Welcome to the Si Farmer Podcast. Podcast where we talk farm and business marketing tactic strategy. You know, if it's farming or marketing or business, we'll probably talk about it here. And today's no different. The other day I was on the farm and I was working and I had something happen to me that, or happened to a piece of equipment that caused me a lot of time, effort, thinking to do it right and still get by without this piece of equipment or without this function on this piece of equipment. And then a couple days later, it happened again in a different situation, not farming, but in a, in part of my other job. And it caused me, again to do things different, think about'em different, to get the job done. Well, it made me better at both of those jobs cuz I had to think about them in a different way, though I've been doing'em the same way for, for, for a long time. But it made me think about them differently and it made me get better. Let's get into it. Today.

I have a love-hate relationship with marketing. Really, I've gotta do what all I

Wanna do is farm. Welcome to the Si Farmer podcast. If you wanna market your farm, farm-based business or craft food business directly to the consumer, this is the place for you. Welcome to the show. Today's podcast is sponsored by Little Tractor and Equipment Company. Now I've worked with these guys for years. These are great guys and they really care about the small farmer carry a lot of lines of products, tractors and lawnmowers and all kinds of stuff. But one of the things they carry that's really unique is they carry used coyote tractor parts. So if you run an older coyote and are looking for an engine or a transmission for, uh, an LB 1914 or something like that, check these guys out. Go to little tractor.com and click on the used parts tab. So when I started disk in a field the other day, I had about, I don't know, 70, 80, it was about 80, 80 or a hundred acres to disk. And they were in two different fields. Well, three different fields, but they, they're odd shaped. And so you gotta think about how you're going to work the ground because, you know, for whatever reason. Anyway, so I get in there and I get in, I make my first pass, and I'm used to going in and setting the auto steer on and man away I go. I get, I get my line set up, I run all of my, my rows. Well, I put my auto steer on and I start, you know, doing the other things that I'm doing, not watching where I'm going. And next thing I know, I'm out in the middle of the field and I look like, I look like I've let a three-year-old drive the tractor. So I stop, go back, start again. Auto steer, shuts off again, not a big deal. So I, you know, I work on, I do all the things I know to do that. I call John Deere and I get on the phone with them and they walk me through a bunch of different things that they know how to do, had to get into tech and all that kind of stuff. I'm sure you don't how to do that if you, if, if, if you use that type, this type of equipment anyway, still wouldn't work. So they, you know, they made a couple suggestions and so I, I kind of took their suggestions and then I went about the rest of my day. So I had to disk this field by hand and I have a lot of respect. I I, I forgot how tough it is to drive in a straight line. It's hard. You're going up and down hills and on the side hills and all that. But anyway, so, but I got better because I was doing it the old way. I, I was doing it a harder way, wasn't as efficient, but I got better at the job. And I, it, it reminded me of some, something somebody told me once years ago, well, a while back was, you know, sometimes it, you need to do it the hard way just to do it that way because it makes you better. And so later that, later that week, this week, last week, um, I was working in my day job and I was working with a piece of software. Well, the software quit working. Now I've used the same process forever. It makes things fast. I'm able to do things very quickly because I, I, I used this process and it stopped working. And so I had to figure out ways to work around this process. And you know what, I got better even after having done this for 25 plus years. I got, I I, I know I sort of went back to school and did it better. And it, it's a good piece of life advice sometimes better to do it the hard way once in a while. Now I know in business we have to be efficient and we've gotta do things the right way every time. But if we want to get better at a process, sometimes it's, well, almost always, it's helpful to go about that process in a different way to achieve the same result. You know, there's a, I don't know if you guys have ever heard of what's a Windsor chair? Now, this was a type of chair. There's, you know, there's a, if you talk to the purist, there's Windsor chairs and jacobian chairs. Don't ask me why I know this, but I do. Now, a jacobian chair is very easy to make and almost always fails at the same place in the chair. As you sit down, the act of sitting, the, the diagonal forces going into the chair force this chair to fail at the same place every time over years. These chair, the chairs fail. However, with a Windsor chair, if they're, they're truly made Windsor, they, as they get used more and more, the joints tighten up and the chair becomes more solid. Very, very neat process. So when I was a, a young man, I took a vacation one time. My wife and I wanted the only, you know, we didn't take a lot of vacations through and, you know, but we took a vacation and we went up to a place in New Hampshire and I spent a week, brought all my tools with me, and I spent a week with some guys making Windsor chairs. Very, very cool. The math, the precision, the time it takes to make one the right way, very, very cool. But the thing I learned was I got better at every part of my woodworking because I did that and I did it. I mean, we did it the hard way. There was not a power tool in the shop. Everything was done with draw knives and plane, you know, hand planes and, you know, uh, um, you know, hand carving the seats and all of this type of work was done by hand. But when I got back, got back to my woodworking shop, which was sort of my hobby back then, I got better at every part of woodworking because it caused me to