Welcome to the Si Farmer podcast, podcaster. We talk farm and business marketing tactic strategy. If it's farming or marketing, we're probably gonna talk about it on this show. And today is no different. I was sitting at one of my favorite places to eat lunch, local v f w, lot of great characters in there. And we were sitting having lunch and guy I was sitting next to, we were watching, watching, oh, it was a, a raw hide, raw hide on TV was up there and commercial came on. And this older guy looks at me, I say older, geez, I, I'm getting up there in that crowd. Uh, older guy looks at me and he says, that's what's wrong with our country today. And I couldn't, I could not argue with him. Couldn't. It was a predatory business. And if you listen to this podcast, you know how I feel about those type of businesses, but got me to thinking, and you know, I know you're probably gonna say, John, that's dangerous for you, but got me to thinking I did it anyway. It got me to thinking that it doesn't have to be that way. And I'm gonna ask you to do something. Think about something in a way that you're gonna, when I first tell it to you after the intro here, you're gonna, you're, you're gonna say, well, that's just wrong. But bear with me because I'm, I, I promise you it comes from a good place and it can help you, help your business and others. Let's get into it.

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 lawn mowers 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, like I said, we were sitting there having, having lunch and, and this guy says, that's what's wrong with, with our country today. And I couldn't argue with them. I just couldn't because it was a predatory business and they were selling a product service, whatever you wanna call it. They were selling it in a way that, you know, was wrong. I mean, it just, in my op, my humble opinion, it was just wrong. I mean, predatory businesses are, I just, I just don't like them. Not even little bit. But I got to thinking, and again, dangerous, but it doesn't have to be that way. I had a dear friend when I was just starting out in the world, uh, and he said he, he was a very successful entrepreneur, started many, many businesses that the vast majority of them actually became successful. Um, and very successful. I mean, he was, he was very good at what he did. But he and I were sitting around having dinner one night, and he, and, and I mean, he was, back then, I was probably in my early twenties and he was already in his fifties, but he sat with me and he told, and he told me something that stuck with me, that has stuck with me my entire career. And he said, capitalism doesn't have to be bad. There is such a thing as benevolent capitalism. And that's where we do, where we accomplish several goals. So first the business has to be successful and profitable. Well, I'll say first it has to do no harm. So we don't wanna be a predatory business. It, it has to be profitable, successful. We can do things in such a way that the business can be generous and in return for all of that, we are successful and we are able to do good and be fulfilled as people. And you know, I sat with him at this dinner and I was like, you know, he just hit what I believed, though, didn't know what I believed to be true. And I have run every business I've ever been involved with, uh, I try to run under those simple guidelines. We have to be profitable, we have to do good or, or, you know, do no harm. I mean, it's okay. You know, I won't say, uh, it's okay to sell goofy products that nobody needs those. So it's not like we're helping the world, but maybe we're making people smile. I worked in the entertainment industry for, for a long time, and I always believed what we did made people smile. And if it just gave'em a break from their day, just gave'em a little break from their day that helped them help them in some way. I, you know, I felt like I was doing something good. But I have always, as I've started my own businesses, I've always tried to start businesses and run businesses in such a way that first do no harm, sort of like doctors first do no harm. Second, be successful, so profitable. Third, we have to be benevolent and good. And we have to, you know, try to help. So we, we find, find challenges in the world and we try to solve'em, and in return we become fulfilled and complete people partially. I mean, there's other things that go into being a, a fulfilled and complete person, you know, that. But that's sort of the goal. Now, how do we do that? And I'm gonna ask you to think selfishly, I know you hear that word selfish, and you go, oh, that's bad. And it is, and it can be. But the way I'm gonna ask you to do it, it's not. And you're gonna see why in just a second. So we can market a business, and it's not, and now don't get me wrong, this is not the only way that you should be marketing. If you're marketing you're farm, you should be doing a lot of things. We've talked about'em on the show. You should make sure your, your listings are right so that people can find you. You should be, you know, you should have at least a minimal, at least a minimal presence on social media. You should have, you know, so you, you should be doing other things. But one facet of your marketing can be charitable. Now, you'll have to talk with your tax advisor and all this on what the best way for you to do it is. But you first have to start with yourself. I mean, your business. Be selfish. Be selfish for your business. Look for organizations, charities, places in your community that need help. If there's not one there, and there's a lot of, there's a lot of need for it, and it fit, you know, and it sort of fits with what you're trying to do, start it. But you have to think selfishly from your business' point of view now. And that's where y that's where we can get, we can get too selfish. So remember now we have to jump around. Um, you know, you hear me talk about it a lot, walk around the counter and