Reflections

By Sam Lawson

If you are thinking of starting your own business, wanting to grow your business, or getting into politics (on a local, state, or national platform), this book is a must for you. It is full of lessons that Sam has learned over his lifetime of experience that will help you make your own decisions as you move forward. Sam’s daughter, Jean-Marie, has been involved in business and politics her entire life. She ran for and became the Democratic nominee for the Commission of Agriculture for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He will take you through the business part of building and operating a political campaign and compare it to operating and building businesses. Finally, Sam will introduce you to many of the people he has known over his career and pass on what he has learned from them. The book is written to give you access to his many experiences, actual marketing documents, and tools you can adapt to your business (including a political campaign) and help you develop a philosophy that will lead you to a high level of success and remind you of what is really important in your life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635688085

Book preview

Chapter 1

Role of the CEO in small businesses and the Candidate in politics

In business, the CEO is the leader of the team. The CEO is the policy setter and then the leader out front that clearly states the goals and policies for the employees, the customers and makes the case on why these goals and policies are the correct ones to benefit both the employees and the customers. For a company to be a success, the employees must buy-in to the goals and policies and commit to adopt these goals that are both important and reachable and then policies that will make the company more successful, and therefore, to make the employee more successful in their individual lives. After this is done, there is a unified front of the CEO and the employees in selling the company to the customers to show them how their lives will be better off if they commit to support the company. This means making a clear case to the customers that it is in THEIR own best interests to support the company and their products and that they will be better off, more successful and happier if they support the company. It must always be WE and the reason must always show how the employees and/or customers will benefit if the plan is followed with 100% commitment.

For years, we told all of our employees, Our success in this business is dependent on each and every one of us! Both big things and small things. If you see a customer who needs assistance, then stop what you are doing and help. If you are walking through the building and see a shop towel laying on the floor, pick it up and put it in the proper place. It may only cost 50 cents but if we lose one towel per day, that’s $3.00 per week and $156.00 per year. That is $156.00 per year that we don’t have to make to break even. That means that the other profit we make on sales can go to the bottom line that will make our company stronger and allow us to do a better job of taking care of our employees, our customers and to do a better job of promoting the companies and their products that we represent." If you take care of the little things and have a clear vision that you have sold to the employees and they have bought in, then the big things will tend to take care of themselves.

It’s the same in politics. The Candidate is the leader of the team. The Candidate is the goal and policy setter and then the leader out front that clearly states the goals and policies for the campaign to the volunteers and any paid staff. Just as in business, it is critical that you spend a great deal of time and thought on any paid employees to make sure that they will be totally committed to the Candidate, the goals and policies and then the plans to accomplish these and not be so tied to their own ideas that they become a distraction to the campaign. A good test is, during the interview, to give a bumper sticker to each paid employee and ask if they will put the sticker on their personal vehicle. If they immediately take it, you know they are 100% on board. If they start stammering around, then look farther.

After the CEO or Candidate establishes and communicates the goals of the company/campaign, and the policies that will accomplish these goals, the next role is to employ any paid employees and/or outside consultants like lawyers, tax preparers and marketing companies. Depending on the size of the company, you might have all of these as outside or you might employee some of these as in-house employees. It is your job to identify which is best for each area of the company makeup and then to employ the very best you can afford in each critical area. In most companies there are departments or areas called sales and customer/product support. In our experience with Hartland Equipment, our John Deere Dealerships, we started with one store and had me doing the CEO position plus the roles of Sales Person, Sales Manager and Marketing Manager. We had measured and accessed our assets and I had the strong background in Management, People, Marketing and a history of keeping focus on the ultimate goal. With this in mind, I took the areas of my strength and then sought to employ people who would be very strong in the areas where I needed help. We hired a Parts Manager and a Service Manager and then, after assessing the market area and our business plan goals, we employed the support people needed in the Sales, Parts and Service Department. When my wife, Beverly, and I were discussing purchasing the dealership, she said she would be totally supportive of the venture and would do whatever she could to help make it profitable; except, she would prefer to not be involved in Employee Insurance/Benefits and Retirement Planning. But, because of her background in Human Resources and her great personality for caring for our employees, that they all picked up on, she took over Human Resources for the business. We then found a great lady who was the widow/partner of a previous John Deere Dealer who was an excellent accountant and business manager. The last ingredient was to hire a truck/delivery driver. I mention this separate since this person is personally on our customer’s farms or property more than anyone else in the dealership. And, they are there at the high and low of the customer’s day. Namely, the truck/delivery driver is on the property to deliver the new piece of equipment and can help go over the use of the new equipment with the new customer, or the driver is there to pick up a piece of equipment that has just failed and the customer might not be in the best of moods. So, this person is very important to customer relationships and we made sure that this person knew that this was an important part of the job.

