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Good morning Path to Warren podcast. It is Monday morning after a long July 4 weekend. It is July 6, and I want to thank you for being a part of this Episode Six as we share about my experience working at one of the largest vegetable producing farms in the Southeast. So just to pick up where we left off on episode five, episode five, I shared about the experience of working at a really large commercial landscaping company right out of College after I sold my pine straw business and 2008 2009 economic downturn had hit, and I found myself needing to make a change. And once I made up my mind that it was time to make a change, I’m pretty set when it comes to something like that. So I’d gone through my entire LinkedIn connections. I found a person who was actually an old fraternity brother that I saw was part owners of this huge vegetable farm, and I reached out to him. The interview process is something that probably needs to be shared about. I’ve never been through a process that took seven steps to be interviewed and hired. That really changed my world from owning my own business, where if I needed somebody, I would just a lot of times shake their hand and hire them on the spot. No asking about past work or asking what kind of skills they had very impulsive hiring decisions from my past life. But, you know, I was doing a type of job where labor was labor and you didn’t really have to have a big background to deliver or spread pinestraw with me. But this company was different even in the landscaping world. I’d never experienced this strict of hiring where they actually had to do drug test. Believe it or not, in the landscaping industry, I was never drug tested or none of the guys that I work with ever had to get drug tested. And I don’t think that’s an industry wide thing, but I definitely know that most landscaping companies and contractors out there are not drug tests in their workforce. I don’t think they would have a workforce if they did. Drugs and alcohol are so prevalent after a hard day’s work. Manual labor, it just comes with the industry, I think. But when I took a liking to this job, I had to go 30 days without smoking marijuana or 30 days without doing any kind of drugs so that I knew I could take this drug test and pass the drug test. The first call that I got was from this lady who was in HR, and she called me one Friday afternoon and wanted to talk for a minute. Well, it ended up being a 45 minutes conversation, and she asked me all kinds of questions. The second question, and it’s crazy that I distinctly remember this. But the second question out of her mouth was, “Well, what kind of salary range are you asking for?” And I had no idea at the time, what I wanted or what I needed. I don’t even remember today. I’m sure if I think hard enough, I can remember the number. But I had never been asked that question before. What do you want to get paid? And that was the second question out of her mouth. Well, after that 45 minutes conversation, I then was asked to come in for a face to face interview. I interviewed with people there on the team, and I was invited back for a third interview. The third interview. I actually got to meet my boss and he wanted to drive me around in the field to show me what was going on. I think he liked me, but I think he also wanted to see if I can “kick the tires” with him. We rode around with the HR director in the back of the truck, in the back seat of the truck, and we drove around the farm. I was so impressed. And so, like, drooling over all of the operations that they had in the field, and he was explaining all the different food safety things that they do on the farm. It was quite amazing. I had a lot to learn because I knew nothing about food safety, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do for the company, but I knew that they were hiring for a field food safety specialist, so I was like, Well, I can learn that. And this was a valuable lesson that I had learned growing up. My dad used to always say, Sometimes, son, you got to mop the floors in order to get in and show them that you are a hard worker. Once you get in and mop the floors and they see how hard you work and your dedication to the company, that’s how you get in the door. It’s then a lot easier to work your way up to a position that you really want or know that you’ll be happy. Sometimes you got to do things you don’t want to do in order to get in the door. So I knew I was going to have to do some things that I didn’t really want to do with this food safety position in order to get in the door. But I was highly qualified for the position. Being a Clemson graduate studying agricultural economics, my business administration minor really helped me when it came to the paperwork being in the Food Safety Department, everything had to be documented. It was all about documentation, so I believe God put me in the right position to handle that job because I was very good at paperwork, from having to do all the paperwork when I have my pine straw business and lawn service to studying spreadsheets and studying all the things that I learned about business administration at Clemson really helped me to get this job. So it wasn’t very long that I was able to turn in my letter of resignation, which I shared about in the prior podcast on how I turned in the letter of resignation to the company I work for. It wasn’t very long before it was day one on the job, and I