SharkFarmerXM's podcast
Beck's Brothers: live from Becknology Days
And welcome again to the shark farmer radio. Hey, we are live at technology days just outside of Atlanta, Indiana. Me and Emily out here. Are you still having fun? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Things are still rocking here too. It's not even beginning to unwind. Yeah, it's different than other farm shows because I think the people are nicer. The people are nice here, yeah. Plus you go on the other farm shows and they want to hit you with their golf carts. You don't get that so much here. You guys do a good job with that. Golf cart etiquette. That's Chris. Yeah. Okay. All right, Emily, we've got quite the guest today. Would it be offensive to say the Beck Boys? I think that's accurate actually. You know how some people get sensitive about that though. You're okay with that? Fine with it. The Beckman. That sounds like a last name though. That sounds like a soccer player. We actually have a guy Daniel Beckman. He works for us. Okay. Maybe you don't do that. All right, Jason Beck, Chris Beck, and Corey Beck. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you. Glad to be here. Thank you for having us. Thank you. All in the triple threat. We could. Okay. All right. So who's the oldest? I'm the oldest. Corey. And who's the middle? I am Chris. Okay. I'll say your names. Who's the youngest? I'm Jason. I'm the youngest. Jason. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that. Okay. You guys were born into a seed company. So if you're sitting around like a day like today, right? You got technology days. This is something that you literally had every year growing up. Yeah. We as kids, though, the ice cream was tucked away in the president's club in the basement though. So we didn't have the ease of access to the ice cream like we do now. And it's just a little bit bigger than maybe it was when we were kids. But yeah, every August. So whose decision was it to make ice cream available to the masses? I'm going to say it was Toby, but it probably wasn't. I don't know. He runs the technology day experience, so he gets credit and blame for everything. Corey, you got a lot to learn. So when I say something like that, you say that was my idea. I'm the one. I'll hit it next time. Give me another softball. Okay. All three of you are involved with Bex Hybrid. I guess tell us what your positions, what your jobs are. My title is business and supplier strategist, and that basically entails working with our suppliers, you know, Bayer, Cortez, and Jenna, where we access trades and genetics. And then I lead part of our finance team, accounts receivable, accounts payable, and our financial planning team. A talent acquisition specialist is my title. There's two of us on our talent acquisition team. It's myself and Tanner Maxie, and we really just help with the recruitment efforts for Bex, all across the board. I run our intern program. We bring in 40 to 50 interns every summer, and then I also do some labor compliance. So, for us working our facilities department as a project lead, primarily for new construction and remodel construction, and lead those teams, and then overseeing kind of the care and maintenance of our facilities. Uh-huh. So, you're working here, very well-run organization, very well-run company. You don't report to your dad, correct? Correct. Correct. So, having that last name back, is that an advantage or disadvantage? I think it's both. You know, but the disadvantage actually comes from, I think, maybe we don't always get all the constructive feedback that maybe we need, and... Why? No one wants to complain to you? Well, maybe it's that. Maybe it's, you know, a fear of just, you know, not wanting to be too disruptive with the family or whatever, you know, honestly, there's a lot of advantages, but I do think it's important that we show up every day, and we work hard and make people, you know, aware that we need advice, we need criticism, just like everybody else. Hey, you get a sleep in though, right? I don't, I don't sleep very much right now. Could you ever say your boss comes in, wait, you put your 15 minutes leg, just walk in and say, "Hey, I'm a Beck." I can promise to you, none of the three of us have ever said that. Jason, is advantage or disadvantage? I mean, I fully agree with what, with what Corey said. It can, it can be both. And what I always like to, to highlight is that even when it is, it can be considered an advantage. I, I really view it as accountability and responsibility with showing up on, showing up early, showing up on time, being someone who is a person of integrity, and wants to add value to the business, add value to our co-workers, and just really serve alongside everyone here that we have within the business. Chris, I hear you show up late all the time. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, the two of them said it well. There's advantages and disadvantages, but I think more than anything. What I find a lot of, a lot of value and joy and is just kind of, just being a part of the team. Like not, you know, not thinking of yourself any different than anybody else, but just being a part of the effort and the, yeah, being a part of the effort and the team is what, what keeps me going. Okay. I always thought it'd be somewhat of a, of a challenge, right? Because, you know, would I be judged on what I'm doing or are people going to treat me different? I've got a whole lot of questions. I want to delve into them. Yeah. So I, I can't wait. Emily, today we are talking with Corey, Chris and Jason back and we'll come back. Yeah, we're going to invest, we're going to investigate further. Is he going to investigate or interrogate? We'll find out. I think I've been good so far, but we're going to push a little more each time. Let her in. We'll be back. All right. After the break. A ground shaker, a rule breaker. Hold tight and roll your through every acre. