AdAgrA Conference 2025: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

The Entrepreneur's Toolbox

Kevin Brown

Jonathan Dysinger

Nick Knecht

Entrepreneurial Core Competencies

I will say just a word of introduction about myself and my co-presenters.

While I am doing that, I'd like to invite each of you who are willing, hopefully all of you, and you have a smartphone, to scan the barcode that's up there on the top.

I'm going to do a poll, a live poll, in just a minute.

And I'd love to have as many of you participate who are willing.

So if you do that, and hopefully it's intuitive enough if you haven't done it before, or maybe you have and you know how it works.

But I'd love to just give a little feedback about who's in the room.

So I'm going to be asking you, taking you through that poll in just a minute.

My fellow presenters are Jonathan Deisinger and Nick Kinect.

Jonathan and Nick and I share an interest in Farmer's Friend.

We're not all the same interest in terms of the structure and the entrepreneurship, and I'll get into that in a minute.

But we will each be taking a few moments to talk about 1 of what we're calling core competencies, okay?

So my background is in accounting and finance, and that's where I've spent most of my career.

My involvement in Farmer's Friend is in that respect as well.

My connection to entrepreneurship is the loosest of the 3, I would say.

I, as an accountant, serve a lot of entrepreneurs, but most of my experience is second hand, okay?

So just for full disclosure so you know that.

Jonathan, who will be talking a little bit later, is actually the most pure entrepreneur among us.

His whole work life is in the context of being an entrepreneur and a business owner.

Nick has a day job, but he also has some entrepreneurial ventures that he does on the side, which is not a bad way to get into entrepreneurial sorts of things if you're not sure you want to take the plunge and you're not a high risk tolerance personality like Jonathan is.

We have lots of fun with that, you know, talking about the differences.

So just, I think it's kind of interesting to know that because you can get a sense of multiple paths or exposures to what it might be like to be an entrepreneur.

We have gotten, I don't know quite how to read this, but some of you in here.

So what I'm going to do is open this poll.

I'd like to just find out a little bit about who's in the room.

So the first question I want to ask, which I think should be on the screen but I'm not quite sure how to get there.

How many Ad Agra conferences have you been to?

And if you just go ahead and plug in your answer on your phone And I'll get to see up on the screen, it looks like there's 16 of you that have logged in, a few more coming in.

And in just a few seconds after everybody's had a chance to respond, I'll close the poll and we all get to see kind of the distribution, okay?

And it looks like we have about an even split between first-timers, people who have been here once or twice, and then the true veterans that have been here a lot.

The second poll question I ask is this 1.

And I give you several options, all the way from you're all in on farming, it's your primary source of income, or your family, or whatever, that's how you sustain yourselves, to the ones who may have just gotten lost and ended up at Agribyte accident, and you actually hate farming.

There's a place for you to answer if that's where you're at.

I'm hoping that's not the case, but you never know.

So I just want to leave those possibilities open.

So let's just take another 2 or 3 seconds for you to respond to that, and then I'll close that poll, and we'll see who's in the room.

I'm going to back away from the mic for just a minute because I want to look at the screen.

OK, so we've got a small number of you that are primarily in the farmers.

Slightly larger groups where it's kind of a supplemental thing.

And then people who grow food but not for income.

This next 1 is probably not a poll question you get asked very often, what's your age?

And hopefully, I'm not asking you to disclose too much about your age, because some of us who get up to my age don't like to talk about that a lot.

But anyways, I'll explain that in just a minute.

And it looks like we have about a 50-50 split between the young folks, the teens and 20s, and then the rest of us who are 30s and up.

And then the fourth 1 I want to ask is, what is your relationship to business ownership?

And again, I've given you some choices there.

You know, you're primarily an entrepreneur or you do it a little bit on the side or you're doing some experimentation.

And the experimentation, what I'm interested in there is if you've done an entrepreneurial venture enough to have revenue from it, even if you've only served 1 customer, okay?

If you've gotten to that point, that's what I'm thinking about when I think about experimenting.

If you're not a business owner, you may have been thinking about it, planning for it, even starting down the road, but if you haven't actually got a paying customer, that's where I would suggest you answer.

Okay, and we'll close that and see our distribution.