There is a term called, Cost of Acquisition of a new Customer. This is critical for you to know. It is critical as you grow your business plus it is a great term for your employees to know so they will value how costly it is to replace a lost customer. Every customer is golden. No matter how much of a pain some might be. Before you discount that customer, look at how much it will cost you to replace that customer and if it is even possible. Just as in the bible verse that was the basis for the song, The Ninety and Nine, you have to always balance the effort to look for new customers with the focus to keep your existing customers happy and purchasing. I will qualify this statement with the absolute fact that you cannot keep customers who are abusive to your employees. I have had occasion to terminate customers who seemed to take great pride in abusing our employees and I always felt that we could not tolerate that.

Now, let me tell you the real secret of message success. Get your highlighter out so you can mark this paragraph. When we bought our first dealership, I had no mechanical background or aptitude. So, in tune with surveying our assets, we had to staff on the technical side. I was to be the front guy, the message person, the person who made the people want to do business with our dealership and give them comfort that we had the expertise covered to give them the technical support to keep their equipment going in the field.

Acknowledging to myself that I was not mechanically astute, I studied up on each major product that we sold and, along with input from our technical people, I adopted five key points about each one and learned them. So, when I was showing a customer a tractor or combine, I stressed the top five things that I knew about each machine (of course I did not point out this strategy to them). If they then asked questions that were not in these top five areas I had studied up on, I called in the technical people to join in the conversation. After these questions were answered, we then went for the close.

Besides showcasing the resumes of the support employees, we bought a couple of tractors and advertised a down-time guarantee. This guarantee said that if they bought a tractor from us, we would not only do the company warranty, but we would furnish them one of our tractors to use for free while we were working on their tractor. This was something that no one was doing at that time and took all of our competitors by surprise. And, it did not really cost us that much. But, it set us apart, and told our customers and potential customers that we cared about their businesses and understood how important downtime was to their operations. So, the message was clear for all to understand.

The secret that I was talking about is that you don’t have to, or even need to, deliver every single detail of your plans to solve the customer’s or voter’s problems or concerns. In fact, remember this, they won’t remember many of the details of what you tell them in a speech or communication. But, they will remember how they felt about you after the conversation. So, how you say what you say and how they relate to you is 10,000 times more important than the details of what you say. Remember, a customer will tend to only listen to the details if they have an immediate crisis and a voter will only listen to the details in the last few days before the election, if then. Look at the Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders campaigns. They identify areas where people have an emotional reaction and point out the area and promise to fix it. Then they move on to the next area. No details, just a promise with confidence and they do it in a way where a majority of the people like them and their message. Same with our dealerships. I have told people for years that we had to work much harder to sell the CaseIH tractor and equipment than when we switched to John Deere. John Deere equipment is much easier to market and to sell. But, the funny thing is that in most cases, it is no better, if as good, as CaseIH or even some of the other companies. But, their message is simple and it makes people feel good about themselves when they have a Nothing Runs Like a Deere.

I was standing at a local farmer’s retirement auction on his farm a few years ago, some thirty years after I was in the International Harvester business, and watched as his 4440 JD tractor brought $18,000 and the next tractor to sell was his IH 1086 tractor, that he had purchased from me, and it brought $3,500. Both sold for about the same price new in the late 70s. He turned to me and said, see what good friends we were. In my lifetime, I have seen many more people successful in sales and elected in politics because people just like them than the person with the best plans or product.

So, likeability and giving confidence are easily the top qualities that bring people to become customers or supporters. Identify the issues and then say just enough to give confidence that you understand the issue, you are committed to fixing the issue and that you have the support behind you to be successful on their behalf. From the time when our daughter Jean-Marie was small, I taught her this saying, The best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want!

It’s kind of like going to church. The churches that are growing across the country are the ones where you leave feeling better than you did when you got there. We had a preacher who constantly read his sermons and they were always about how we would go to hell if we did not toe the line. And, guess what, the congregation shrank. We then got a preacher, who was full of excitement, had a short outline and he preached the good news and how we should be happy and good neighbors. Plus, he got us out in time so we could get to the Sunday restaurants before the other churches and that saw the congregation grow and grow. Same with business or politics. Know what you want to say, talk to the audience with a happy personality and then ask for their support and set down.

As the spokesperson for the business or campaign, one thing you must learn well. It is called Earned Media. This is media coverage that is earned and not bought. This means, you do an event, have an interesting enough announcement to get news media to come and cover your announcement, you do interviews with the media or you endorse or get endorsed by a special person. The big thing you have to understand is that this Earned Media is FREE! You can actually do this by calling the newspaper reporter or radio or TV reporter and ask if you can come by and do an interview and tell them the subject so they will be interested in doing a story about this subject. If they buy in on the subject, then you get the Earned Media coverage. As the CEO/Candidate, you are the only one who can accomplish this.