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect land owners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io. That's commonground.io. And welcome back, sir, Carmen Radio. We're live here at technology days just outside of Atlanta, Indiana. Emily, you just, you just can't wait to be done to get the ice cream cone. I am looking forward to the ice cream cones. Yeah. This has been a fun day. I mean, people are taking the buggies out. They're going through the fields. They're finding out what new things they want to try on their farm next year. We got the root reveal. I love the root reveal. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I never do. Well, of course they never grow that good on my farm. The roots, because I've got a plow pan layer. It's about two inches deep. So I always wonder why you get about six bushels and acres. Oh, gosh. Today, we're talking with Corey, Chris, and Jason back. They are the, what do you call them? The triple threat. The triple threat. Do you like, do you guys like that? Whatever you want to call us is fine. Did you guys come right back to work for the family company after you got done with the college? No, we, each of us did a few different things. I spent a little bit of time doing commercial real estate before coming back to the business. I spent a little over a year down in Texas working for fidelity investments, financial services industry. I coached college football at Duke in Durham, North Carolina. Yeah, remember that. Was you head coach, offense, defense? No, assistant quarterback's coach. Assistance quarterback coach. They're the divas of the football team. The quarterbacks. Actually, that's probably the wide receivers. Oh, okay. Or the tight ends. It's all good. Do you think that was a good decision? Do you think? If someone's coming back to a family farm, family business, that they should go work somewhere else first? I think it's a great decision. And, you know, I spent a year doing it. And I think I could argue that I should have spent a little bit longer time. But I referenced those lessons learned from having a different boss and a different experience being away from home all the time. You know, I quoted, you know, my former boss, head coach at Duke, in the president's message earlier today. So I'm constantly going back to those experiences. I agree with what Corey just said. I think I could have spent, and I mentioned it earlier on a different panel, but I think I could have spent a little bit longer down in Texas as well. It's Texas, though. Why would you want to go down there? It's nothing but heat and hatred. I had a connection that led me down there, but I did end up back here after a year and a lot of it was because of the heat, so. What do you think? Advantage or disadvantage? Coming straight back? You know, definitely the experience that you get going somewhere else is I think it was paramount for me, anyways, coming back here. As Corey said, you learn to work for somebody else. You figure out, you know, the pros and cons of other businesses. It gives you good perspective and kind of just look at things with a little bit different lens. And that way when you come back to the business, you don't just immediately think, "Oh, these things are, we don't like these things. We like these other things." And it just, yeah, it allows you to see things just from a different viewpoint. Plus, if Chris hadn't gone and done commercial real estate, he would have never come back with all these crazy stories about one of his former co-workers. So we would have been deprived of some Tom stories. Tom's a great guy. We had a lot of fun. I mean, we're listening. No Tom stories? After the show, maybe? Okay. One thing I like about Bex is that you guys can openly share your faith. You can talk about your faith. That is not true in a lot of big business, a lot of agriculture. So my question to all three of you, out of all of the sins out there in the world. Oh no. Which one is your favorite? I mean, that is like the worst setup question I've ever had. Somebody needs a media training, I guess. Can't handle that one. I don't know. Is eating too much ice cream a sin? No. That would be Chris's favorite. If you say yes, you hate dairy farmers. No, that is not a sin. Kind of like the Bob stories, huh? We're just not going to get. So here you guys are in a family business that embraces faith. Tell us what that means to you. You know, it's really a blessing because I think we get to show up in a shame of what we believe in. We can stand by our convictions of things. It allows us the opportunity to show up real every day. You don't get a lot of that in today's world yet. There's just a lot of things going on where you got to be real careful about this and real careful about that because you don't want to offend somebody. You don't want to, you know, what if it's bad for business type of thing? You know, they opportunity to just embrace it and own it and say, hey, this is, we're going to stand in this totally, totally unashamed. I love that and I'm glad to be a part of that. I think I just enjoy being able to show up and know that I have like-minded folks around me and we just have a foundation. When you have a foundation in the business and when you have a foundation with the rest of our employees, people know what the truth is. They