From Success to Failure. The Custom business

I have always been pretty quick to share the funny, not so funny, and the success stories on here. this one is a little different. Maybe it will give some perspective on the challenges of what we do. I have been stewing on the events of recent weeks and figured that I may as well share that too.

As many of you know, we had that really nice article a couple of months ago in Progressive Forage Grower Magazine. Thanks to Lynn Jaynes for that, it was awesome.

With the business growing, it was pretty apparent pretty quickly that the old swather wasn't going to hold up forever. This began the 3 month search for a rotary swather, preferably a Massey Ferguson. After bidding on many, we finally found one at the price and hours we wanted. A few days later came a 3X3 baler that would round out the upgrades. A significant upgrade and investment, to say the least.

Fast forward to getting everything to the place and ready to roll for the year. First cutting starts in a couple of weeks.

I start doing interviews for hired hands and cannot find anybody. I mean can't find a warm body with any experience. Well, maybe one, but he wasn't hire-able, and even then it was questionable. We advertised locally, on social media, with the Wyoming Job Service, here on HT, everywhere that I thought might get us someone half ways qualified. No dice. There are farm hands getting laid off all over and no one wants to work custom haying.

So at this point, there I set with all of this new to me equipment, and no one to run it. The doubt starts to creep in. It wasn't a pleasant feeling to be sure. I can't take a job to put up hay if I don't have the people on board to run equipment. I should mention that my main guy last year went back into retirement, and has no interest in working this year. The part timers have all moved on. All except one, and she has a full time job.

We had a meeting of the board again, another three beers for the uninitiated, and talked it over. it was looking pretty gloomy.

The phone started ringing. Of course that little article got some attention from some big outfits. Over 1200 acres of grass hay on one of them.

The pressure got pretty high to make a decision. I had a choice to make. It was either quit the day job and go full time custom haying or back off entirely. Without any help I couldn't justify quitting the dayjob, although I could have hired a gunsel at that point and made it work. It was a roll the dice situation at best.

So in a nutshell, there I am with a pile of newer machinery and no way to put it to work. With that equipment came the debt load right behind it. At some point I realized that a sizable chunk would be required to service that debt. I also came to the realization that I couldn't do it by myself.

We made the difficult decision to hang it up and sell out the equipment that is owned by the company. We are keeping our stuff and will continue to do our own haying. So far, about half of it is sold or pending sale, and we have half of it to sell yet.

Talk about a roller coaster ride over the last few weeks. We have had highs and lows of epic proportions. In the end, we will go back to relaxing. We will put up our own hay and maybe some lease ground yet. We might actually have time for some R&R this summer, instead of running wide open. The fish might not like it, but we will.

Looking back at a whirlwind last year and a half, I realized that we built a successful business. Our plans all worked as designed, our business model was good. Everything worked exactly as it should, save for one thing. Hired help.

While we are adjusting to the new normal, it helps to reflect on all of the good stuff that has happened. I guess that it can be considered a successful failure in some ways.

We won't be in the custom business, at least for now, but I know that the market is there for it. I proved my theory. Today, that is just going to have to be enough.

 

 

 

From Success to Failure. The Custom business