Harvest Profit with Nick Horob

Shay: Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Today you have Shay Foulk with Nick Horub. Nick, how are you?

Nick

Horob: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. How are you, Shea?

Shay: Doing well. It's been a while trying to get this aligned and happy to finally have a conversation here with you today. Nick, if you would, I don't think I would do justice giving an introduction. A lot of people know you for your work with Harvest Profit, but you're a man of many things that you have going on in your business. So could you give the listeners just kind of a, a 2-minute overview of who you are and where you're at.

Nick

Horob: Sure. So I founded a farm management software company called Harvest Profit. We offer a suite of software tools that are centered around cost and profit tracking and the inputs that, that flow into those calculations. I originally grew up in northwestern North Dakota. Town of Williston. Both sides of my family farmed. I was actually kind of known as the, the pain in the butt who would, you know, come out and go hunting and tear up the roads. And, you know, oh, Nick's back, you know, bring a girlfriend out, um, all that fun stuff. And then I went to school, I went to the university, a few stops along the way, but, um, went to school for engineering, industrial engineering. It wasn't It was a bit too narrow for me. I really liked more of the broad business.

I got a finance degree at the University of Minnesota, went to work for a private equity firm in Minneapolis that would mostly buy businesses from retiring entrepreneurs, help them kind of implement the next step of their dream. If that, you know, buy a supplier to competitor to and help transition those businesses from family ownership to more professional ownership. So I got to see a lot of different industries and what succeeded and what challenges and successes. At the same time, this is like back in the late 2000s when commodity prices really spiked higher, specifically where my family farm is. It's right in the heart of spring wheat and Durham country. And so all of a sudden you saw wheat kind of unthinkably go in the teens and then even more unthinkably trade north of $20 a bushel.

And so along that, as that was happening, talking to family and friends about what they're doing, the decisions they're making, and pretty quickly realized that there was— farmers are forced to wear lots of hats, whether it's, you know, an operator, repairs, agronomy, bookkeeping, you know, risk management. And a lot of the, you know, it's very uncommon to find somebody who's an expert at all of those. There tends to be a weak link in that chain somewhere. And oftentimes, you know, the, the business side of the farm, maybe not the business side, but, you know, calculating cost of production and making those those marketing decisions, that maybe falls a little bit down the list of priority or the list of maybe implied competence. And so I quit my job at the private equity firm in Minneapolis. My boss said I was the only person he's ever known that's voluntarily left that industry.

That was a quote unquote good job and started consulting with farms in Minnesota, in the Dakotas. Just helping them be a voice of reason when it came to— it comes to the business side of their farms. Similar to what you all do now, looking at cost of production, marketing decisions, capital allocation, how to think about the balance sheet, working capital, long-term debt. And then I saw that a lot of the work we were doing was in spreadsheets, and we had a lot of great spreadsheets., but what would tend to happen is as soon as the fields get black and warm up in the spring and the tractors start getting pulled out of the shed, you know, as the tractors get pulled out of the shed, you know, the dust falls on the spreadsheet until the next fall. And there's a lot of decisions that need to be made from the spring to the fall.

And so I kind of developed this passion for trying to build a set of tools that were a bit easier to keep updated, that could be a bit more mobile-friendly. And so that led me to create Harvest Profit. And the initial traction was a little slow, but then all of a sudden we, I think we ended up signing up, you know, 100 and 150 customers that first year. Got to the point where I could, I did kind of make a decision if I was going to go on the consulting route or go on the software route. And I was being, you know, I was being pulled in too many directions trying to do all of it. And so I decided to focus on the software side. And yeah, that's kind of hit the ground running. So that would have been 6 or 7 years ago now. And so it's been, you know, on one, on one hand, it feels like it's been a long time.

And on the other hand, it's, you know, we're just saying 6 or 7 years, that's pretty short in the big picture. So it's—

Shay: and in the meantime, kids and family and lots of other stuff going on too.

Nick

Horob: Yeah, so I'm married. I have two twin boys that just turned 4. Harvest Prophet was acquired by John Deere at the end in November 2020. And I remember I was on a call with some, some executives and they you know, they asked how it went and I said, well, you know, negotiating a sale of your business while you have 4-month-old twin boys at home and there's, you know, COVID and, you know, it's not easy to get help, you know, that was, you know, maybe definitely some— had to do a lot of work on little sleep. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, it all turned out great. A lot of the things that were promised to me during our acquisition process about, you know, Deere wanted to— one of the highest demand or the highest requested features were financial features.