You can do Press Releases and occasionally they will get put into the news but after you have reached out and made the effort to go to the reporter and give them a personal/exclusive interview, you will find that you will be much more successful in getting your press releases covered after that. After all, after they cover you, they now own a certain amount of buy in to you and your business/campaign.

Just always keep in mind, no matter how many consultants you have, how many people you listen to and how much you discuss the plans and policies to move forward, you are the CEO/Candidate and it is your name on the line so it is your responsibility to make the call and then unify the rest of the crowd behind your decision.

Chapter 2

Can your dream become a business?

Over the last fifteen years, I have served on the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board. This board was formed by the Kentucky General Assembly to administer the funds received from the major tobacco companies because of a suit brought by the Attorneys General of most of the states in the US. These funds were a settlement to help stop the flood of smoking-related suits that were popping up all over the place and were moving from an expensive nuisance to fear that they would bankrupt the tobacco companies. So, the largest cigarette companies made a settlement that paid literally billions to the states. Kentucky’s legislature formed the Kentucky Agriculture Development Fund to get half of these funds that came to Kentucky as their part of the settlement. This board was formed to direct these funds to help Kentucky’s Farmers to diversify away from growing tobacco and into other ventures that they could utilize to help make their farms to be profitable, help them to remain on their farms and for our rural communities to prosper. So, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars in this fund and earmarked for Kentucky Farmers and Kentucky Agriculture, I have had the opportunity, over these last fifteen years, to see and explore over 1,400 dreams and our role, as board members, was to determine the dreams that actually had an opportunity of becoming a business and then to help these dreams to become successful businesses.

The first things we looked for were:

1) Does the proposed business have a profit potential?

2) Does the applicant have a background that would allow them to manage this business?

3) Is there enough capital to fund a successful business?

4) Is there an existing market or can a market be developed for this product or service?

5) Is there a positive cash flow enough to fund the business operations for the long term?

Every business has to make a profit for it to continue to be a business. It would seems that this statement would be pretty self-evident but it is amazing how many applications we viewed that were a dream but had zero potential of ever making a profit.

There are all kinds of statistics available from government sites to help you do your due diligence. Due diligence is the research you need to do before you start making up your mind that you really want to move forward with your business idea. The first site I would go to is called the Bureau of Statistics. You can find out all sorts of information about demographics of the area you are looking to cover with your product. You will be somewhat amazed at all of the things that our government tracks. And, when you go to this site, you need to figure out which parts of this information will help you to make your decision. Then, if it is a go, you can use this same information to put together your business plan, marketing plan and, if you need financing for your project, your financing proposal package.

Here is an example of what you can put together from this information. This is a report that Southern States Cooperative did for our dealership stores. It looks real big time but it all came from this Bureau of Statistics.

I always suggest you do a Five Year Plan. People say, How can I project out five years? Isn’t that just a guess? Yes, this is true to some extent, but what it does is make you look out over five years to make you think through your plan. And, it just so happens that this five years is the timeframe when most small businesses fail. So, do the five year plan and really think through if this is reasonable, if it is possible, if this is really what you think you can accomplish. The Old Axiom of, If it won’t work on paper, it for sure won’t work in real life didn’t get to be an Old Axiom for nothing.

The first year of this five year plan should be done on a monthly basis. Yes, it is important that you do this monthly for many reasons. One is it gives you an opportunity each month to measure your progress and, if necessary, to make course adjustments in the plan before it gets out of hand. If you wait until the end of the year, it might be too late and you just might already be out of business. A monthly listing of projected income and expense accounts also gives you the information you need to project how much cash you need to have to start your business. We will discuss that later in this book. This lets you set financial monthly benchmarks so you can measure your actual progress against your plan.

Here is an Executive Summary of a Business Plan that we developed for Tango4. Tango4 was a company that contracted with Lawson Marketing to help them develop a dealer network across the corn belt of North America. This might give you an idea of what I am talking about.

Executive Summary of the Business Plan for Tango4, LLC, in North America

Background on Tango4, LLC

Tango4 is a U.S. Corporation owned by three successful businessmen from Argentina and a successful business person in the Louisville, KY area. Each has a successful business background and both are respected members of the business community. For several years, their Argentina companies were selling many dollars of replacement parts to CaseIH in North America along with the other major farm equipment companies. The buyers from Case approached them about bringing a distribution location to the U.S. since Case needed to be able to say that they were buying their parts in the U.S. To reduce their financial risk they pooled their funds and banded together to come to the U.S.A.

