“This is a business, and it is run every day as a business. We don't have farming to support it. We don't sell seed corn to support it. We are precision, and that's it. If we don't support our customers, we are immediately out of business because that's all we do. That really resonates with [customers].”
— Nate Kelson, Salesman, Jenner Precision
Transparency and relationships built on trust have led to a 13-year trend of steady growth for Jenner Precision in Fairbury, Ill. Jenner Precision, Precision Farming Dealer’s 2022 Most Valuable Dealership, is a largely aftermarket business that’s part of Case IH dealer Jenner Ag.
In this episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast, you’ll hear excerpts from a more than 2-hour conversation with Bryan Fehr, manager of Jenner Precision, salesman Nate Kelson and precision support specialist Andrei Hildenbrand about the practices making their business successful.
Listen in as they explain the values that form the foundation of Jenner Precision’s success, how they’re navigating supply chain shortages, their service package offerings and how they sell customers on the need for service packages, and more.
Full Transcript
Michaela Paukner:
Welcome to the latest episode of a Precision Farming Dealer podcast. I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Precision Farming Dealer. New episodes of this series are available wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to get an alert when upcoming episodes are released. Transparency and relationships built on trust have led to an impressive 13 year trend of steady growth for Jenner Precision in Fairbury, Illinois. Jenner Precision, Precision Farming Dealer's 2022 most valuable dealership, is a largely aftermarket business that's part of Case IH dealer Jenner Ag. Executive editor Kim Schmidt and I visited Jenner Precision to dive into the practices making their business successful. In today's episode, you'll hear excerpts from our more than two hour discussion with Bryan Fehr, manager of Jenner Precision, salesmen Nate Kelson, and precision support specialist Andrei Hildenbrand. Bryan starts this off after Kim's question, followed by Nate, and then Andrei later in the conversation.
Kim Schmidt:
How would you guys describe your core precision mission as it relates to customers, employees, and revenue growth?
Bryan Fehr:
The four core values. So the these are Jenner objectives. The BRIDGE, the B is for bond. We want to build a bond, whether that's internal customer or an external customer. And then we want to recruit wins. So when we have a big win, we want to talk about it, and we want to keep them going. And involve knowledge is asking other people. There are some people that've been at Jenners for 25 years, so there. And then drive to a line would be everybody works together as one, we have one goal of where we want to get to.
Bryan Fehr:
And then give gratitude. Tell people thanks. So I mean the biggest thing there is if we send out RTK fees, I'll send them maybe in a text and I'll put in there, "We thank you for your business. We really appreciate it." That goes a long ways because customers appreciate that we appreciate what they do, and that's internal the same way. And then endorse value, believe in and show that our stuff's of value. So that's the bridge, and then RISE is the reduce, improve, simplify, and environment. So that's Jenner as a whole. That is what everybody is trying to do every day.
Kim Schmidt:
Whether that's with someone in the building or a customer.
Bryan Fehr:
Yeah.
Nate Kelson:
And they can tell when an employee is bought into a company. I mean you can tell that. When they show up on the farm, they can tell, like with me, I'm not the brightest crayon in the box on Ag at all, but they know that he believes in the company he works for, he believes in the service techs that support it. The people from Harristown would come to the farm meetings and they said, "Well, who are all these people? We've never seen any of these people at our farm meetings before." And it's because we got creative on prospecting, wouldn't you say?
Bryan Fehr:
Yeah.
Nate Kelson:
And there were people coming in where there was a couple of meetings where I would say two thirds or three fourths of the people in that room had never done business with Jenner before. And it's just creative prospecting. And I'm not saying we've sold all them guys something, but they're showing up. And so we're willing to try new things. And COVID's put a little bit of a crunch on that. I mean I just don't jump into a combine randomly like I used to, and I'm hoping we get past that, but we just try to get creative in the prospecting side. That helps growth. It is good to have a relationship with the same customers, but if you want growth, you got to pull a few more in. And the technology world's nice because it always expands, but sometimes there's a year where I'm just not going to sell this guy something because he's pretty well set up for the year. If I'm going to be straight honest with him, he's set up.
Kim Schmidt:
Yeah, he doesn't have anything that he needs to change [inaudible 00:04:10].
Nate Kelson:
Right, in two years, three years, yes. But this particular year, I need to be finding somebody else.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
I think a lot of the cold calling has, for the most part, gone down to a minimum because just because you don't sell somebody something doesn't mean you can't talk to them. Because if you know that customer really well, he's going to say, "Hey, call my guy. I know him for the last six years. Call my guy, he knows what he is doing." So then there's your new sale.
Kim Schmidt:
What do your service packages look like?