And there was a handful of companies in the market and they really wanted to, you know, they wanted to— there's a lot of changes happening, you know, acquisitions, some companies were shutting down. And so Deere wanted to solidify that there's going to be a farm financial tool in the market. And so they partnered with Harvest Profit. And so we've been operating relatively, you know, mostly autonomously. I'm here in our little, you know, 8-person office in West Fargo, North Dakota today. And we're, you know, working on what we feel is the best features that we can for our customers and supporting them. And it's been, yeah, it's been a, a fun, busy, you know, intellectually stimulating ride. And at the end of the day, I think that's one of the, one of the blessings that anybody can ask for, is to, to work on something they, they enjoy and that is intellectually stimulating.

And that's definitely been, uh, been it for me.

Shay: So, so I'm, I'm going to come back to some of the things that you hit on there because I do have a few key questions, what you outlined. But I like that last point about intellectually stimulating, uh, because I, I really enjoy following you on social media, Twitter, um, I think you're on LinkedIn too maybe, but just a lot of the content that you put out seems like your brain's always thinking, um, you are in pursuit of things that you enjoy but also that are maybe intriguing and hard too, I would say. Um, so I mean, what, what else do you got going on? What else interests you? What do the listeners need to know about Nick that maybe they don't know?

Nick

Horob: You know, I really like to read. I maybe jump around a little bit more reading and consuming content, and I've, you know, I've kind of embraced that rather than, you know, forcing myself to finish a book. If it's not gripping me, I'll move on. You know, I've really grown to— maybe it's due to some self-reflection, but I've grown to respect the the impact that our emotions and our biases play in making decisions. I've always tended to be maybe a little bit, I don't know if like not critical is the right word, but for the longest time I was, you have when it comes to financial news, for instance, there's There are certain— if you follow Yahoo Finance or the Wall Street Journal and you click around the internet, more than likely ads will follow you. And there's a lot of spooky ads, right? Like, the crash is coming, buy gold, buy your silver coins.

And so I've realized over the years that a lot of people just fall victim to the biases, the human nature, the fear and the greed. And so that's really one of my kind of personal passions is just to try to learn more about the behavioral side of things. I often use a quote that says if you ask a group of farmers, you have 100 farmers in the room and you ask them how many of them would love a $2 rally in corn, soybeans, and wheat, all of them, of course, would raise their hands. Well, then if that $2 rally happens and you come back and you say, 'How satisfied are you with your marketing?' Most of those farms would be frustrated and not happy. When I was doing consulting, I would say the least enjoyable weeks I had in my job were the weeks in which we put these big bullish highs in because people were frustrated.

If they had— maybe they had a margin call, they sold some corn at $5 and then some corn at $6, then all of a sudden it's $6.50 and they're just really frustrated. Even though their profitability went from, all right, we're going to break even this year to now we're projected to make $500,000, it was still a lot of frustration. And so those type of topics really are fun for me to explore. And at the same time, I really found you know, just doing more writing. Like, I haven't been as active on our Harvest Profit blog for a while. Still writing some email newsletters, but just the thought of writing and putting those thoughts down on paper is something to me that I enjoy much more than I ever thought I did. So, you know, reading, writing, learning. Yeah. Is, is really, is enjoyable for me.

Shay: So with the, the emotional, the impact that emotions have on our decision-making and some of that bias that you referenced, of course, we learn and grow over time through experience and hopefully learning from others so that we don't make the big mistakes. When you look back, because there's, there's two pivotal moments here that I wanted to question you on when you left the private equity firm and when you decided to partner with Deere. When you look back on that, is there any— anything that stands out to you about how your emotions were impacting your decision-making process? I mean, you had a lot going on there, like you said, family and kids and, uh, great opportunities in front of you. So anything major on those two particular situations that you think is interesting?