was just thrown in to the wolves. They gave me a little S10 truck, a little two by four. It wasn’t a four X four. It was a little two X four truck, and my job was to go around, and they really wanted help with the harvesting crews. So the way it works is we had 25 different vegetables or so between 20 and 25, depending on the season that we were growing and harvesting year round. And there were at the time, roughly 750 employees in the company. And of the 750, I would say 80% of those were Hispanic guys from Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala. The skills that I learned it’s crazy to think about now, but all the Spanish skills and the ability to lead a crew and talk with guys about, hey, we got to do this in order to get this done or all those skills that I’d learned in the landscaping industry when I was thrown into Sumter County with three Hispanic guys told the landscape a whole park. It really helped me when I was in the middle of a collard field trying to get these guys to do a certain thing for food safety or bunch these kale or collards in a certain size to meet the food safety spec. The average crew had about 15 or so guys on it, and each crew had a crew leader, the crew leader’s job. And it was my job to follow up, make sure he’s doing it. The crew leader’s job was to make sure that there was a Porta John within 1000 feet of the crew wherever they were harvesting. So it had to be about a quarter mile from wherever they were harvesting. And this company I work for, they had their own metal fabrication shop over in Gilbert, South Carolina. They would fabricate these what we call “PTF” portable toilet facilities. I had no idea what a PTF was when I started working for them, but a PTF is basically a portable toilet facility that has Porta John secured on top of a little trailer, a small two or four wheel trailer on this little trailer, they would weld a frame that had a tank of water up top that was clean potable hand washing water. So the person would use the bathroom, come out of the Porta John wash their hands. The water would be caught by this little catch basin. They had a small little sink that was like a stainless steel sink. The Gray water would go down into this second holding tank. They would use, like a 50 gallon tank or so a 50 gallon tank up top to have the clean water, and then a 50 gallon tank below that would capture the Gray water. Then on the side of that little frame. There was a paper towel, dispenser, hand sanitizer and soap dispenser. And there was a little trash can. And all around the PTF, they had signage. They said, Wash your hands, please pick up your trash that were in both Spanish and English. So this crew leader, it was his responsibility. If they were harvesting kale, it was his job to make sure that that Porta John on was moved to the other field, say, for example, they’re harvesting kale on the left side of the field because that’s where they wanted to start. But all of a sudden they run into some heavy insect pressure. And there are holes in the kale, and they realize they need to move to the other side of the field where it’s a lot more harvestable. It’s the crew leader’s job to hook up his van or truck to the Porta John and move it to that other side of the field. It doesn’t seem like a major deal, but in a food safety inspection, that was a big deal. You had to have one Porta John for 20 people. It had to be within a quarter mile, and it had to be stocked with soap, hand sanitizer, paper towels. It had to be clean, had to have signage in both English and Spanish. So my job was to take the food safety inspectors or the auditors from the US Department of Agriculture or the people from a company like Trader Joe’s or Publix or any of these large grocery stores. If they wanted to come and look at our produce. I was the one that would normally give them the tour, and I really loved doing it. I got a lot of pleasure out of showing off what we had worked very hard to do, and it was really neat. The tractor drivers. We had two divisions in the field, and I worked directly under the field operations. So we had just to back up a little bit. We had marketing and sales. We had processing and operations, so they would like bag the kale, chop, the kale, dice the onions, all of that was rolled up under the fresh cut. They called it fresh cut operation. But those facilities were fed. All the products that was chopped and diced were fed from the operations, the field operations side. So you have field operations, and you had plant operations. The facility where all the chopping and dicing happened had about 200 to 250 employees, and it works 24/7. There was a whole maintenance shift that would come in at midnight and clean things until six in the morning. They would sanitize and clean all the processing equipment. But that was a really huge operation in the facility. My boss was over all of the field operations, so all of the growing, the fertilizer, the maintenance of the crops, the maintenance of the equipment, the tractors, all of that fell under the Field Operations Department. There was a Harvesting Department. And surprisingly, the harvesting crew reported up to the Vice President of Marketing and Sales, which I always thought that was kind of interesting. It makes sense to me today. It makes that would roll up that way because you want the crew to harvest exactly what is being sold. And you want there to be a direct line of communication between what the guy sold. You