And it looks like the largest group is that third category.

People that are kind of experimenting, maybe you've tried a little bit, got at least 1 paying customer, maybe more.

And then smaller representations that are already fully engaged in ownership, some that are doing things on the side, and then some that just aren't in that space just yet.

It's fun to kind of get a sense for who's in the room.

So I asked the question, these last 2 questions, because I want to explain to you who we had in mind when we developed this little course.

We're specifically looking for younger folks in that teens, maybe early 20 category, who aren't necessarily veteran entrepreneurs just yet but are in some stage of evaluating or learning or trying to figure it out or decide if you want to do it or not, okay.

So if you're not in that class, you're as welcome to stay as you were at the beginning.

But I just want you to know who we're thinking of when we talk to you and what we're trying to get at.

Somebody I would think of, a young person who has maybe got a side gig or is thinking about getting into it, but not entirely sure.

And so that's what we had in mind when we kind of picked out these core competencies and thought we'd talk generally about what getting into the entrepreneurial world might look like.

The first 1 will be Nick, and he's going to...I'll let you introduce your own.

Jonathan will follow with his core competency that he's going to talk about.

I'm figuring we'll take maybe 30 minutes, give or take, for the 3 of us to talk, and that will leave about 15 or 20 minutes at the end for us to have some interaction and you to ask some questions.

So please feel free to take notes or think about questions you'd like to ask any of the 3 of us specifically or more broadly.

And if you can't think of any questions, we'll come up with some questions for you.

I have not a ton of an introduction planned for myself.

All 3 of us will be giving a longer presentation over the next couple of class sessions.

So you'll hear a little bit more about me then, but let me get my slides up here So the 1 that I wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about is product market fit.

Foundations of Effective Leadership

And if you were here for the first section on entrepreneurship, thanks for staying.

In this segment, we're gonna be talking specifically about leadership, what I view as foundational principles of effective leadership.

Now, I'm not saying that these are the only foundational principles, but we're gonna highlight 3 principles that I think can make a huge difference in your leadership if you are in a position of leading a team and starting a company.

All right, well, hopefully you'll leave here with some new insight and some potential tools in your tool bag.

So I'm gonna share just a few minutes about myself and my background.

So I grew up on a farm if you've come to add agar before you probably know my family the Dysinger family we have a farm in Middle, Tennessee and That was how I grew up.

I was like 7 years old I think and so I I really enjoyed it There's been some people that assume like, oh, he was just looking for a way to get out of farming.

I enjoyed farming, but I did feel like my natural inclinations and the way I kind of naturally leaned was more towards mechanical things.

I really enjoyed welding, taught myself to weld at an early age, and just enjoyed tinkering with equipment.

In 2012, I started my company Farmer's Friend, and pretty early on, I realized, like, I needed a team.

Like, I couldn't accomplish what I wanted to accomplish unless I had a team of people.

And starting out that was just 1 other person, but I also knew that in order to hit the goals that I had, like we needed to hire more.

So I think my first employee I hired right away, the second employee I hired like towards the end of 2014, a couple years in, and I made a ton of mistakes.

And I definitely will also say that I am a student of this topic myself.

So preparing this presentation was good for me just to like think about these things a little more deeply and just remind myself like of the areas where I can still do better.

So, definitely I'm not the expert And we're all in this together.

But I do have a little bit of experience, and I can share some of that with you.

1 of the things that I remember hearing, and I've heard it over the years, people say things like, well, running a business is great until you have to hire people, or, You know, it's great until people get involved.

And I hear things like that, I just like internally kind of like cringe a little bit because I'm like, well, I don't want that to be true for me because I want to have a place to work that like I enjoy going to work.

And hopefully my employees enjoy coming to work and find value in what they do and are able to work in a team environment where they get a lot of fulfillment and joy out of.

So, I think that's originally like really early on what kind of inspired me to try to learn more about effective leadership because I did not want to have personally those feelings like well the business like I was really enjoying what I did until I had to hire a few people and then everything went downhill from there.

Sure there's ups and downs but I can honestly say that right now Farmer's Friend there's We have about 35 employees and I deal with almost no drama from an HR perspective and I think that most of the people that come to work every day enjoy what they do and find value.