Nick

Horob: Uh, so when I quit the private equity firm, I was You know, it's a— I don't know if glamorous is the right word, but it's definitely a coveted job. But when you're, you know, when you're in the weeds of it, it was, you know, a lot of things like you'd be looking at an acquisition and you'd have to do their, you know, do it— we'd have to do due diligence on their insurance and you'd have to, you know, do background checks. A lot of this, you know, dotting the i's and crossing the t's that wasn't enjoyable for me. So I was cognizant of the fact that, okay, this is just kind of the slog, you know, you're, you know, you're putting in your dues and there's, there's something, you know, to, to get to, you know, more of the go to the meetings and make the deals, you know, you just got to kind of go through this slog.

And so I was, I knew that I was probably being a little bit short-sighted in leaving, but at the end of the day, I was just trying to, to optimize for happiness. And so for the longest time, you know, financially, if I look at the financials of that decision, that was a, a suboptimal financial decision for a long time. Um, but I was trying to, you know, I was in the position where I did— at that time I didn't have a family, so it was like I could take on more risk. And I was optimizing, you know, for happiness. So, you know, looking back, you know, I maybe would've, I maybe would've stayed there for a little longer and, and saw what happened. But, you know, optimizing for happiness was, you know, was what I, was what I ended up doing at the end of the day.

So the Deer, thinking about Deer, you know, we, you know, we're getting to the point where we were gonna take on some features that we're gonna require a lot of development and maybe server. So we're going to go, we ended up building out Profit Maps in Harvest Profit. And that's just like a whole nother scale of data when you're storing row by row shapefile data across lots of different field operations that occur throughout the years. And at the same time, there were competitors coming and going and we didn't really want to end up, you know, in the software market itself at the time was, you know, you had FieldView that was super popular and then they went free. And so like there was people experimenting with, well, if you, you know, here's free satellite imagery for a year.

So there was a lot of, I don't know, a lot of maybe, unfounded fear that, you know, something was gonna happen to shake up the industry. Like, you know, yeah, definitely some like underlying fear that things were changing fast. How's that gonna impact us? Where I think back to the decision that I made was, you know, if you, if we were gonna, you know, sell the business, if I was gonna sell the business, you have Grain companies that are buying grain. Well, most of our customers sell their grain to multiple parties, agronomic companies, seed companies, or the big input providers. Most farmers do business with multiple input providers. And so I really thought that if we were going to do something, doing something with either a tech company or an equipment company, has the least amount of conflicts of interest.

So I'd probably say, you know, and I remember seeing some competitors come out with features, you know, they started in the agronomy, they had some challenges. So then they launched, you know, cost tracking and marketing. And I remember just being like sick to my stomach and I couldn't, you know, I was just like, you know, lost my appetite. You know, all these competitors are, you know, realizing that farmers like these type of features. So they're coming in our market. Well, fast forward a couple of years later, we don't hear about any of that anymore. And if I could have just stayed focused on my business, that would have been— yeah, I could have definitely probably freed myself of a little bit of this gray hair that's creeping up.

I had a conversation last week with a farmer who farms an average to maybe slightly above average farm size in Minnesota, has had a couple really good years. And he was sold some land in preparation to buy some land that was coming up right next to his farm. And he wasn't able to buy the land next to his farm. So he has this money that he was planning on doing a 1031 exchange. And he said, you know, I might just have to pay the tax on this and just completely pay off the operating note. But he said, if you let off your gas, if I let off the gas pedal now, I might not be able to put it back on again. And it was, well, you're farming 4,000 or 5,000 acres, you have one son in the operation, having a debt-free or a farm that has very, you know, it's removed a lot of risk over the last few years. Like, that's a pretty good spot to be in.

But there's just, you know, there's this persistent fear. I think some of that's healthy, you know, strives you to do better, strives you to improve. Um, but at the end of the day, it can also, you know, lead us to go down the path of, you know, taking on more, you know, taking on more stress. And at the end of the day, you know, we should all be, you know, optimizing for happiness, in my opinion. Yeah, long-winded answer to your question.

Shay: No, it's great. And, and I really like that last piece too. I don't know if it's really recency bias, but I think people that are in that position— and a lot of listeners that listen to this podcast are, you know, average to above average size, scale, uh, complexity, whatever variables you want to throw in there— and that fear of letting off the gas for just a second, I think, is an impact of how rapidly things have changed in the last 20 years to where you've seen the farm operations that haven't let off the gas even when we had economic downturns, which maybe we're looking at here in the next few years again. They really took advantage of land purchasing and then look what land prices had done. They, they added a lot of acres, they added a lot of relationships, they took advantage of a lot of transitions that were occurring.