know, we want to type the trailer load of Collard 24’s, which means there’s 24 bunches in a box or whatever the sale is. You want it to harvest it exactly that way. So here I was working for the field operations Department, but I was in charge of making sure that the food safety was happening for harvesting crew, which reported up to a different Department. There was quite an interesting dynamic there some days trying to do my job, but make sure they’re doing theirs, too. So many days I was out in the field trying to roll up on these harvesting crews and tractor drivers, making sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do to keep E. Coli and salmonella out of our crops. During this time of working on the farm, my wife and I had a little baby girl. Maddie was born. Her name is Madeleine when she was born. That really made all of this food safety so real to me. Here I was bringing home the produce and the vegetables that we grew, and I was feeding my wife and myself. And all of a sudden, now we had a little baby girl. I did not want E. Coli and salmonella to come into my house. So it was like an overnight thing that clicked in my head when I realized, hey, guys, this is serious. This is really serious. And I know that sounds selfish, but nothing like bringing home kale and squash and zucchini and sweet corn and knowing that an unapproved pesticide, for example, was sprayed on the crop or knowing that the crew that harvested the corn. Yeah, they weren’t really good about keeping that Porta John on close by. Gross huh?. Let me go down a little rabbit trail here real quick about the Porte, John. So the deal and why it’s so important is the food safety auditors and the food safety inspectors. When I would give them a tour of the farm, one of the things that they always did or wanted to do was tour around the perimeter of the fields, so they would say, hey, Matt, why don’t you drive over here? Let’s go along this wood line, and then I drive over there and they say, all right, why don’t you stop right here? So he would get out of the truck. He or she and they would walk along the wood line about 5 or 6ft, 10ft from the edge of the Woods into the Woods looking for toilet paper. The first time they did this, I was like, hey, what are you doing and the guy said, oh, I’m looking for toilet paper. And what was happening was if he found toilet paper on the edge of the Woods, he would stop the food safety inspection. And it was an automatic failure, because what that meant was the harvesting crew. The guys would not have a Porta John nearby, and it was easier for them to walk. They’re going to do whatever’s easiest. They’re getting paid by the box. So if it’s easiest to just go right here to the Woods, as opposed to walk a half a mile to go to a Porta John. they’re going to do what’s easiest and quickest so they can get back to harvesting. Well, that meant if the guy found toilet paper, that meant that harvester walked into the Woods, used the bathroom, pulled up his pants, didn’t wash his hands, and then went back and harvested your kale. Pretty gross. Really gross. But that is exactly where E. Coli comes from. It comes from fecal matter. It comes from fecal content. So I was told early on this Porta John deal is a big deal. We got to make sure that they’re doing what they’re supposed to with these Porta Johns. Well, so I have my daughter. I had been there about two years, and I had taken on it’s kind of like I gave an example of starting out as the janitor where you guys got to mop the floors. I started out as the guy who was checking on Porta John’s and making sure there weren’t cows walking in the field or making sure there weren’t people vandalizing our crops at night. I started out doing that job, but it quickly grew. I would take on more and more responsibility. I really enjoyed it, too. I was learning all I could from the operations side of things, and my boss would just unload information and data, and I was steady taking notes. He saw me steady taking notes. I ended up helping a lot with the spreadsheets. I started a spreadsheet of the planting schedules, actually. Excuse me. Let me take that back. I didn’t start it, but I picked up where the guy before me had left off. He was kind of haphazardly making a planting schedule and would give it to these farms at the beginning of the season and then just step back and let it go and not really track what was happening. It needed a lot of help. I’m not throwing him under the bus. He had a lot going on, I guess. But I really jumped on the planting schedule side of things. And so before I knew it, I was really managing all of these planting schedules to make sure that we had enough crops growing to feed this big mammoth of a processing facility. And I was only making about $44,000 a year. I worked my way up from $37,000 to $47,000. I might not have been making 47. It was around 44. I think I went to my boss one day and told him that I needed to really probably change my title and ask him for a pay raise. And I had very strategically started looking for other companies to work for. I had become pretty disgruntled wanting more money. I think I was just actively chasing money. But I had found a company that after searching and searching and doing a few phone interviews, I found a company that was a big organic vegetable producing company that bagged their own. They made those frozen meals. When you go to the grocery store and you go to the frozen section and you open