know that they can have consistency. They know that they can have reliability in what we do and what we provide and who we show up as, Chris mentioned, who we show up as. I think that's a key point and something that I really appreciate about having a solid foundation within BECS. Yeah, you got to behave yourself too, right? Because you're the BEC boys, right? So if you're like leaving the office and you slam your finger in the door, you've got to go, oh, son of a gun. We just say, oh, Sonny. [laughter] All right, that's clever. Maybe they didn't tell you, I'll do the humor. Sorry. [laughter] So you don't actually work for your dad. I would find that difficult because what if you see stuff in the business that you think is wrong? You can't really go to your dad because then you're going over. Do you find it hard to navigate all that stuff? I work with my dad, so I go to my dad all the time. When I have ideas or thoughts or questions, I think that's part of our organization. It's just he and I just talking about the family business. So I don't know that it's seen as going over somebody or around somebody. Because I would have the same comments that I have with my dad. I might have with my boss, Tom. That's a Tom. The Tom story? That's a different Tom story. That's why you don't want to talk about it that way. I enjoy talking about our business, so I talk about our business with my dad. I would say it's no different for me. My boss is Mike in the Human Resources Department. The things that I talk to Mike about, I'll talk to my dad about. I just have very open lines of communication, which I think is great, and just builds that trust within the business as well. Yeah, I have a similar experience in that regard. My supervisor Caleb, we actually both work really closely with my Grandpa all Sunday on a lot of projects because of his involvement on the facilities side of things. So I think there's all the time, there's ideas that are kicked around, and there's conversations that are had that it's not about going over or around somebody. It's just about running a family business. And so it makes sense that the family talks about the direction of the family business. All right, we've got to go to break. Today we're talking about Corey, Chris, and Jason back. We'll be back. This segment is brought to you by Common Ground. Are you looking for an easy way to buy, sell, or lease your land? Well, check out Common Ground where they connect landowners and farmers and hunters too, by the way. Go to commonground.io, that's commonground.io. [silence] [music] This is Shark Palmer Radio. We are back in technology days just outside of Atlanta, Indiana. We've got three great guests. We've got Corey, Chris, and Jason Beck. They are the all sons of Scott Beck. I get your dad and your grandpa mixed up sometimes. Why don't they go by different names? I don't know, because Scott and Sonny is too close together. You think you could work on that for me? I mean, I think you're the only person in my life who has said that those names are too close together. I think this is your problem. [laughter] Now we got them loosened up, don't we? Here, finally, the third segment. Now we got them going. Okay, all right. So tell me, what was the name of your first girlfriend? [laughter] You go first, Jason. [laughter] Okay, we've been talking about you coming back to the family business and that. Are you guys able to separate, so like Thanksgiving? I mean, are we talking about how many seed we're selling or whatever? Are we talking about other stuff? Are you able to separate? Yes and no. You know, it's part of us. So I think I'm not sure that we've ever had Thanksgiving together where something business-related didn't come up. But at the same time, there also is some separation. There's other things that we enjoy doing together. But the business is also what we enjoy doing together. So I don't know how to answer that. Sometimes we separate, sometimes we don't, but it really all kind of runs together. Yeah, I think they both said it well. And I think the thing that I really like about it honestly is that even though they kind of, you know, sometimes we have separation, sometimes we don't. When we're doing it for the business and all together, it's just a lot of fun. It's seeing the whole family involved and plugged in. And, you know, one of those times shows up, probably the clearest force is like, you know, at the end of the year for our Christmas party with employees. It's a chance for the whole family to get together with our employees and serve in that way. So there is some separation, but we really enjoy doing it together. So if I get exhausted and I have to take time to rest my brain, my go-to is kayaking, right? So you guys are all into sports and you all have your downtime. You have been on vacation. Do you guys duck hunt together? Do you guys pick a vacation where you just get away with your dad and just do the guy thing or what do you do to rest your brain? I can resonate somewhat with the kayaking thing just being on the water. That's kind of my enjoyment and I guess finding peace there. Taking a little bit of time every now and then to just unplug a little bit and enjoy being out in nature and going boating with friends or with family and just kind of spending some time on the water. Yeah, we enjoy a lot of sports, like you mentioned, boating, surfing, being really any type of water sports and then you mentioned hunting. Dad's always been very intentional with all of us boys specifically or us men about spending time with us and so we did spend some time a few years back and Arkansas on a hunting trip