Andrei Hildenbrand:
We basically have a basic and an advanced plan. And the basic covers phone support, and some extended hours into Saturday, and eight o'clock PM type of stuff, being more available after five o'clock. And then the advanced one, you pay more dollars and you get one free inspection basically, but you also get the same hours, the phone support, you get discounts on hourly service labor, discount on parts. They're our service first customer. We go to them and bypass the general people.
Kim Schmidt:
Right.
Bryan Fehr:
What Andrei's talking about is when we have a guy that buys something and we're supporting it past two years, then we'd like them to be on a maintenance plan so we can continue to give them support. The biggest thing is there's not enough hours in the day for these guys to answer the phones, and so if we want to continue to add people, we have to charge for that service.
Kim Schmidt:
However many percent who don't have one of the packages, if they call, are you charging them for phone support then?
Bryan Fehr:
Yes. The biggest thing is everybody's struggling right now in the service tech world. These guys are becoming more and more valuable every day, and other dealers are figuring that out too. So we're going to have to charge for it if we want to keep these guys around in this economy.
Michaela Paukner:
How are you convincing the customers that the service plan is beneficial to them?
Nate Kelson:
Precision planting says if you're sitting on the [inaudible 00:06:09] for ... What was it, an hour? It's $3,300. I mean it's very expensive, two farmers to sit during a good weather window. And so if they can hit the field and feel confident, it's not the stuff doesn't break, but that equipment is ready to go and they can get a good start going, they're going to pay the money. But if they got somebody's coming out with a checklist and they're like, "Yeah, your planter looks good. Here," there's a lot of difference between that and somebody's pulling off gauge wheels, checking things out, spacing stuff. So that's where Andrei, he sells that. And as a salesman, I keep my hands out of it a lot of times. And I say, "This is the people that will take care of you," and I put a ton of trust in them. And the customer reads that too, that I know this person will take care of you, and you need to let them on your farm and let them work with you, and that means paying a service plan. So it's a team effort.
Kim Schmidt:
What would you say are the biggest challenges the precision team's facing right now?
Bryan Fehr:
I mean the biggest challenges is product, getting product. I have never been a guy to go out and order a bunch of inventory. We've been very fortunate with Ag Leader, Precision Planting, Yetter, Raven, whoever we worked with, it was on time. On time delivery. You order it, you had it in three to five days. And so this has been a big change for me because I've never played that game where we're going to go out and order $700,000 of inventory and hope to sell it. Hope is not a plan. We've had to do some creative things. I mean in December, we're ordering fall product. And the biggest thing on that is so if this thing ever does flush through that you don't have a glutton of bad inventory. Because that's the problem with precision is in the precision technology, everything's changing so fast.
Nate Kelson:
Pretty obsolete in three years.
Bryan Fehr:
And so that's the biggest thing that we're working through. We've got some areas that we're maybe better than some other dealers, and we're tweaking some other areas to get some product. We're fortunate on that side. And then it's just trying to look out ahead, but it was our forecasting and what we do is a great game. We're doing it all the time.
Kim Schmidt:
With what you're ordering for fall, are you ordering more than you typically would so that you have it or how have you changed?
Bryan Fehr:
I'm saying okay, I know we need this many of this, and we've sold this many, and we're going to do this many. And then hopefully we can do some trading. We've traded quite a bit of precision stuff to get some stuff we needed.
Kim Schmidt:
Okay.
Nate Kelson:
With other dealers.
Bryan Fehr:
With other dealers.
Nate Kelson:
And what's also changed is we have always tried to order some stuff during the programs, a little extra, but Yetter is telling us for fall product, which is going to start to be made late spring, early summer, they're only going to start making it until then, they say if you don't have order by January 1st, forget it. Well, that's different. Before, it's one thing, it's like well maybe we get a little more margin if we take the risk and order a little of this, and we're pretty sure we can sell it so we'll go ahead, and put some money on our inventory, and take that risk, and we'll get a little.
Nate Kelson:
What Yetter are saying is you don't order by January, and farmers usually think about ... One of these products we sell, Devastators, they think about this product late July is when they even start to think about it. And I'm going to farmers and telling them, "If you don't have this order by January, forget it." And they're going, "What? We think about this stuff in July." And so that's really changed for us in a way as far as how much do you get? Because they're going to think about it, but how many of them are going to think about it? There's a lot more risk.
Bryan Fehr:
It's a whole different ball game and a whole different world. We're fortunate enough, once again, that we have an owner than understands.
