12):
Back to your comment about customer’s jobs to be done, their pains, their gains, seems like what they’re trying to buy though is control. Ultimately, the farmer is trying to de-risk his purchase as much as possible. And the way one of the levers that they have is, well, that number worked before, give me the same number again. And I think what you’re saying is you need to break them of that habit because the actual improvement year over year of the new product is actually better. It’s like a meaningful difference.

Brad Fruth (01:00:44):
Well, farmers are fiercely independent and for good reason, and I don’t know if break them maybe is the word that I would use. We love our customers dearly. So in order to do that, we have to be able to then deliver the value that we’ve promised. And that is something, a whole nother topic of conversation is the ag tech community probably got in front of our skis 15, 20 years ago and under promised and didn’t bring that value. So I would say if we’re going to do that, we have to do it in a manner that we can truly deliver that additional value. I mean, we have some dealers right now that sit down with customers and the trust is so high that the dealer picks everything, everything. And then we have some customers that are like, no, here’s what I want. Or, I saw this guy at Field Day, or I saw this video, or my neighbor said this, my neighbor said that. So I think we can get there, but again, we have to be able to deliver incremental value and then be honest with ourselves that we’re delivering that in order to gain the trust for folks to do that. And so I think when we talk about maybe messing with that or playing around with that, we have to be real honest with ourselves. Can we deliver that value over just picking,

Kyler Mason (01:02:00):
Do you have the best job at the company?

Brad Fruth (01:02:01):
Oh, yeah. I have the best job at Beck’s Hybrids. We get to look at a lot of new stuff. So my personality type is I need a little bit of flavor. I need a different thing every single day. Not only are we working in innovation projects, we’re dealing with startup companies, but I briefly mentioned we’re trying to look at what’s going to be new and where Beck’s Hybrids is going. And that to me is very exciting. I would say I’ve had to learn that when you talk about change that you have to bring along on that journey, a frustration can easily be, if you guys were talking about, let’s say, launching a new division of Element Three and you go in and you’ve been working on it for eight months and you get in and launch it into a leadership meeting and everybody freaks out or is like, I’m not with you.

Brad Fruth (01:02:48):
That would be discouraging. So what you have to do is make sure that when you’re working on, I would say large transformation, that you’re bringing everybody with you and know that that’s going on. But yeah, I get to swing for the fences. I often strike out and get told to sit back down, but it is an awesome job to have. And yeah, I often tell people we get to run around with not having the financial accountability my fellow workers don’t always enjoy. But yeah, it’s awesome. I work for an amazing company and an amazing vertical, and we’re very, very happy.

Kyler Mason (01:03:21):
Yeah. I hope you only continue to almost get fired.

Brad Fruth (01:03:27):
Well, yeah. Yeah, we’ll see. Scott Beck often reminds me what that number is, so we’ll see. Does he really? He’ll see. He knows what the number is. This isn’t just your joke. Yeah, well, no, it’s now turned into everybody’s joke, so we definitely have some fun with it. We actually just had our here about a week ago in the office. We had our next class of interns come in, and it’s hard to believe it’s been so many years ago that I started as an intern, just hired as a strong back to come in and help move a bunch of stuff. But no, it’s been an amazing career and I love what I do every single day.

Kyler Mason (01:04:00):
Love it. Love it. That’s a great place to wrap.

John Gough (01:04:02):
Thanks, Brad.

Brad Fruth (01:04:03):
Hey, you’re welcome. Thank you guys. Thanks so much.

John Gough (01:04:07):
Why You Win is presented by Element Three, a marketing firm focused on modernizing go to market strategies for manufacturers that sell through complex distribution channels. We help leaders solve problems across demand generation, sales channel support and brand development.

Kyler Mason (01:04:17):
If you’d like more from myself or John, connect with us on LinkedIn. And for more from Element Three, visit elementthree.com. That’s elementthree.com.