And so people have this, uh, like you said, maybe with your business too, an unfounded fear of what's going on around them, or just, uh, how do we keep focused on our business. And I think it's important for people in today's environment to refocus on what is important, uh, and having a debt-free or a low-debt operation in economic turmoil to prepare for opportunities in the next 3 to 5 years is probably a really, really good place to be. So, um, yeah, I appreciate it.

Nick

Horob: I, I've come to grasp this concept, and maybe it's, you know, a bit of self-reflection on myself, the concept of the journey is the destination. You know, I've had, you know, I've had a lot of fortunate things happen in my life, and, you know, some of it material And it's surprising and yet not surprising that these material things, they don't really lead to much joy. To me, if I look back at the dear acquisition of Harvest Profit, what was the most enjoyable? Was it when it closed and the money got sent out? No, there was a— I had to my wife's father was ill, so we were back in West North Dakota and I had to put a bunch of information together and get it out to the other side. And like, I sat on this toilet, the boys are sleeping, it's dark in the hotel room.

For like 6 hours straight, I worked from the toilet in this bathroom and like, just, you know, I had to put together some budgets and some things that I didn't have created.. I wanted it to, you know, I wanted it to look like, you know, this was all good and done. So I got it all done perfect. You know, I didn't have much sleep that night, but like, that's the fun part, right? Like the journey, the journey is the destination. And so I can empathize with that farmer who I talked to last week. And yet, because the journey is the fun and, you know, making those decisions and navigating it and it's like, well, you know, maybe just removing the risk of ruin from the journey, right? Like, keep pursuing opportunities and growing and trying to get better, but, you know, removing the risk of ruin, uh, to me, you know, is— would be my advice.

And so, um, yeah, that concept that the journey is the destination is, is super powerful. And, you know, in doing so in a way that prevents, you know, the the quote-unquote risk of a, you know, business death, I think is, you know, is a powerful way to frame that mentality.

Shay: I've embraced that mentality here too, in our operation, the farming, the seed business, the consulting that I'm involved with. And one area that I think has been the most impactful to be able to embrace that concept of the journey is having a purpose and a why behind what we do. And in the last couple of years, I've really been able to focus in on that. And having that, having that clear target just makes everything else so much easier. And so whether it's through cost of production or business planning or just different challenges that I'm facing in my life, you know, kind of one word that I've picked for 2024 is I just, I want to simplify. I want to simplify my processes. I want to simplify why I do the things that I do. And then, yeah, like you said, the material stuff, that's, that's not where the joy comes from.

It's, it's in making changes in the operation, in making changes in the business. I do feel that there's— they got to be careful a little bit because a lot of the personalities in agriculture, a lot of the entrepreneurs, people that you and I interact with, they like change. And you got to be careful. Don't just like change for the sake of change. And I'll share this. Last night we were sitting in the living room and my wife said, you know, time to put the computer away, work stuff's done. I said, okay, that's fine. So I shut it down, went, made some tea, and I was just sitting there in the room kind of, you know, tapping my— tapping my hand. And she's like, what? I said, I think we need to rearrange the living room. She's like, it's like it's 9:00. Why? And we did. So we rearranged the entire living room.

And we took like half of our couch apart or whatever, but my vision was that I knew it would be better. I knew that she would like it. And then meantime, she's like, I know you like change just for the sake of change, but this is not my cup of tea. And at the end of it, she's like, okay, I like this. I see that this is good. And so I think, you know, just understanding, not only understanding your why and having simplicity in the things that you do, but understanding how you operate, how you make decisions.. I think that's an important piece of it too. And, you know, a lot of reading goes into that. I listen to a lot of podcasts. Um, so I, I think I really appreciate what you say about the professional development piece cuz it makes you more self-aware, I think, of what you have going on in your business too.

Nick

Horob: Exactly. I was surprised your, your wife didn't say, okay, you can pull your laptop back out.

Shay: I think for a while there she was kind of wishing that I would've cuz making field, uh, planting plans for the year ahead.