Michaela Paukner:
Before we continue the conversation, I'd like to invite you to the upcoming Dealership Minds Summit in Iowa City, Iowa, July 26 through 27. This two day dealers only conference offers knowledge-packed general sessions, panels, round table discussions, networking, and more. Mark your calendars for July 26th through 27th and register online at dealershipmindssummit.com. Now, let's get back to the conversation.
Kim Schmidt:
If you look five years ahead, what's a critical change you think the business needs to make for continued growth?
Bryan Fehr:
More service techs.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
More employees. Not just service, I think sales. There's a lot of guys out there that we don't even see on the sales side, I'm sure of it.
Bryan Fehr:
But you have the service guys to back it up.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
To back it up, yeah.
Kim Schmidt:
From the service side, are you looking for general service tech who then learns the precision side, or are you going and finding people who got the precision?
Bryan Fehr:
Well, Weston didn't know how to drive a tractor when he started here.
Kim Schmidt:
Okay.
Nate Kelson:
The training is out there, the vendors do a good job of training.
Bryan Fehr:
It's basically come down to if the guy has a good work ethic and wants to put the time in it.
Nate Kelson:
We invest in them.
Bryan Fehr:
The sky's the limit. I mean that's what I will tell you at Jenner. The sky's the limit.
Nate Kelson:
There is no limited income here.
Bryan Fehr:
Yeah. And that's what I will tell you, the biggest thing with Nate is my brother James, Nate, when he was the operation manager, he was wanting to do something and James is like, "No, you don't need to do it that way. You need to be working yourself out of a job every day." Nate says, "Well, if I work myself out of a job, what am I going to do?" We will always find something else. And so that's what we've always tried to do.
Kim Schmidt:
Always be getting your replacement ready.
Bryan Fehr:
Yeah.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
Because I was in sales for about three months.
Bryan Fehr:
Yeah, he was going into sales, and then we had a service tech walk in and quit, so we put him back to service. He did really good, but I mean that's where Andrei flexed backed for us.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
It's also to show that the service tech, because he knows the product and you've trained that much time into him that he can be a salesman and do successful at it. And if not, there's always a job waiting for him in the service department. You already have the knowledge, you don't have to retrain a new guy. Because that's what I asked them. I said, "I'll do the sales thing. I'll try it. But I better have a job when I fail at it."
Kim Schmidt:
Right, but if I decide well, it's not me-
Andrei Hildenbrand:
Or if I don't want to do it, yeah. I said, "Am I going to have my service job?" They said, "Absolutely. Always use you in the service department."
Nate Kelson:
There's a lot of stretching that goes on here, and some of it's self training, but how do we get better? Because there is no limited income per se, the salesman is always going okay, where should I be spending my time? It sounds simple but it's still just continuing to do things maybe we didn't do last year to grow. And when I was operations director, they walked into my office and they said, "Take one person, two people, whatever, just train some people. Everything you do, train somebody else to do it, you're going into sales now." And I'm just like, "I got a family to feed." They said, "Don't worry, we'll bury you. You will never have to worry about" ... They had pegged me. They said, "This is what they're going to be good at." I don't ever want to go back to that operations job, I like sales. So it wasn't random, they'd figured that out.
Bryan Fehr:
For him, I mean basically it's what it was, he came in one day and I'm just like, "What do you think about going to sales?" "Um." "Well that's what you're doing." And I mean I had talked to Steve and I had talked to my brother, James, and that's what we decided. And so Steve's like, "Don't load and aim, fire the gun. If you're going to make the decision, make it." So that's what we did and he's like, "What do you want me to do?" I said, "Go jump in cabs." And I will tell you, if you drive around the Fairbury, Forrest, Gilman area, he's probably known as the Gatorade guy because that's what he started doing is giving out Gatorade and candy bars.
Nate Kelson:
They had no idea I was coming. Just come through this tall corn and there's some doofus standing at the end of the road. He's running at you. When you come through the corn, he is running at your cab, and he's up the ladder, and opened the door, and shut the door before you really could say anything, and then looks at you and says, "Why are we stopped? Let's go."
Bryan Fehr:
But the other thing that Nate had is Nate was not a farm kid, he let farmers teach him, and that's how he's grown to what he is. That's why I'm saying as long as we have somebody that has the right attitude, we can teach him. Because you have Nate that came from construction world, you have AJ that was an operator. They're both salesmans, they're both done fantastic, and they're helping each other. Service guys are doing that too.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
Teamwork, it's a good thing.
Bryan Fehr:
The other thing I guess you guys ask how we get guys buy into maintenance plans. The biggest thing that I think people see with us is this is a business and it is run every day as a business. We don't have farming to support it, we don't sell seed corn to support it, we are precision and that's it. And so if they want us to stay around, they pretty well know that they're going to have to pay a bill because these lights don't come on free. Everybody that works at this location knows what it costs a month to turn the lights on.