look at it from the other side. So now, you know, after you've found, you know, where you think there's a problem and there, or a hole in the community or something you as a business can do to help. Now you have to walk around and think about it from, and I start, I, I, when I, when I do this, I think about the people that we're trying to help from their point of view. Are we actually helping or are we causing them more problems? So we think about it from their point of view, then it, they're working with a charitable organization. Maybe it's Habitat for Humanity, or it's your local food kitchen, or it's, you know, uh, uh, the Red Cross, or it's St. Jude or somebody like that. Think about it from the, the charity's point of view. How do you help them? And you'll find that if you make that circle all the way around, if you make that circle that you answered there, there's, there's been. And if you, if the, if it, it comes out positive for the, the people that are, that you're trying to help, if it's good for them, and you have to think about it, you have to truly try to put yourself in their shoes, then you have to think about it from the charity's point of view. Are you good for the charity or the organization that you're, you're trying to, or, or you're, maybe you're creating one. But we're trying to find a place that, that helps all the way around. And when we do that, we find that it helps us personally as well. It makes us better people. It makes us, you know, it makes it, I, I'm a big one for, you know, being able to sleep at night. I wanna be able to live my life in such a way that when I put my head on the pillow, I go right to sleep. And that's, some people say, oh, that's hard to do. Eh, you know, it is. And it, it, it, it isn't, it isn't not hard to do. Let's do the right thing, try to do the right thing every day. But we can be marketers and think we have to think that way. So when you get all that done, so you know, you, you've gone out in the community and you've found this need and you've started to serve this need, well, it helps your business, it helps the community, it helps, obviously you're, you're, you're trying to solve a problem. And in trying to solve that problem, you have helped yourself. I mean, you, you've heard it probably your whole life. Giving is the, is the best gift. So thinking selfishly is sort of this, you know, you can call it selfish. You can say putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and thinking about it from their point of view. I, I like to put myself in that and think from, from from the other, other person or the other organization, how does this impact them? And when I do about it, I try to, and this will sound, you know, this sound kind of goofy. I try to internalize it so that I'm actually trying to think, well, if I was in charge of this organization, does this really help me? Or does this, does this become a distraction to what I'm trying to do? And so I'm thinking about it as, as me. And so that's why I say we have to be a little selfish in saying that because we're putting ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to think like they, they do. And when we come around, if we've answered all the questions and we've checked all the boxes that yeah, we're helping the people, yeah, we're helping the organization, yes, it helps our business. And in the end, I'm fulfilled. You're fulfilled, man. Then let's, I mean, talk about a buzzword, win-win, then you have a great opportunity to do good. And my friend years ago would look for those. And that's sort of, you know, in a nutshell, that's sort of the, the advice he gave me and his businesses thrived. And it wasn't totally because of that. Don't get me wrong, you can, I, I don't believe that you can just go out and do charitable works and be and, and be responsible to the overall marketing goals of your company. But it should absolutely be one of the core things that you do. Take a sip out of the mug here, slug out of the mug. The, you know, when we run businesses, it is so easy, especially in farming, where you not only have to run to run the business, but you gotta run the business. And yesterday, for me was just a, a great example. We're, we're working on equipment and we had all the tractors lined up, and we had guy, I mean, you know, we had people had guy in there cleaning everything, cleaning the cabs out, washing windows, and then we're also going through fluids and we're, you know, getting ready to check all of our grease points and all of that kind of stuff. And at the same time, I had mechanics coming down from, uh, about an hour and a half north work on a piece of equipment. Plus I had people asking, you know, asking to buy hay. So I'm trying to market the company and, and I mean, the day is just like that every day. And it's easy to get bogged down in the weeds and just, you know, it's sort of, oh, I just gotta get through today. I just gotta make it. But every once in a while we have to step back, find a day, find a, you know, a rainy day, and just step back and think about the bigger picture of our business and what do we want to accomplish. And I like just my personal opinion. I like to be able to check all those boxes off that have done something good that I've helped some people. I've run my business profitably because can't stay in business if you're not profitable. And in the, in return for that, I think, I think I have become a better person for doing that. And marketing a business should be partially about that. Now I say, uh, you know, I've been in involved in businesses that the whole purpose of the business is to start this, this, this shell of a business, build it to a certain point and sell it. You know? And that there are guys I know that are very successful doing this. They have this idea, they get funding. They, they build this business. Um, good friend of ours is a columnist for Inc, Inc. Magazine. And he, that, he did that for a long time. That's what he