really enjoyed doing some duck hunting and some pheasant hunting and so we just enjoy spending time together. I'm a football guy so I like going to football games and watching football games. Yeah, it's fun for me. When it comes to the hunting, who's the best shot? I won the ski shooting competition. I forgot that he won. As did I. Who's got the best duck call? None of us, yeah. At least you're honest. Chris, what did you do at Horseshoe Bend? Yeah, so that was a guy's trip that we took. Actually, it was when Corey when he graduated from Purdue, Dad said, "Hey, we'd like to take a trip with you guys and we're going to go out to the Horseshoe Bend area and do some fly fishing and so we got to do that." It was a blast because we just got to unplug for a few days. It was a relatively short trip but it was an opportunity to spend time with our dad and together and, again, for me being in that nature thing, just some really neat views spending time, again, out in the water and doing some sporting activity and fly fishing. Did you go up top and look over it? Yeah, we did a little bit of that. I can't remember exactly where we were at when we looked over but yeah. Yeah, I know we don't remember. If you were a dad, you would remember because we went there and my kids, you know what they do? They take their phone and then they go past the guardrails and they're taking pictures like this and they're like this far from the edge and everybody's doing it. They're all hanging over. I'm freaking funny. And then as we're leaving because they're all making you, you made fun of me. My kids are making fun of me as I'm leaving. I'm interested. I'm a Google. How many people fell off, horseshoe, whatever it was? Like 15 last year. Yeah. They're all making fun of me. I'm just trying to protect people. So I know you don't remember. But you two both have kids, right? Or who has kids? Poor and I. Okay. What do you have? I have two girls. I've got a four-month-old Olivia and a two-and-a-half-year-old Blair. Okay. We've got an almost two-year-old Lydia and then we've actually got a boy on the way at the end of November. No, good night. Okay. And you're working on it? That's a good description. We'll leave that there. All right. Last question. What do you guys want to know? What's it like coming from this family, coming back to work for BEX? Maybe something they wouldn't understand. What would you like people to know? What do I want somebody to know who's coming to work for BEX? You know, everybody kind of would like wonder what it's like to be you guys. Is it difficult? Is it awesome? You know, do you have to work harder? Do you have to work less? Everybody's kind of curious. I think we all work harder. I also think it's awesome to be me. So to answer that part of your question. It's awesome to be you. It's awesome to be me. No. I do think we work harder, you know, but I think it's part of, you know, it's who we want to be. Values that we want to demonstrate as a family. And it's just an important part of our culture here. Yeah. So I think it's harder to come back. You know, there's a lot of people, you know, question. Some of what we talked about earlier, question, you know, decision making or, you know, what you're doing or maybe why you're invited to this or that. And so I think it's part of the territory, you know, being a member. But it's something that I enjoy being a part of and something that I enjoy stepping into that responsibility and leading others in that way. I think there's definitely, you know, there's a little bit of pressure that we get. You know, people watch what you do, right? You're a family member coming back to the business. They're interested in how you're going to, you know, fit in with the business and work with the business. But I think for me, it's just about, you know, leading by example and the best I can with the skill sets that I've been given. And, you know, just, I like to place as much emphasis as I can on just wanting to serve alongside other people. And, you know, I find a lot of enjoyment of, you know, being the guy in the trenches, just, you know, shovel in hand. And also helping make decisions and lead the company in a way for the future that I think will be a benefit to the family and to our family of employees. Well, I will say it's probably a lot harder being you three than you're letting on, right? Because a lot of eyes on you, a lot of expectations. The way you guys handle it yourself, not just up here, but the way you guys handle it yourself, working for BEX, representing the company, representing the family. It's really a tribute to your upbringing. It's a tribute to your maturity. We could all sit here and name kids from, you know, families that own companies that miss me, that have not handled it as well. So, I mean, it's a true tribute to your family, the way you guys have been able to navigate all these waters and become the successes that you become. I agree with you, a tribute to our family. And also, you know, there's a lot of employees that have worked here for 20, 30, 40 years that play a role in that too. We've got a lot of long-term employees that are still here that have watched us grow up and have invested in us, and so I don't want to discount the role that they played to in our upbringing. Okay, just take the compliment, maybe. (laughter) No, you guys do fantastic. You've done a great job up here. Emily, this is it for you and me this year. It is. It's been a great experience. Another technology day. Yes, it's an extremely well-run program, so thank you to all the part of the show up here. Everybody else, we'll catch you next time. (music)