Nate Kelson:
Yeah, and if a farmer asks me, "Will I have support?" Because that's a big deal in technology, that they have support. "Will I have support?" And I look at them and I say, "Well, I don't sell seed and I don't sell fertilizer. I have nothing to supplement this with." So I said, "If we don't support our customers, we are immediately out of business. We're just out, because that's all we do." And that really resonates with them.
Bryan Fehr:
We have some other guys that say, "We run everything that we sell on our farm." That's fine that you run everything you sell on your farm. But when it's go time, are you running your equipment that you sell or are you going to come work on my stuff?" And so that's one of the things that we try to say the other way is we're available all the time.
Kim Schmidt:
You talked a little bit about training, but on a more like formal level, how does Jenner approach training?
Bryan Fehr:
To the employees?
Kim Schmidt:
To the employees?
Bryan Fehr:
Lot of the product trainings, we go to the manufacturing. Sales trainings, so one of the thing that Jenners does that's really cool, I just got done with it, they have a leadership class. It's two years, you meet five times a year. It's taught by Steve Jones, the owner. There are [inaudible 00:16:59] classes, but you have what a great leader is. And then you have how to do a sales call. Then you have how to do a presentation. It's just all a bunch of things that make a better person. And so present, you had to go learn a product that Jenner sells and you had to do it in front of this group. It's an all-day class, nine of us that went through it this year. And then financial, we're teaching financials every week.
Nate Kelson:
Play the great game of business here. And so we know what needs sold and what needs serviced, and we predict ahead of time. There's total trust in the company. If the company's failing, we know about it immediately. We don't worry about our jobs. There's no rumors, there's not insecurity there because we know exactly what the company is making, and so we act like owners.
Kim Schmidt:
I did a story with Steve about [inaudible 00:17:59] business years ago.
Bryan Fehr:
It's all open book.
Kim Schmidt:
It's an open book management system essentially, but there's a whole competition.
Bryan Fehr:
It gave us the opportunity to predict what we're going to sell and it holds people accountable. Jenners always says they would like to do a physical throughout the year instead of the end of the year doing autopsy. So every month we know if we're losing or making money.
Nate Kelson:
I have a college degree in construction and I was project manager for multiple years. I left the construction world, came to Ag, knew nothing about Ag, and the reason I signed up for this company was because they played a great game of business. That's the reason.
Kim Schmidt:
So were you already familiar with it?
Nate Kelson:
Somebody had told me about it and I looked at it, I'm like yep, I'm going to pursue that company. And it was a field I had no knowledge in.
Bryan Fehr:
Like I said, the sky is the limit at Jenners. Whatever you want to put into it is what you're going to get out of. I mean we always say it takes 18 months to figure it out because there's a lot, when you come in here, to figure it out, to know what's going on.
Nate Kelson:
Yeah, it can be a little overwhelming, but it's a continual process. And so a benefit, we haven't talked about this much, we started with just one vendor, Ag Leader. So since then we've added Precision Planting, Yetter, 360, and all that. They know we played the great game of business, and so our relationship and our partnership with them, it makes and breaks sometimes. We get some decent treatment out of the vendors, we get some special things, and we get bailed out in season by our vendors. Some of them work very hard to make sure that their product is working on that farm. When we've exhausted all of our resources and our training, the vendor's there.
Nate Kelson:
And they try to do that for everybody, you could say, but it is a relationship, and I think they say, "Okay, Jenners is not going to be just a flash in the pan here. They're here, this is what they do, this is what they're focused on, and their employees stick around more than six months. So if we're going to invest time to grow Jenner as a business," the vendor's saying this, "Or we're deciding who do we want covering these sales areas, they know if we invest time in the people, there's a good chance that five years from now, those people will still be here." Hasn't always been the case with everybody.
Kim Schmidt:
More often than not.
Nate Kelson:
So it's really given us a unique maybe a head above on some of our competition in the area because of the type of company we are. We did not go to Precision Planting. We were an Ag Leader dealer, we did not go to them and say, "We'd really like to sell Precision Planting. Can we?" Because we had a Precision Planting dealer five miles down the road from us this way, we had another one 20 minutes away this way, we had another one 40 minutes away this way. There was no reason. Precision came to us. They came to us and they said, "We would like you to be a Precision Planting dealer."
Kim Schmidt:
Wow.
Nate Kelson:
That says something about our company culture.