think about the process a little differently. And it's a, again, you know, sometimes taking a process as you do over and over and over, we tend to get lazy. I do, you know, if you do the same thing every day, you tend to get lazy. I noticed it just this morning. I got up and sort of, I got up and I did, went through my morning routine and I get the coffee out. I get the coffee started in the morning and I set out my, the, my wife likes a, a certain type of creamer in her coffee. So I set, I set the creamer out, now the box is the same shape and it was in the same place in the refrigerator. And I grabbed her, her box, you know, this little cardboard box of a thing that holds her creamer. And it was the wrong stuff because I got used to the box shape and everything. It was just my morning routine. I did it and I put the wrong creamer out and I've, you know, not that big deal. She doesn't get, you know, she was like, yeah, hey, you grabbed the wrong one. I, you know, not a big deal, but it was, you know, I do the same thing every morning. I got lazy. I didn't look at the label, I just grabbed the box and put it out and made my coffee and, and set her coffee up to get made. And, but that, that repetition sometimes causes us to get lazy. In looking at the details in the process, and I've started doing this from time to time, is do it the hard way. Go back to the beginning and start and figure out a different process that does not use the same tools or uses the tools differently to accomplish the same end goal with the same quality that you're used to having. I've told you, uh, I've probably said it on here and for years I was a, I was a music engineer, producer, engineer, and a television. A producer en you know, engineer and editor and, you know, I still do some of that. And vocal compression, getting a voice compressed and sounding crisp and clear and clean can be a difficult process. Now, because I've done this for so long, I was mixing a project just the other day for somebody and a piece of software failed on me. And I thought, well go about this a different way. And I started looking at this track that I was working on and I went about the vocal compression in a different way. And again, same result, I got better. It's 25 years, been doing it the same way I've been doing it and getting better and getting better. You know, you, you do this, but I got lazy cuz I have a process that works. It speeds my workflow up. Boom, I got lazy. But I went back to the drawing board and you know what happened? I got better. Seems to be a recurring theme here is I got better. And I, I, I look at it and I almost hate the fact that I've let myself get lazy at some things. Driving the tractor, I was out again, auto steer went off. Well, driving a straight line shouldn't be that difficult. But you know what? I hadn't done it in a in years go out. I get my lines set up, I set my, my field barriers, all that stuff. And I just start going, well, driving a straight line was tough. I I didn't do it well because, you know, I set the auto steer and I go about doing other things. I'm watching the disc or the tool, whatever got behind me when I did it, I got better getting, you know, and that process. I like the process of getting better at things. Job I've done for 25 years, I got better just this week. And that's a, that's a a thing we should all strive for. We should all get up every day. It's a little piece of life advice that we should do. We all get up and if you have one goal for the day, get up and be a better person today than you were yesterday. I think that's a noble goal. That is a noble and maybe it's, maybe you're already the perfect person. I don't know. I'm not bud. I like getting better and I've sort of made this a habit of trying every once in a while. Not all the time. I have processes that work very, very well in, in things. I focus on doing it a different way. I do it the hard way sometimes just because it forces me to get better. Sometimes. It's like Edison said, I didn't, you know, I didn't, I didn't fail. I learned how not to do it. Sometimes that's what you learn, but you learn something. And if we get up and we, we do that every day, well, we get better. And I would advise everybody or recommend to everybody to do this. There's something you have done for years and years and years and it works perfectly great. That's fantastic. That makes us, you know, we've gotten good at what we do and we've repeated this process and it works every once in a while. Do it different. Force yourself to do it differently because it's going to, for, it's going to require you to think about the process differently. It's gonna require you to refine how you think about that process. Whether it's the beginning, the middle, the end of the process, whatever it is, but doing it differently, doing it in a way, using a different tool, using a different, to try to achieve the same or better result, forces us to get better. And hey, if our goal is to get better every day, whether it's to be better people, to be a better father or husband, wife, son, daughter, whatever our goal is, you know, get up. And we try to be better every day. And one thing that I have started to do in the past couple of years is from time to time, do it different force myself to do it different because it does require me to think about things differently. And again, I'm not trying to change the result necessarily for, you know, a job I've done for 25 plus years. I know the result I get is good enough, it's good enough, but we can always get better. And doing it differently forces us to think about that. So, you know, whatever the process is where the you're, you know it, heck, you're making waffles. Use a different mix. If you're making pancakes from a box mix, use a different mix. Learn how to judge the, the, the oven temperature, the frying pan temperature better, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, doing it a little differently forces us to think about that thing different. And we're trying to get better. And I'll, I'll roll this back around to marketing. Um, you know, marketing, there are very few hard, fast rules. So when we're marketing our, our farms, you know, you can talk to a hundred different professionals and they're