Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
If that famous quote were true, there’d be a lot of rich farmers.
Most farmers are always tinkering in their workshops, either modifying equipment or creating something new from scratch.
Some of their inventions make it into commercial production but countless others never get past the prototype phase.
How many farmers would have a lucrative side business if their marketing savvy matched their ingenuity?
“You can invent the best mousetrap in the world,” says Raymond Dueck.
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“But if there’s not someone pounding out sales, all you’ve got is just another mousetrap. You need to fire up people’s imaginations about how they would benefit from owning this product you’ve created.”
Dueck should know.
The Manitoba entrepreneur is a compulsive inventor who holds 14 U.S. patents and has five more pending.
More importantly, he’s sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of carpet and vinyl carousels, motorized bike racks, propane tank dispensers, grain bins and other products.
Many of his patents relate to those carpet and vinyl flooring carousels you see in places like Home Depot.
They are the core business of Dueck’s first manufacturing company, Vidir Machine.
He also has patents on rotary cutters, a wire carousel and a motorized bicycle storage system.
Dueck’s newest venture is a biomass energy system, which uses round straw bales as a heating fuel.
He’s also got a composter that can handle 350 pounds of deadstock per day and a nifty portable dock.
He laughs when asked if he’s one of those guys who wakes in the middle of the night yelling, ‘Eureka!’
“Well yeah, I have a sketch book and when I wake up in the middle of the night, I go and get it,” says Dueck. “I have all kinds of things in that sketch book that haven’t happened yet.”
One of the things that hasn’t happened yet is the DrumDock, even though Dueck has built a prototype.
“That particular product is, in a sense, a failure,” says Dueck.
“I mean I have one at my cottage and I’m getting use out of it. And I know it’s a good product, especially in areas where you have to take your dock out for winter because this dock rolls on its drum floats and it’s really easy to get in and out of the water.
“But it’s a failure because I haven’t gotten around to going to dock sellers and finding one who would take this up as a product line and promote it. So I haven’t sold any. That’s the only definition of success that counts.”
Sometimes you can get lucky, he adds.
Actually, that is how Vidir Machine got its start.
Ray and his brother were running a lumber store in Arborg, Man., (near the defunct village of Vidir) in the 1980s when they asked their father, Willie, if he could fabricate a display rack to hold rolls of carpet and vinyl flooring.
Flooring salesmen who visited the store were impressed, told others, and the rest is history.
Vidir Machine did well but had only 16 employees when Ray, who had built another venture, joined in 1995.
He focused on creating a better-selling mousetrap.
He hired an engineer to officially certify the rack as structurally sound and he made some cosmetic changes to improve its appearance.
“Technically speaking, those were minor improvements but from a marketing standpoint it was a big improvement,” says Dueck.
“Home Depot really liked that it was engineer-certified. That’s how we got into its stores south of the border, and that’s when things took off.”
Today, Vidir Machine employs 100 people. Dueck now runs another company, Vidir Morris, which does powder coating on everything from bins to tandem trailers and manufactures grain bins as well as Biomass Energy Systems (see www.innovaat.com).
Vidir Morris employs another 50 people.
Dueck says he’s run into a lot of impressive innovators over the years, many of them farmers.
He believes a lot more would be making money from their inventions if they’d stop waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.
“Take a look at Bill Gates. When the personal computer business was getting started, he had the worst software of anybody out there,” says Dueck.
“But he did the best job of selling, and that’s what it boils down to. You don’t have to start with the perfect product.”
Nor do you have to be as ambitious as Bill Gates. If you’ve got an innovative idea or product you’ve created for yourself, consider who else might benefit from it.
And then beat a path to their door.
Glenn Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found at www.farmcentre.com.