We've had ups and downs for sure, but at this point the Lord has really blessed us.

The first thing, let me just make sure I didn't miss anything on my notes.

So the first point I wanna talk about, and the first foundation of effective leadership is making sure that you create a vision and you have a clear mission.

So Proverbs 29, 18 says, where there is no vision, the people perish.

I know that this is not specifically talking about like a mission statement or a vision statement for your company.

This is like talking more about prophetic vision.

And it's really not too different if you think about it, the importance of having that vision.

All right, and so the leader of the company, the owner of the company has to create that vision and that mission.

Without that, you're like a ship without a rudder.

So a vision is a dream or a goal for the future.

It can be lofty and vague and may not be immediately practical.

A mission is a plan of action for how to achieve your vision.

It is a general statement that defines an organization's business objectives and how to achieve them.

A clear mission and a vision give your team a sense of purpose and direction and they align your team around common goals, shape decision-making, and communicate what you stand for.

And lastly, your mission statement helps you determine what opportunities to say no to.

And that's really important, that last 1, because when you get into business, it may, you know, if you're just starting out, it may not seem like this, but you will reach a point where the opportunities in front of you are sometimes endless.

You know, there's endless opportunities for things you could pursue.

And so if you get into business with this goal of just trying to make money, you'll go in every direction that it looks like there's some shiny dollars, right?

And so it's super important to have that mission, that focus that will keep you on the straight and narrow, so to speak.

So I'm gonna share a lot of personal stories and depending on how the time flies, we may hear more or less stories.

I could probably go for hours on some of these stories I've written down, but what I wanna talk about that specifically talks about or kind of is relevant when it comes to the vision and mission.

So when I started the company, obviously the first product was the Quick Cut Greens Harvester.

If not, it's just a small handheld device for harvesting salad greens.

Harvesting salad greens was very labor-intensive on small operations and so I wanted to try to figure out a way to do it more efficiently and thus you know the the Quick Cut Greens Harvester became a product.

And so from the very beginning, because of my background and also the product that I brought to market, we were really focused on that niche audience of small-scale commercial growers.

We immediately were selling a lot of product and were having a hard time keeping up.

But we also started getting requests from people who saw the product and said, hey, we could modify that.

Or we also made 1 prototype pretty early on of something that was dedicated just for harvesting microgreens.

So it was like on a conveyor, and you could put trays of microgreens and run them through.

And we made this little video and put it out on our YouTube channel.

And we started getting emails about this, like, hey, I have this big microgreens operation.

And so at the time, it was like, hey, sounds like if we got money, let's do this.

And so we started making these custom machines.

And it was, in some ways, a cool opportunity.

We did some custom work for a fairly large grocery food chain in the Northeast called Wegmans.

We did a tray harvester for wheatgrass for their farm up in Canandaigua We built this machine for a farm in UK I mean the guy flew here from from England and saw it and we Crated it up and shipped it to him And you know, so there's some cool opportunities, but really it was a huge distraction from the other things that we were, had the potential to focus on, which was in line with the core mission of serving small scale growers.

And so pretty Early on, I realized like that is, this is a distraction.

We spent about a year and a half kind of pursuing these other opportunities for these big companies.

They had money, they were willing to pay for it, but doing custom work is challenging and it did not align with our mission and it was not a product that we saw bringing to mass market for our primary audience of small scale growers.

And so as I spent a little bit of time thinking about, okay, what is our mission?

How do we focus the efforts of the company?

This is 1 thing that became pretty clear that we needed to cut it out.

We just basically quit working on the project.

People that were in the waiting line, we just told them, look, we're not going to be moving forward with this.

You can take the designs and do something with it if you want, but We're not going to be able to offer that service.

And so clearly defining your vision and a mission is important because not only does it tell you what to focus on, but it tells you what not to focus on.

And in the light of your team, it's a lot easier to get a team of people energized and excited about working for a vision that they can align to.

And so if you clearly define that vision, it's easier to find people who align to that.

And then you'll also be kind of letting them down and disappointing them if you don't stay true to that mission.

So I think that that vision and mission is 1 of the foundational principles.

