Gregg Sauder could be on a beach sipping a Mai Tai right now after selling Precision Planting for $250 million in 2012. But that’s just not in his DNA. An unrelenting drive and passion to help farmers succeed pushes him to keep grinding.
“We’re probably working harder now than we’ve ever worked in our lives, and I felt like we were pretty busy before,” says Sauder, who founded Precision Planting with his wife, Cindy, in 1993. “It was never a question of whether we’re going to take this income and just relax. The question was how can we change ag?
“It’s not easy to start over and we had a great team of individuals at Precision Planting. You quickly learn in business it’s never about yourself. It’s about the team that surrounds you. We built Precision Planting one step at a time from the ground up. When we started 360, I realized I don’t have all that much more time, so we did the opposite and started from the top down. I enjoy the challenge of getting the company where it needs to be. We’ve brought in the right talent, and it’s working out for us.”
Sauder is a farmer who became an inventor out of necessity. Before his Precision Planting days, he spent many sleepless nights worrying about a five-figure financial hole and inaccurate planters costing him yield.
“Lord, I didn’t marry Cindy to bankrupt her,” Sauder recalls praying one night.
The light bulb flickered in 1993 when Sauder started planting 20-inch narrow row corn.
“Planters weren’t designed to do that,” he recalls. “We immediately started to reinvent the meter so it would singulate at that low RPM. Once I jumped in, I said, ‘Man, these meters need a lot of help.’ Pretty soon neighbors were asking, ‘Can you do mine?’ We started custom setting planters, and it just took off from there.”
“I was never satisfied with the way equipment ran. I can remember long before we even had a farm shop, I’d be laying out in a white rock drive, with nothing but a vice grip and a crescent wrench, trying to re-shape, re-build and re-weld. I’ve always enjoyed that side of it.”
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