the door and you got these little meals that are ready to go. I was entertaining the idea of being the East Coast Farm. I think it was farm manager of the East Coast or operations manager, something like that. But basically, my job was going to be to travel from Florida to Maine, up and down the East Coast. My job is going to be to travel a ton supervising these farms, trying to work out deals and negotiate with these farms to grow organic crops. Organics was just getting big was just starting to get big. It was such a new thing, I think what turned me on about it and why I was so interested in it was that I was a big part of the organic business and starting to grow organic for this company. I was working for this guy that I told you was my fraternity brother. That was the VP of Sales. He came to us all the time during our strategic meetings where we were planning what we were going to grow. He would always talk about guys. These trade shows are talking about Organics. All of these big customers are asking about Organics. What are we going to grow organically? When can we start growing Organics? I tell you, I was caught in the middle. I was really caught in the middle of my boss, who was over all the fields, and my fraternity brother, who was over all the sales and marketing. My boss was not too excited about growing Organics. In fact, of the entire 700 person company, there were only two people that were really adamant against organic. You want to guess who those two people were? Vice President of Field Operations. My boss and the Chairman of the Board of the entire company. Chairman of the Board was like, 86 years old, something like that. He had been farming since he was, like two. His dad started the company. I really looked up to this old man. He was a mentor of mine during that time. Why in the world would the two people that knew the most about growing? How could they be against Organics so much? I mean, they were really digging their feet into the sand, no pun intended. They were really digging in when it came to not wanting to grow organic. And the Vice President of Sales was really like, hey, why don’t we just try it? What’s there to lose? We’ve got 4000 acres in South Carolina. Can’t we just try a little bit? We ended up starting with 30 acres as our first field. They ended up hiring an organic farm manager who was awesome. I learned so much from her. She was a single lady who came from the mountains of North Carolina, was a die hard organic person, just all about the sustainability of the soil, all about rotating the crops. The thing about Organics is you really got to have somebody that believes in it. You can’t have somebody that’s willing to compromise the integrity of the organic certification. So I didn’t know it. And I guess it was none of my business. But I found out later, and it really stirred me up, I guess, because I was so much about money that I was, like, devastated when I found out that she was hired at $90,000 a year. Here I was making $44,000, and I was her boss. I mean, I didn’t have a say in hiring her, because that was really up to Ashley. Excuse me, the VP of Sales and my boss, they really were involved with the hiring process. But anyway, we became good friends, and she taught me a ton. I’m so grateful for our relationship, but she had a tough road to hoe. She had a tough year or so. She only was there for about a year and a half, and she couldn’t take it anymore. And she left and went back to farm her own farm in the mountains of North Carolina. But 30 acres of Organics is pretty substantial. You might see some organic farms or heard about some organic farms around town or urban small farms. Those are, like, two to five acres is a big farm for them. And a lot of times they were trying to grow 25 things organically. Well, we were 30 acres right off the bat trying to do it on a commercial level. It’s kind of interesting. One day I went in and I was like, you know what? Let me look and see how other commercial organic farms are doing it. Maybe I could go visit them. Maybe I could call them up and see, ask them how they’re doing their cultivating and how they’re doing the planting, how they fertilize, because all of this was new to us. And here I am, trying to be a proponent of the Organics. I really believed in trying it. I really wanted to do it. And that was a major part of actually making it happen because I had to convince my boss and the chairman of the board, but I didn’t know what we were doing. I had no idea how to do it. So I went in one day on the computer and I Googled Commercial Organic Farm, Southeast United States, and there was nothing. There were zero commercial organic farms in the Southeast. And my boss was like, don’t you think that’s a sign? And I should have realized I should have remembered what my dad told me when I was growing up. That, son, if you don’t have any competition, that might be a sign that there’s not a market for it when you start a business and you’re excited because there’s no competition. Think twice about that. What they could be saying is, hey, there’s not any competition because there’s not any market for it. There’s not any demand. That’s why there’s no supply. But I didn’t let that deter us. I kind of was obsessed about trying to make sure we were going to have an organic farm. And I’m glad that I did, because we were successful at it quickly went from 30 to over 200 acres from the time I started there to the time I left. So I was interviewing