And if you start out with that, I think you'll be miles ahead of somebody that just starts out with the goal of making money.

So, the second is to clearly define goals and expectations.

There's a couple different aspects to this.

So starting out, I would say, if you have employees who are going to be hiring people, create an employee handbook.

And this provides a consistent communication of policies and expectations, which takes a lot of pressure off you as the leader.

So I will be honest and admitting to you guys that Farmer's Friend, we've been in business for almost 13 years and we just officially rolled out a you know a company handbook about 2 years ago I think.

So I certainly could have done this a lot sooner.

And I'll say what was holding me up is I had this vision in my mind of this kind of perfect, you know, if you've ever heard the saying like perfection is the enemy of progress.

Entrepreneurial Finance

I'd like to begin by just offering a word of prayer, so if you'll join me.

For some of us maybe the first time today, for some of us maybe after several contacts already, but again, we are pleased to be in your presence doing work that we pray that you will bless and guide, help us to grow in our understanding of stewardship of financial resources in Jesus name.

What I would like to do is begin by telling you just a touch about me.

Many of you already know me somewhat, but I'll give a little bit of an introduction that maybe is more specific to today's topic.

And while I'm doing that, I'm going to put up this poll.

Those of you who were with us yesterday are familiar with this, but if not, what you do is just take a picture of that code up on the screen, and it'll take you to a place where you can answer some poll questions, which is what I'm going to do when I'm done introducing myself, just to find out a little bit about y'all, who's in the room.

I'm not supposed to use that term since I left Oklahoma, but I can't get rid of it out of my vocabulary.

I've been an accountant for my entire career.

I passed that exam out of college, and so that's been part of my credentials ever since then.

Most people, when they hear CPAs, think of taxes.

And that's understandable, because that's what a lot of CPAs do.

I've been more in companies doing work like, you know, accounting.

In my last several stops I've been like a chief financial officer, a CFO.

There's a lot of CPAs that do that work, but it's a little different discipline than taxes.

And so I don't need to go deep into that, but my experience and perspective is much more from the industry or the company side.

I'm very, I would say, sophomoric when it comes to taxes.

I know a little bit, but I'm not really an expert in that frame.

And then most recently I've been doing, actually much of my career I've been in companies that were owned by either families, like closely held families, or in some cases individuals.

So I have a view of entrepreneurship from that perspective.

And then in my most recent rendition of my career I've actually got several clients that are smaller, but all entrepreneurs.

So that's really where I come from is an experience, is from the experience of serving entrepreneurs as their accountant or internal finance expert.

What I'd like to do is open this poll and just ask a couple of questions designed to figure out a little bit about who's in the room.

How well do you like or how well do you think you'd like accounting, bookkeeping, and finance matters?

It's okay, but it's not your favorite or it's just like the worst thing you can think about every day is spending time thinking about money.

I like to get a little bit of a sense of the personality of the room and seeing if I'm trying to convert people from haters to maybe not just haters or if you already are in love with it and you know whatever.

So I'll leave the poll open for just a couple more seconds if you want to respond.

Looks like we've got about 25 or so of you responding and I'll close the poll.

There are a few more haters than what I was expecting.

I shouldn't say haters, that's not the right word.

It's just you don't enjoy talking about it.

And then the bulk of you are kind of in that middle category.

There's a few of you that, like me, actually enjoy talking about this stuff.

I need to sit with you at dinner and we can just have all kinds of stories.

My wife doesn't enjoy accounting like I do.

So we talk about other things when we're having dinner at home.

How proficient do you consider yourself to be?

That's different than whether or not you like it.

Now, sometimes you like it and you're good, but sometimes you like it but you're not that good, right?

You're very comfortable, you do okay, but you're not an expert, you're barely adequate, or you just absolutely know nothing.

Again, I'm just kind of curious for a personality of who's in the room.

And it may actually guide or direct how far I go on various topics or the way I approach them.

But I just kind of like to get a feel here.

So we'll go ahead and close this down and see how our results are.

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Series

The Entrepreneur's Toolbox

Entrepreneurial Finance

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Entrepreneurial Core Competencies

53m

Foundations of Effective Leadership

52m

Entrepreneurial Finance

45m

Sound Doctrine