Nick

Horob: But, um, another— I was just gonna add one more thing, and that is, I've, uh, you know, in addition to, you know, just, you know, the reading and learning, I'm about 6 months into— 6 months into this habit that I've started. And that is at the end of every day to just like taking a literally like a minute, 30 seconds, a minute, a couple minutes, and just jotting down some some thoughts from the day, you know, mostly around family stuff, just like funny moments, the funny things the kids say, um, or, you know, geez, they, you know, woke me up at 5 AM this morning, you know, it'd be nice when that doesn't, doesn't happen anymore. And some business thoughts too. And it's, it's been really mind-blowing to look back. Like, if I go back even 2, 3 weeks, I would have forgotten almost all of those. Like, they would have just been memories that are completely under the bridge.

And it's been, it kind of slows down time a little bit as well. You know, as we, I just turned 40 this year and that was a bit of a, you know, for the first time it was a birthday that actually like felt different than maybe, you know, my 21st birthday. But that, the concept of just like doing a really quick daily journal has been really powerful for me and something that You know, I tend to be somebody who, you know, hears these productivity tricks and habits and I try them, and at the end of the day, very few of them stick. But this little daily note-taking has been one of the more powerful things I've tried, and, you know, it grows in value over time.

So just the thought of having that for, you know, the next 30, 40, 50, 60 years is, you know, pretty powerful to be able to look back on those those memories that you're creating and also minimizing like the, you know, how many of those things that were headaches or annoyances or made you mad then, you know, truly mattered. So it just allows you to not miss the little things, but also realize that, you know, focus on the big things as well.

Shay: So I appreciate that. My wife and I did that in '23 and we're doing it for '24 as well. We actually got a big Mason jar. That we put a— we have like a, a sun window above our kitchen sink. And so we put this big mason jar in there, we put a sticky note pad right next to it. And so every day, every other day, we just write down something. We got two little girls, you know, what the girls do, how are they changing, or what big events went on. And so we sat down the first week of January here and reviewed 2023, and it's just— it's a blast, uh, to go through. Yeah, memories. And then it's a shared experience too, because I would write down— yeah, she didn't know and she'd write down, yeah, I didn't know. And so that was, that was pretty impactful. And I, I like your comment.

One of the peer groups that I'm in, they— a lot of those guys, uh, write down their thoughts in the morning, afternoon, whatever, um, about— or at the end of the day, rather— about what they have going on, gratitudes, things that they enjoy. And, uh, I should probably pick that habit up. I just had, had my 30th birthday, so, um, I appreciate the the heads up on that end.

Nick

Horob: I've also been— it's, it's a little bit kind of foo-foo for maybe, you know, in the past I used to maybe have a different approach to these things of, you know, you're a man and you just, you know, you, you, um, you're strong. But at the— I also write down every day when I, when I get to work or in the morning, I just, you know, I have a to-do list for the day I fill out, and then it's you know, who I am as a person, you know, trying to be an active listener and patient and present, and then who I don't want to be. So yeah, those— yeah, just being, you know, writing this stuff down to me is a— yeah, it's been, it's been powerful way to just, you know, center yourself and, and, you know, but yet, you know, not forgetting the little memorable moments, but also focus on the big picture.

Shay: So Yeah, that's great. A couple other things I just wanted to pick your brain on here, and we'll wrap up in the next 10 minutes or so. But software as a service, and so this is kind of taking a hard 180 from what we were just talking about.

Nick

Horob: Yeah, that's all right.

Shay: Just, you know, software as a service, I think we— there's a lot of discussion around it right now of what's going on in the industry, in the ag space. What are your thoughts around that? How do you think the farmers and listeners and business decision makers should frame their mindset around the value that it provides, around why it's important and how it's gonna shape the industry moving forward.

Nick

Horob: So it's a bit— my business, Harvest Profit vs. Farmers, is a little apples to oranges. But if I look at the tools that really helped our business grow and like do so in a sane way, You know, we have certain email tools we use, we have customer support tools. All of those tools are subscriptions, and all of those tools actually have some sort of like a value-based metric. So the more email subscribers we have, the higher the price. The more seats we have in our help desk software, the higher the price. I've almost come to— I wouldn't even consider a one-time purchase tool for Harvest Profit. That is the The support that comes with most subscription SaaS products is like, you expect it to be good and it's pretty darn good. Like there's somebody there. In ag, what has happened is there's been one-time charges or free products that are monetized elsewhere.