wanted to do. He wanted to build businesses, make them successful, and then sell them off. Uh, farming's not like that. And you know, that, I mean, you know, I guess there, there are some opportunities like that. But, you know, farming is a long term, long term. I don't think about building my farm to sell it off. I think about building the farm to have to live the life that I wanna live, like doing the things I do. And so, you know, we can't think, you don't think about just today, we have to think about tomorrow and the next day and the next week and month and year and five years and 10 years. So how do we, you know, when we're, and, and that comes back to the marketing side, we have to think about that in our marketing too, because we can't just think about tomorrow, the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year. We have to think more long term. Now, I understand you're gonna get in times where your cash crunches and you've got to get products sold or you have to do something. And that tho those type of marketing, you know, solving that problem is a, is its own challenge. So don't, don't, don't lump what we're talking about today in with that specific challenge. You know, we used to hear Kmart, uh, the old retail store did the one day sale or the, you know, the blue light special. Well, they were trying to solve a problem in that moment. What I'm talking about here is a longer term, longer payoff. If you want to think about it in return, you know, a lot of guys I talked to in the marketing side wanna talk about the return on investment. And if you look at that, doing this process is a long term benefit. And part of the benefit is you're gonna be a better person. But part of the benefit is long, it's a longer term play. And because we're, what we're doing is, and we'll talk selfishly for a second, cuz you know, that's the way I started this. For our business, we want people to identify our business in a way that makes them comfortable. And I'm talking about this purely selfishly for the business. We, we do good things, okay? So you, you do these charitable things. You, you do this, you, you tell people that you do it. People know that you are involved. But the return on that is they identify your company with these positive acts that you do. They identify your employees. I mean, they identify your, your team becomes invested in these projects. If you do it well, and then you personally reap the reward, if not only your business growing a little bit, but also the, the personal side of it. So that's the selfish side of, uh, of this. When we talk about what we're going to do, then we have to think just a little bit. You know, we go back and we, we look at that process again. Did we do good? And this is where, you know, I all, uh, everything we do in marketing is a guess. At first we learn, we get better at guessing because public opinion changes, uh, strategies, everything. You know, it's this river you're trying to navigate. But one of the biggest things you can do is after you've done, say, your year of this charitable project that you're working on with your business, after you've done it, sit back and go through the same exercise again, but ask the diff the next question, which is, you know, at first we thought about selfishly from the, the, the, the problem that needs to be solved from that point of view, is this gonna help? Now the question is, did it help? Did you solve a problem or start down the path of solving a problem? Did you create an organization or did it get better? Did the organization you're working with get better? If there's not one, did the, you know, did the process get better? And did it help your business? And did you feel good about yourself for doing it? You know, that's that evaluation process that you sort of have to go through in every facet of marketing. Whether, you know, if you bought an ad, well, you bought an ad on your local TV station, oh, great ad you know, you, you worked on the creative and you, you got your ad out there and your ad ran for however long it was gonna run. When it's done, one of the next things you should do is evaluate it. Did it work? Did you gain the, the, uh, the return on investment that you expected? Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But this is the evaluation process. And when we're doing this process of, you know, looking at how to do this, uh, charitable side where we're talking about everybody in this circle should win, we have to go back and ask our, ask ourselves that same question again. Did they win? You know, you hear charities, um, there's a website, I wish I think of it, but they rank charities on the amount of money that comes in that actually goes out to the people they're trying to help. And you know, there are some charities that bring in an absolute ton of money and only a little bit of money gets to the places where it's supposed to get because they're paying abor, uh, exorbitant salaries and they're paying, you know, the, their, they've got fancy offices, stuff like that. So, you know, that's part of the evaluation process when you go through and you ask. But the, the whole evaluation is did we help and did it help? Did we help the, the, the problem? Did we help make the problem better? Did we help, did our community get better? Did our business get better? Did we get better? And when we ask ourselves all of those questions, if it came back, yes, you know what, do it again if it came back, no, this is, go back to the drawing board and do the same exercise again. I promise you, this is not a bad, this is a good thing. And you may not get it right in the first time. And it's okay. It is okay. And you know, so I, I'm gonna leave you with that. I hope, I hope this helped because I, I'm, I am trying to answer this question every day, which is, how can we do run our businesses in such a way that we help our business, help our community, and in return become better people? With that, good luck. God bless.