I’m a Kansas businessman first with a company that serves the national oil and gas industry. And yes, I’m a problemsolver who loves a good challenge and isn’t afraid to create and nurture something instead of accepting status quo. I saw opportunity to make a ranch manager’s job easier.
Back in 2011, I helped ride cattle with a ranch manager who was shorthanded. I mentioned I could write a feed program that might save him a lot of time in the evenings. He told me I was crazy and there was no way it could be done. I sat down for a week and wrote a program in Microsoft® Excel that allowed a ranch manager to enter very little information and print a daily load and feed sheet.
A few years went by. Sometime in 2015, I met with a cattle nutritionist working for approximately 1,500 different ranches across the country. He said he’d seen the feed program and asked if it was for sale because most of the ranches he works for could use something like this.
We stepped back and decided to get serious about developing the program into legitimate software for the ranch/feedyard industry. That was generation 2, and we learned the feed program was great but very hard to sell without commensurate inventory and invoicing capabilities. Late in 2016, we began reprogramming and are launching with a third generation that is pretty darn smart.
A cowboy’s job never ends. It’s all hours of the day, and sometimes night, seven days a week. CowboySmart is so clean and simple it literally gives back at least an hour a day to the ranch manager, and it will give younger managers with families a better quality of life. Ranch hands like it because they get bunk sheets with instructions that are crystal clear. They do their jobs better.
A ranch/feedyard manager’s job is to keep cattle healthy and thriving and that means expert management of rations and meds. CowboySmart controls cost of gain because you can better manage rations, accurately dose and track meds and bid feed rations with a larger network of vendors.
Some ranch managers do pretty much everything. Larger operations have different units or teams that take care of moving cattle, processing cattle, doing the paperwork, feeding, etc. CowboySmart is useful for the one-man show and large ranches with feedyards. It saves time, regardless of size.
When a ranch or feedyard manager becomes a CowboySmart user, he enters all his vendors in the CowboySmart system so he can quote, order and invoice supplies. CowboySmart becomes a closed loop for his operating system. Those same vendors can also choose to subscribe to the CowboySmart system so they’re seen by all the ranch/feedyard users within a desired radius. In that way, CowboySmart becomes a business development tool for them or the top of their sales funnel. The number of RFQs they get can literally explode.
There’s of course a reverse benefit for the rancher/feedyard manager. If I issue an RFQ for hay to the vendors in the system and get back 10 quotes, I can tell pretty quickly if my long-time vendor is cost-competitive. CowboySmart keeps things honest and benefits everyone.
Yes. Every ranch/feedyard owner is proud of his operation so we created a way to incorporate owner brands, if desired, into the software screens. Ranch hands could see JBS CowboySmart on their bunk sheets, for example. The general ranch public will see CowboySmart.
That we held the line on its simplicity. I’m not a real cowboy but I’m part of this world and I wanted CowboySmart to stay grounded and true to the individuals who will use it to manage their operations. They’re smart cowboys with integrity and insatiable work ethic and I believed I could help them move closer to making the profits they deserve.
Bright. It’s hard to believe but there are so many ranch managers still doing rations and med calculations by hand and shuffling mounds of paper. Compared to other extremely sophisticated ranch management software programs, CowboySmart is easy to use and an unbelievable time saver. Ranch users will tell you they spend four minutes each evening on what they used to do in an hour.
Fast. We expect CowboySmart to gain traction in the U.S. pretty quickly and foresee interest on big cattle stages like Brazil and Argentina. CowboySmart is designed to benefit everyone: ranch/feedyard owners, ranch/feedyard managers, rations vendors, medications vendors, shipping vendors, veterinarians, ranch/feedyard nutritionists, national ag retailers, equipment suppliers, area retail stores that sell to ranches/feedyards, ag associations and coops and service businesses that work in this industry.
Also, subscription fees for ranch/feedyard users and vendors are very low, and CowboySmart is designed with ad placement opportunities for the largest national retailer and the local 4-H.