Brenda had to figure out what to do with her love of number-crunching. Mark wanted to find a way to stay involved with farming, be his own boss and not have to drive a tractor.
Both spent the early 2000s trying to figure out what they should be doing, and ended up forming a company that now has hundreds of clients who farm millions of acres across the Prairies.
“Where have I come from? Well, I came from a farm. What can I do with that?”
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That’s how Brenda Tjaden Lepp helped find her way toward forming FarmLink Marketing Solutions.
Tjaden Lepp had been working as a Winnipeg-based consultant after spending a few years working for Louis Dreyfus Canada and Cargill, but wanted something more focused than contract-to-contract consulting work.
For Mark Lepp, the path to co-founding FarmLink with Tjaden Lepp developed out of his interest in almost everything about farming except for the actual farming.
“What I liked about farming was the finances, the budgets, the marketing. I liked the overall planning,” said Lepp, who had been operating his own farm at Elm Creek, Man., and working for a seed and chemical company.
“The part I wasn’t so keen on, and I certainly wasn’t good at, was the day-to-day farming.”
He had noticed that some good farmers were often bad marketers. Tjaden Lepp noticed that many farmers seemed to subscribe to market newsletters but never read them.
They decided to form a company that could take over the marketing requirements of commercial farms, something that would allow Tjaden Lepp to focus her analysis and Lepp to embrace his love of farm financial management.
It’s worked out well for the couple, who live just outside Winnipeg.
They started off gingerly and modestly with a small office in west Winnipeg with only a few staff, Tjaden-Lepp doing most of the daily market analysis and Lepp doing much of the direct financial advice to farmers.
They discovered a far bigger demand for their type of customized marketing advice and management than they expected, so they started adding farm advisers and analysts.
Within the past few years they have added staff across the Prairies, with 27 advisers scattered from the Peace River country of Alberta to southeastern Manitoba.
The west Winnipeg office proved too small for the growing operation, so they left it and moved to the Portage and Main area of downtown, in the midst of the Canadian grain industry and all the main players of the prairie ag market.
That office now houses three full time market analysts who work closely with Tjaden-Lepp, as well as administrative staff.
With the CWB monopoly on wheat and barley gone and new grain buyers and marketers moving into Canada and into the Portage and Main area, the relocation has worked out well, although they are already considering expanding their bigger offices.
It’s been an intensely busy few years for the couple, setting up their own business and expanding it across Western Canada, but they have also been busy at home, having two babies while expanding FarmLink.
They now have dozens of employees across the Prairies and more than 700 clients who pay them top dollar to manage their crops sale-by-sale, connecting sales to both market outlook and cash flow needs and combining it with personalized risk tolerance profiles.
They’ve learned a few things along the way. Lepp was surprised that the people who seemed to him to be the worst marketers were often the least interested in hiring someone like him.
However, the farmers who seemed to be the best farm marketers were most interested in hiring someone like him to take over those duties.
“We quickly saw that we were getting the guys that were better at it,” said Mark.
“They were good at marketing, but they had more important things to do with their time that would have a bigger impact on the farm.”
Tjaden Lepp has been interested to see how much farmers like to talk with each other.
“These guys like to get together,” said Tjaden Lepp, who hopes to use Twitter, online discussion forums and Facebook to create a community of like-minded farmers.
“Here’s this new space, social media, where we can all hang out together.”
While their decision to launch a marketing management company had nothing to do with the upcoming changes to the CWB monopoly, it was perfectly time to fit a growing need.
During the last years of the monopoly, as the CWB added many Producer Payment Options, grain marketing got more complex for farmers who wanted to attempt to do more than just stay in the pools.
And now with the CWB gone, marketing malting barley and many types of wheat and durum has gotten much more risky and challenging.
Farmers who at one time were actively marketing only canola, oats and special crops suddenly found themselves having at first the opportunity and now the requirement to market all the board grains, too. Many have decided to employ outside help to market their production, and FarmLink is one of the places they have gone.
For more information visit www.farmlinksolutions.ca.
