Who will be the winners when agriculture finishes reinventing itself?
The ones who went big? The ones who found small profitable niches? Or the ones who diversified?
I wouldn’t bet on any particular path, but rather on the person walking it. I’d want the ones who can keep going even when things seem hopeless. People like Chris Griffiths.
Griffiths isn’t a farmer, he’s a guitar maker. He could possibly be the most innovative one in the last 200 years. When he was 22, the Newfoundlander came up with the idea of using injection moulding to create great guitars at a bargain price.
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A traditional guitar skeleton involves precision cutting 30 pieces of wood and then painstakingly assembling them in a process that takes two hours or more. Griffiths’ glass fibre framework takes a mere 45 seconds to produce. And what’s more, you can make a $900 guitar sound as good as one costing twice as much.
It’s tempting to say his great idea is why Griffiths became a multi-millionaire before the age of 30, but it wouldn’t be true.
“Ideas are the easiest part of the whole process, but what counts is the execution of the idea – turning it into a thriving and sustainable business,” Griffiths said.
The story of Garrison Guitars is amazing and it’s well told at www.innovation.gc.ca (type in Griffiths in the search box).
But let’s skip past the first five years during which the injection-moulding process was refined, patents obtained, marketing studies done and every nickel Griffiths had or could borrow was consumed.
It’s January 2000 and Griffiths is about to use the last of $250,000 advanced by angel investors to fly to Los Angeles for a four-day trade show. That’s when the investors dropped their bombshell: If you want $3.5 million for a factory, come back with sales orders for a year’s worth of production, or 7,000 guitars.
“I had four days and if I didn’t get it right, that’d be it,” he said.
“It was ludicrous. The company didn’t exist, we didn’t even have a logo. We’re building guitars in a way that had never been done before, and all we had were our prototypes and a 10-by-20 booth at a trade show among 1,300 established manufacturers.”
Griffiths was 26 at the time, but everything was on the line. This is a guy whose dream was to make guitars and have his own shop. And at age 19 he’d done it.
He’d poured everything into Griffiths Guitar Works. He’d sold his car to pay for the rent, sponged off his parents and lived like a monk. His first year in business, he drew only $751 in salary, a level of sacrifice even he admits was a little over the top.
“When I was 19, I really didn’t have that much to lose. But now I had basically driven Griffiths Guitar Works to the brink of bankruptcy. That’s a whole new level of risk.”
It was a desperate time.
Armed with a list of the 2,200 buyers attending the show, he sent each one a letter, fax and e-mail and with the help of friends posing as employees, phoned them. The result: 112 prearranged meetings, a buzz that had crowds ringing his booth, and, after four frantic days in L.A., letters of intent for 56,000 guitars.
And so Garrison Guitars factory was born, and today turns out 25,000 guitars a year. But it was oh-so-close to being a dream that died. Why didn’t it?
It wasn’t that Griffiths couldn’t contemplate the idea of failure. It was the idea of quitting while there was still a chance that he couldn’t accept.
“I didn’t want to be 65 and wondering if I gave up on it too early. I didn’t want to live with ‘what if?’ “
Most new businesses – and if you’re reinventing your farm business you’re in that category -fail within the first few years.
What would you do if desperation time hits? Is your business dream one you’d fight to the end for or just a half-hearted plan to boost your income? If it’s the latter, listen to a guy who found success by risking
it all.
“I don’t think I would have sacrificed what I did if all I had been thinking of was a financial payoff,” Griffiths said. “I couldn’t have kept believing during the six years of uncertainty, worry and running my first business almost into bankruptcy. You need more than that.”
Glenn Cheater is editor of Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the
Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns can be found in the news desk
section at www.farmcentre.com.