You know, for us, We, you know, we've written thousands and thousands of lines of code, um, thousands of updates, you know, all of our customers receive all those updates and then they receive the support. And like, to me, the, the support is the big one, you know, there's two big ones, a few, you know, theoretically, and I think what we're starting to see is you can lower the upfront cost on some of this technology 2, it improves over time in a more seamless fashion, and those improvements that come, you know, are requiring people and kind of a continuous feed of R&D expense. And then 3, the service better be pretty, you know, pretty darn good. And that's how I, you know, how I tend to approach SaaS and Ag. It's unique because most— a lot of the business people you're dealing with are, you know, they wear the hat of a business person, but they also wear the hat of a consumer.

You know, if I were to go to— if I were to pick out any manufacturing plant within a few miles of our office here in Fargo, you know, most of those businesses, you know, would— there's a lot of them that would have a similar size of revenue and profit as a farm. And most of them would be using some sort of 5-figure software, some sort of pretty high-end ERP system, or maybe like a manufacturing planning tool or inventory planning tool to help run their business. And so, you know, we've heard, I just don't understand why Harvest Profit is $1,600 a year and my Dropbox is $10 a month. And the market size, you know, you have 500 potential— 500 million potential customers versus, you know, 100,000 is, um, it's something that people need to be, you know, realistic about as well.

But at the end of the day, I, uh, I was talking to somebody who's involved with some of these, you know, this— these type of conversations on some recurring revenue. And, and the one thing that he said— and he's an egg— he said, I've worked on a lot of technology in my career that has had very underwhelming utilization. Like, this business model needs utilization. So it's going to force companies that are using a recurring revenue business model to deliver tools that get used, make it as, you know, to, to make the value there to drive use, to make them easy to use. And so it's It helps kind of drive a, you know, a more holistic flywheel of delivering value. The features are getting used. The usage, you know, is very objective, right? Because there's a monetary component to it. So it, you know, hopefully is going to be a flywheel that delivers value for all parties.

I very— I very rarely look at any of the bills that I've paid for in my career at Harvest Profit and think, ah, that's just, you know, that's just a, that just isn't delivering the value. And when it has, hasn't delivered the value, you know, we don't do business with them anymore.

Shay: So, so I, I really like that last part. And when it comes to the usage and the applicability, and I'm going to pick on farmers here a little bit, I am one, so that, you know, Sometimes what we think in our decision-making process is that we're justifying the money that we spend in a one-time purchase. We can justify that away because, oh, we did X and that created Y, or we spent the money and the cost savings was here. But having to justify that year over year when it comes to some of these things that are— and not just for Harvest Profit, I want to make sure everybody understands that.

But there's a lot going on in the industry that is annual and recurring that is providing massive value to farmers that we just haven't historically looked at it that way, because we're able to justify those away and maybe haven't had the ownership of saying, okay, well, am I doing what I need to do to get the value out of the tools and the services and the softwares that I'm paying for? You know, so when it comes to, you know, implement technology, when it comes to business decision making, when it comes to how we're handling customers and clients and suppliers and things like that. Am I really maximizing the utilization of these systems and tools? And I would argue that a lot of people, the answer is no, and they don't feel good about that. And that's why there's this, you know, just kind of this ick feeling.

Nick

Horob: Yeah.

Shay: Yeah. Paying for something over and over. Take an internal look and say, am I really utilizing what I need to do to make the decisions. Because like you said, what, what we talk about with, you know, what we're doing on cost, like with Profit Manager or whatever, is we don't want you to have a tool that does gather that dust on the shelf, um, from the tractors being pulled out of the shed, and then you don't use it. You should be utilizing it as often as you think about making decisions in your business. And if you're not, that, that's on you. You know, that's an ownership piece that I just, I think it's going to be a big change in the industry. And I think we're going to see more and more of it in the next 5 or 10 years.

And I'm not sure there's been a real open conversation outside of farmers just complaining about, you know, what they're having to write a check for every month, every year. And like you said, if you're not getting the value out of it, well, you vote with your dollars. But if you are, then you should continue to invest in that service that's going to give you that support, give you that research and development and look at Hey, you know, how does— how is this impacting my bottom line in my business? So thank you for the perspective.

Nick

Horob: Yep.

Shay: Any, any other thoughts? I didn't want to cut you off there if you had something else that you want to know.