With advice from the World Trade Center of Argentina, they were put in contact with the World Trade Center of Louisville, KY. Louisville is very centrally located to all of the different parts of agriculture in the U.S. and Canada (except the West Coast states) and is the home and world headquarters for UPS Air. The Argentina businessmen found the owner of Pleasant Hill Farm Supply, who was married to a Spanish-speaking woman and was in the parts business just outside of Louisville. They invited him to join Tango4 as the US arm and distribution center. Tango4 selected Louisville as the site location for their distribution headquarters. They filed for corporate papers as Tango4, LLC, and worked to establish their distribution center.

After establishing their processes to distribute their parts from the Louisville location, they were approached by another Argentina company named Allochis to export their agriculture products to the U.S. and Canada through the Tango4 network. Allochis is well known across Argentina and Europe for their steel and aluminum corn heads and their draper grain platform. They had never approached the North American Market but felt that, with the network that Lawson Marketing was developing for Tango4, they were the correct vehicle to open this market for the Allochis products.

The decision was made to grow Tango4, LLC, from just a parts distribution operation to a full-fledged distribution operation and that the Allochis products, along with other products South American manufacturers built that they would distribute to the North American Market, and all of the equipment would be marketed under the Tango4 logo.

So, Tango4 is a US Corporation which is a distributor of Farm Equipment to a growing dealer base of established and financially strong farm equipment dealers. Tango4 will purchase the products and will be supported by the original manufacturers for warranty, product development, marketing and the other ways that are customary and usual. This overall plan was developed and proposed by Lawson Marketing to the principals of Tango 4 and, after approval, were the entity that was employed to implement the plan.

Marketing Plan

Tango4, LLC, contracted with Lawson Marketing, Inc. of Bowling Green, KY, to establish a North American Dealer Network and to handle the marketing to introduce and establish the Tango4 equipment product lines to the North American farmers. The goal was to identify the best possible dealers, especially ones with multiple locations, in the traditional corn-belt states and sign them up as Tango4 Dealers. These top dealers would introduce the products to the North American Farmers and handle the sale as well as to provide product support for the equipment to the farmers with back-up from Allochis through Tango4. As of this date in early 2014, Lawson Marketing has identified and signed 70 store locations, 60 in the U.S. from 22 owner groups and 7 in Canada from 2 owner groups. This is the group of dealers that will represent Tango4 for harvest year 2014. Lawson Marketing is currently working on over 100 other store locations and expects to have them signed for future harvest seasons as the Tango4 products prove themselves to these first dealers and their farmers, especially after Tango4 introduces their new draper head, which all of the dealers are anxiously anticipating.

The decision was made to bring in only enough corn heads to do the Farm Progress Show (2) in Iowa, (2) to the Farm Science Review in Ohio and the National Farm Machinery Show (1) in Louisville, KY, and then sell them to farmers who we could work with to track their satisfaction with the heads. This was successfully done in 2012. Then, in 2013, we were shooting for selling around 20 heads spread out over our dealer groups. We did sell 21 heads (19 in the U.S. and 2 in Canada.) This allowed us to get our dealers familiar with our corn heads, get our own comfort with the sales, but more importantly, develop the service support for our dealer network. If all goes as expected, we will open up the ordering program for 2014 to allow the dealers to order to their anticipated market demand. If we sign the additional dealers we anticipate plus these excellent dealers we already have, we should easily sell over 80 corn heads for the 2014 season. We will still monitor the dealer inventory closely to make sure all heads are going to retail, even if we need to transfer heads between dealers to fill a retail sale.

The marketing will consist of:

1) Showing the equipment at major farm equipment shows. In 2013 this was the Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Illinois; The National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, KY and the Farm Science Review outside Columbus, Ohio. In 2014 this will be expanded based on where the dealer network has evolved and which shows seem to have the maximum potential to generate and motivate dealers plus to show the equipment to farmers. We will participate in the Ontario, London Farm Show, with our dealer in Ontario.

2) Advertising in select farm equipment statewide periodicals in states where we have active dealers. These ads will promote the website of both Tango4 and Lawson Marketing. Social media will be used actively plus direct mailings to dealers and potential customers.

3) Brochures and in-store signage at all of the dealership stores

4) This would put Tango4 North American Heads sales in 2014 at approximately 25 heads. Unless we have a reliability problem or some other glitch along the way, this should be a minimum sales number in 2014 and sales in the out years could increase rapidly as the draper, tillage and UTV lines are added. Sales in excess of $2.5 million in 2016 would be expected, assuming we can support the delivery and infrastructure necessary to support these unit sales. As a distributor, we can control sales and grow as is prudent along the way.

This would be equipment sales but there are also the aftermarket parts sales to support wear and tear or