Trevor Thiessen, President of Redekop Manufacturing shares how he beat the rat sweats and set big goals and achieved them for the future of the company. This episode highlights Trevor’s dedication to traditional agricultural values and his love for the land. Dan and Trevor engage in a conversation centred on a farmer-first mentality, where Trevor's passion for farmers shines bright.
A sales rep phones his manager, worried. He has just stood in front of twenty farmers who together represent about half a million dollars of his annual sales, and told them not to buy. Two dry years, too much nitrogen still in the ground, the product would not pay. The company's response was to celebrate it.
Trevor Thiessen spent more than two decades in agricultural biologicals before buying a Saskatchewan manufacturer in his forties. This is a conversation about what he learned on somebody else's money, and what changed when it became his own.
What's Inside
- Why not getting the banking job he trained for was the best thing that happened to him
- The long, unglamorous history of biologicals, including a 1912 sales manual priced at the same dollars per acre the same product sells for today
- What went wrong when they scaled a product before testing it in real field conditions, and what farmers had to do about it
- Buying a business two years after fire destroyed its production facility, and what the first three years actually looked like
- The audacious five-year goal they set for a demoralized team, why the number was never the point, and how long it actually took
- Harvest weed seed control explained plainly: three streams through a combine, why the weed seeds ride in one of them, and what it costs per acre
- The chaplain they hired while they were still broke, and the phone call that proved it was the right call
- What twenty years of selling to farmers on four continents taught him about what the job actually is
Connect with Trevor:
Website: redekopmfg.com
Facebook: redekopmfg
Twitter: redekopmfg
Youtube: MAVstrawchopper
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