Nick

Horob: No, no.

Shay: Okay.

Nick

Horob: No, I was just— I was just going to say there's a lot of— yeah, there's a lot of changes underway. You know, companies are going to try different things. You know, there's this concept of, you know, lower upfront cost. In exchange for subscription, you know, there's gonna be some misses there, there's gonna be some hits, and we're, you know, it's pretty dynamic, but at the end of the day, it's gonna force companies that are using that business model to deliver a service that adds value. And at the end of the day, I think that flywheel, you know, rather than, you know, convincing somebody to, to get a certain upgrade or, you know, unlock on a tractor because it helps the resale value, and then it never gets used. No, that doesn't feel good for anybody. And now this is going to drive usage and improvement. So I understand the skepticism. It's definitely a new way of thinking.

But at the end of the day, you know, the companies are going to have to continue to find the model that works and keep improving it so the value is there, or else it doesn't work for anybody.

Shay: Yeah. Final parting thoughts, anything that you're excited about in the year ahead, anything that you are worried about, anything that farmers should be considering, just kind of give you an open platform on kind of where Nick's mind is right now as we head through 2024.

Nick

Horob: You know, it feels a little eerie. You know, we, anytime in ag when you've had a, you know, well, it's a cyclical business, right? Even though it— that's another one of my behavioral observations is that, you know, we tend to take what's happened, what's happening right now and extend that out way too long. Recency bias. When times are good, you tend to think they're going to be good. When they're bad, you think they're going to be bad. You know, we've been proven that it's a cyclical nature. Supply adjusts to demand and demand adjusts to supply. I'm just nervous of the overall environment. Odds would favor some tighter years here along with a fair amount of open crop on old crop and the good marketing opportunities for new crop were quite a ways in the rearview mirror. So just nervous about that overall sentiment.

But at the end of the day, Harvest Profit tends to do better during lean times. We've actually seen that this winter. I wish that wasn't the case because we can add more value during the good times. The software can point to opportunities. We can't necessarily artificially manufacture opportunities. As far as Harvest Profit itself, we're going to start doing a little bit more work on the balance sheet side of the farm. We've been really focused on cash flow, expenses, cost of production, breakeven prices, breakeven yields, field-by-field profitability. Starting to do a little bit more on adding some visibility onto the equipment side and looking at your balance sheet. And so excited about that. And then really just excited for the opportunity to integrate more with the tech stack at Deere. Make our integration with Operations Center as seamless as can be.

And also, you know, working with, you know, people like yourself that are out, you know, kind of pounding the pavement is fun for me. And, you know, hearing a lot of great things about the work you guys are doing— your conference was, you know, I can't even— I can't think of a better received one that I've heard about recently. So congrats on that and keep up the great work. And I know You know, you guys have Profit Manager spreadsheet, Harvest Profit software, you know, definitely some competitive overlap there. But, you know, I really appreciate the approach that you and Chris have and just trying to, you know, help farmers think about their farm like the manufacturing business it is and be a bit more objective and unemotional. And at the end of the day, you know, still realizing, like I said, right, farming's a It's a journey, and that's where a lot of the joy comes in.

And if we can, if all of us can help smooth out the roller coaster that it is financially and emotionally and eliminate the risk of ruin, I think that's what drives us all forward. So a little bit of nervousness, but excited about some of the stuff we have working on, that we're working on, and with With the downside, it does kind of open up people's minds and think, all right, you know, maybe we should be doing things a little bit better in preparation for the next, the next period of higher prices.

Shay: Yeah, a lot of opportunities ahead. I appreciate your comments there, Nick. And I think rising tide floats all ships. And that's why I was so looking at this conversation and, you know, what this looks like moving forward. But Nick, thank you for your time. If, if listeners want to go check out what you got going on at Harvest Profit or anything else, where's the best way to do that?

Nick

Horob: Yeah, just go to harvestprofit.com. We have a free trial you can sign up for really easily. You're not going to get pestered by any, any, any salespeople. So just sign up for a free trial, kick the tires. If it's a fit, great. If not, let us know what we can do different.

Shay: Yeah, sounds great. Nick Horb with Harvest Profit, thank you for the time today.

Nick

Horob: Thank you.

Shay: And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch, and we will catch you next time.