all gonna give you different advice. There's, there's gonna be some consistency, some things that they're all gonna tell you, yeah, this is what you need to do. But there's very few hard and fast rules because every business is different, every process is different, every product is a little bit different. So the way in, you know, when we're marketing something, the way we, we do things, you don't necessarily want to change what you're doing. But from time to time, take a beat, go about it a little bit differently. It's gonna help you learn. It's gonna help you learn about your, your customers. It may help you learn about your product, about your packaging, about your, you know, whatever it is you're trying to do. It's gonna help you learn a little bit and be able to make some refinements maybe in what you do. Again, you know, if it's not, if it's not broke, don't fix it is great advice sometimes. But if it's not broke, not broken, my wife would correct my grammar there. It's not broken and you don't fix it. The other thing that will never happen is it will never get better. I mean, I'm sure there's some really rare edge case where it could get better over time, but in the vast majority of cases, if it's not broken and you don't fix it, it will never get better. It will stay doing the same thing until it's broken and you have to fix it. So whether that's, whether that's a process, whether it's a tool, whether it's a, you know, whatever it is we do, you know, driving down the road, I've gotten, my wife got a new truck last year and we drove, we went to, uh, San Antonio, Texas, talked about it in a podcast a week or two ago. L uh, love San Antonio, but I noticed she has a deal on there, on her truck. I drive an old pickup, 20 years old I think, but it has adaptive cruise control. So you drive, take your foot off the gas, your car is in cruise control and it maintains the proper distance, whatever distance you set between your, your car and the car in front of you. So, and during this trip, it was a long trip. It was what, 15 hours I used it. But the one thing I've noticed after getting back off that trip, man, I got you. You get lazy. And so, you know, sometimes these tools that we use that make our lives easier, made that drive. Man, it was great. I didn't have to worry about it. I set my cruise control, somebody cut in front of me, it slowed down. If the car sped up, it sped up, you know, it was great, but it made me a little bit lazy in my driving and I don't like to get lazy in my driving. I, I like to be a good driver, want to get in my trucks. It has cruise control. Doesn't know, it's not fancy cruise control, but it has cruise control. But get better at driving and, and I, you know, I know it made me lazy. So when I get in my truck, I have to become a better driver again. Again, we're still driving in a straight line. We're still going to the same places, but we're trying to, you know, when we do things over and over and over again, repetition, repetition, repetition. It's also a place that minor change can force us to make big mistakes. Driving could be a big one. Again, I was mixing a cut for guy. I don't ton of that. I don't do a ton of that work anymore, but I was mixing some stuff the other day and I've done it the same way for a long time. And I took a shortcut because I know it works and got all the way through it. And this, I had this software issue and I had to stop and go back to the drawing board, bring up a whole new set of tools, go through the process again, and it made me better. And I, you know, we tried to get better with everything. You know, again, we try to get better every day. Whether that's him being a person, sometimes you see the same person day after day after day. I've got a good friend that I, you know, he comes by the farm about every day, every, you know, every other day. And it's easy to get in the habit of not keeping up with the nices. Hey, good morning, how are you doing today? What are you up to? You see'em all the time. You, you know, it's easy to get lulled into that. Hey, and forget, we don't even as when we're around a personal life, we don't always know what's going on in the rest of their lives. So remembering those ides can be well dice. But in our goal of trying to get better, now think about this. Pick a process in your life that you do every single day and try to improve your process of doing that. Whatever it is, it does not matter. It doesn't matter what the thing is. It's not important what it is. But in making something better, in trying to think about it, it's going to cause you force you to think about the entire process differently. And I hear, I hear this all the time. This is the, the quote that, and, and sometimes it drives me batty. We've never done it that way. Why would we do it that way? We've never done it because we've always done it that way. Really. I have, I have heard this more times, you ask, well, you know, what are you trying to accomplish? And they tell me and, and they say, but we've never done it that way. We always do it this way. And definition of insanity. If you've ever heard the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result, well there you go. I mean, you know, why? What are you trying to accomplish? Well, we want to get more sales or we want to get more engagement with our customers. Well try this. Well, we've never done it that way. Okay? That's why we're gonna try it. Trying new things, trying them in different ways, different approaches, forces us to think about that entire process. Whatever that process is, forces us to think about it a little bit differently when we think about it to look differently. When we come at a problem from a different direction, we most of the time come up with a different solution or at least a better understanding of the problem. Even if you can't solve the problem, you get a better understanding of that problem and the, the, the root causes. And that's important. So I'm gonna leave you today with this advice. Do something different. Go out, pick something you do all the time. Go about doing it a different way. Do come at the problem from a different direction, think about it differently and you're gonna get better at it. With that, good luck and God bless.