OFI 2002: Finding A Way To Make It In Farm Country | Dan Frank | Frankie’s Feed Movers | Re-Cap Episode

KEY IDEAS: 

Today’s episode is significant to me for a couple of reasons.  First, what Dan Frank is doing epitomizes what this show is all about.  He is a small, owner/operator of a business that allowed him to “make it in farm country”.  Dan values the lifestyle that living rural and farming brings, and this drives him to find a way to make a living “out there”.

Dan chose entrepreneurship to be the main way of creating his income in an area where jobs normally are scarce.  He sees our current economy for what it is – a moment in time that will allow you to get ahead.  Right now, Dan can get all of the side jobs he wants working for other people because unemployment is so low that farmers cannot find labor, let alone quality labor.  However, Dan realizes that this is not going to last forever.  So, instead of sitting back and enjoying the fact that he can work as much as he wants for other people and make good money right now, he is building his own business on the side for when the economy slows and jobs are less plentiful and competition for those jobs is higher.

Dan has been bootstrapping his silage hauling business, Frankie’s Feed Movers.  He started out by purchasing an old truck and using an old box on the truck to get started.  He is now creating enough revenue that he is going to be able to upgrade equipment and expand the services he can offer.

At the same time, Dan has been building a federation of other silage haulers, almost as a cooperative.  This way the federation can compete with bigger companies that have more equipment and get jobs that a single, owner/operator, would normally not be able to get.  The federation will split the revenue from the job equally, but each of them is working and not losing out to bigger companies.  This is a smart tactic.

The other thing that made this show significant to me was a realization that I had.  For almost 800 episodes of the Off-Farm Income Podcast I have thought of this as a show about farming.  What I realized when I interviewed Dan was that this is a show about celebrating the great people of our country who want to work, who want to achieve something and who have a drive to live the best life available to them.

As with everything else in life, as you grow and gain more experience, you realize that what you have been doing is actually something totally different than what you thought it was.  Or, at least, it has additional meaning and ramifications than you initially knew.

ADVICE FROM DAN:

RESEARCH – You need to know your market, and the only way to learn it is to do market research.

RIG – You had better know your rig – know what its capabilities are so that you don’t get yourself into trouble out in the fields.

RELIABILITY – If you are not very mechanical, you had better invest in equipment that is reliable.  You cannot buy the cheapest piece of equipment out there if you don’t have the ability to fix it.

BEST ADVICE DAN HAS RECEIVED:

“You’re either making payments or repairs” – this falls right in line with the advice Dan gave.  You can save money up front on cheaper equipment, but you will be fixing it a lot.  Or, you can buy something more expensive, likely requiring payments, and not have to do as much repair work.  The choice is yours, but those are your options.

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