with this company. There was a national company that did the frozen foods. I did two phone interviews with them and they were willing to offer me $70,000. So I was like, Well, shoot, I’m making 44. They’re going to offer me 70. That’s just too good to pass up. We had just had our little baby girl, so she was about a year old, maybe a year and a half. And I said, this is too good to pass up. So that’s what I thought. At least there was going to be lots of travel involved. They told me, hey, you’re going to be traveling four days out of the week, at least because I want you to be there at those farms in Florida, Texas, all up and down the East Coast. I want you to fly there and manage those farms to make sure we have organic production for our organic frozen foods. So one day I walked in the office and I said to my boss, I closed the door behind me in his office, my boss had this way of leaning back in his chair, putting his leg across the other leg and propping leg up on the desk and leaning back in his chair, looking at me over his glasses. When I closed the door behind me, that was a sign that I needed to talk, and I had the ability to talk frankly with my boss. I think he looked up to my he admired what I had to say and respected my opinion. And I told him I said, Boss, I’ve got a job offer on the table to work for another company. And he said, really, who is it? And I said, I’m not going to tell you. And he said, Well, what are you going to be doing? I said, Well, it’s also farming. It’s agriculture. And he said really instantly he was thinking it was a competitor down the road or something like that. And I said, Well, they do commercial organic farming. And I’m going to be traveling up and down the East Coast to grow their organic operation. And he said, really? And I wouldn’t tell him who it was. And he didn’t guess he threw out a couple of names, but he didn’t actually land on the one that I was thinking about. He said, Well, what’s it going to take to keep you? And I said, Well, I think $80,000. And he said, Whoa, I said, yeah, between 70 and $80,000. I said, They’re offering me 70. So he was kind of blown away. He said, what are you making now? I said, 44. Well, I had been told by the VP of the plant operations. When I started to get a little disgruntled. I was told by the VP of Plant Operations that the thing about this company is that they’ll give you a $20,000 bonus or $20,000. It’s not a bonus. Excuse me. A bump in pay if they really want to keep you, that’s where I was, like, okay, well, the 70 won’t be too far out of the picture. So several hours went by. He was meeting with the head manager, the Director of HR. They were meeting in their office for several hours, going back and forth. I could see him leaving, going to his office and coming back. So I guess they were trying to get approval and things. Well, my boss calls me in later that afternoon to his office and says, all right, Matt. And one of the things I wanted if they were going to keep me was a change in title, because here I was. I’ve been there three and a half years, and I had the same title. Agricultural Food Safety Specialist had the same title as when I started. And I was doing so much more in charge of all the planting schedules, grew the organic farm, really running all of the operations. So that was one thing that I wanted. If I was going to be offered to stay is I wanted a new title. So he says, Matt, we want you to stay. We’d like to offer you $70,000 plus a new title. He said, what kind of title do you want? And I had, of course, obsessed about that. And I said, Agricultural Operations Manager. I thought that would be the best resume builder for me. And sure enough, he said, I don’t care what your title is, really. So he ended up giving me the title of Agricultural Operations Manager and $70,000. The feelings that I had after that was one of happiness, of course, the instant gratification of getting a pretty nice pay raise. But it also made me really think, like, how much longer would I have been stuck there at $44,000 if I’m worth 70? If the market says I’m worth 70 because of what I do and what I know, it made me even more confident that one day I’m going to leave there. As crazy as it sounds, they gave me the pay raise and they gave me the extra added job. Title promotion. But it made me more confident that these guys really don’t care about the employees as much as they say they do. All they’re really trying to do is hold me down at that $44,000 for as long as I could until it really took me walking in there, threatening to leave in order to get heard. I stayed in that position. I did a lot with this children’s garden. I share more about this little organic children’s learning garden that we started. I could talk for days about all that I learned on this huge vegetable farm. It got to where I was traveling, visiting all of these satellite locations. So it got to where I was doing more of a contract grower liaison role, working with contract growers that were supplying us with produce. My job was to make sure that they were planting on time and following all the food safety things. So very grateful for that job. It shaped the way that I turned out today and where I am today. Thanks for staying tuned to this podcast. I look forward to sharing more about the children’s garden on the next podcast and more of what I learned at that farm. Thank you, everybody. Have a wonderful day and remember to make your contribution. Thanks.