Kim Schmidt:
There were that many Precision Planting dealers surrounding you. That's pretty impressive that they-
Nate Kelson:
I have not taken any sales from him. I haven't. I've probably sold some stuff to his customers for him. I've went in, convinced the guy, I've been in his cab. I know I have. And the guy's like, "That's a great product. That's awesome. I didn't even know that Precision has that." I'm like, "Yeah." "I usually work with this guy." "Okay, go work with him." We have a good relationship. We have a good working relationship with these guys that are close to us because, like Andrei said, there's a lot of farmers out there.
Bryan Fehr:
We try to play fair. I mean I've told these guys that if you get in the cab and there's Precision in that cab, you don't sell to that customer unless he requests a quote, and then you do what we're doing and then we've-
Nate Kelson:
Or sell him something that isn't Precision.
Bryan Fehr:
We've worked through them hurdles. And it helps when we play the great game and we do a budget, and these guys turn in sales dollars for what they're going to do or sales dollars for next year, he turns in a service number, and one of the head guys from Precision Planting comes down here with his RM and says, "We need to do a budget." And I said, "Okay," I just pull ours up, and I said, "What do you want to do?" And he's like, "We don't need to worry about Jenners, they got it figured out," and we didn't even go over the budget. So that's what's helping us. And the great game's got us there. Trust me, it was painful, I thought it was dumb when we started it, but everybody's got to buy in and everybody's bought in, and it's nice knowing that you know what the company's doing.
Kim Schmidt:
How are you guys incorporating the Raven Autonomy stuff, and getting that into the business, and approaching sales and service on that end?
Bryan Fehr:
Right now, I've been the one that's basically been selling it because of the stipulations of what you got to have for a tractor and stuff like that. Once we get it rolling and once they get this thing fixed, it is where the game is going. I mean they're not stopping it. I mean it's just they had a few the shadowings of the night, and the bean dust, and stuff like that. They will get all that figured out. And once that happens, that's where we're going to need techs, and they got to be smart to figure this stuff out. Basically, what you'll do there is we will have a tiered deal. So when you're talking the service guys, you have your service guys that what they are is they drive the big white truck. The UMAX guys are driving a 2,500-
Andrei Hildenbrand:
No service, [inaudible 00:23:23].
Bryan Fehr:
No service tool. I mean they do all electronics is what they do. And if they can't fix it electronically, troubleshooting electronic, then they call in the service tech. Then your guys up above, the UMAX Plus, then they're still doing electronic troubleshooting, but they're learning the new product and pushing it down is what it's doing.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
And doing trainings and stuff like that.
Bryan Fehr:
And doing trainings and stuff like that. When it comes to the autonomous side of it, we will more than likely have to have somebody in here because you can log into all that stuff. Raven was logging into us when we were at the field day. So we'll have to have somebody that, once this thing fires off, that we can see where everybody's at. And we will have somebody that has to be in an office.
Nate Kelson:
I think our service team in general, over the next five years or more, you're going to see a change in the structure of it somewhat. I mean I would think so.
Bryan Fehr:
It's getting more electronic side of stuff and you're going to have to have the troubleshooting guys that they go in, and are going to troubleshoot the electronic side of it, and fix it with just whatever, the software or whatever, or then you're going to have the guys that are going to have to come in with wrenches. So the autonomy side of it, you're going to have your service guys over here that are in the trenches, and you're going to have the guys over here that are autonomy, and it's be totally different. You're need a different team because there's a lot.
Andrei Hildenbrand:
If they bring in seeding and cultivation.
Nate Kelson:
And it may change the sales landscape. Right now, I don't sell a lot of tractors because who's going to support them up here. And so I just don't really focus hard on that. And right now, I've been told by our CEO, "Don't focus on it." He says, "If you have a whole portfolio of stuff to sell, he says, "I find if you just keep adding that portfolio, you don't sell more, you just sell what you're comfortable with." So if I'm not comfortable with tractors, I'm not going to sell them anyway. Even if they say, "Go sell tractors." So if you got somebody in the service world working on tractors in your area, all of a sudden guess who's going to want to learn more about tractors? The salesman. So it'll change the sales landscape if that's the way it goes.
Michaela Paukner:
Thanks to Bryan, Nate, and Andrei for joining us for today's episode and congratulations to the entire Jenner Precision team for your 2022 most valuable dealership award. If you'd like to learn more about the outstanding practices in place at Jenner Precision, we have extended coverage at precisionfarmingdealer.com/mvd. Let me know what you thought about this episode by emailing me at mpaukner@lessitermedia.com or calling me at 262-777-2441. And if you're looking for more podcasts about precision farming, visit precisionfarmingdealer.com/podcast or check out our episode library wherever you get your podcasts. From all of us here at Precision Farming Dealer. I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.
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