Turning Three Years Into Decades: Duo Lift Manufacturing

 

Mike Lessiter: I’m Mike Lessiter with Farm Equipment magazine. I’m here with our friends, equipment manufacturers from Nebraska, Duo Lift, the Hellbuschs.

Jim Hellbusch: I’m Jim Hellbusch, Duo Lift Manufacturing, Columbus, Neb.

Ben Hellbusch: Ben Hellbusch.

David Hellbusch: David Hellbusch.

Mike Lessiter: So tell us about what Duo Lift does. If you were to encapsulate what your role is in this ag world, how would you describe that?

Jim Hellbusch: We have several divisions of our company, agriculture. It’s trims and running gears for the fertilizer industry for ammonia tanks, liquid fertilizer tanks, and some dry fertilizer equipment. Then we also manufacture head hauler trailers, fuel hauling trailers — jump in anytime. Machines to roll up the spent bags on the green bagging industry. We also have another part of our company where we manufacture a salt brine machine. It’s called a brine maker. It takes rock salt and turns it into saltwater, which is used by municipalities and state governments for anti-icing and deicing highways. We also make trailers that deliver that solution to the highways. We have another part of our company that we manufacture over-the-road trailers, all the way from small, 10,000-pound trailers up to 30-, 40-ton semitrailers and everything in-between.

Ben Hellbusch: I’d add to there that we think of ourselves as the industry leader as far as farm equipment, trailering equipment. We’ve had constant evolution inside our company. We started with fertilizer, as Jim had mentioned, with low boy anhydrous and liquid tender trailers, things like that. We were the ones that really refined that and took it from an old junky piece of farm equipment to something better, something that’s high quality, something that will last. We positioned ourselves as the high quality, the gold standard. In our world, people are constantly chasing us and we’re constantly trying to stay ahead of them. We always strive to stay in that position, to always be the one that has the next thing first.

Jim Hellbusch: We’re very proud of our equipment. We don’t take any shortcuts. We have a fuve-year warranty on our equipment. In our industry, we’re the only ones who do that; most of them are one-year warranty. We stand behind it. Depending on the year, we’ll build 3,000 to 4,000 trailers a year. That equates to 15,000 to 20,000 trailers at any one point in time subject to warranty. Our warranty is miniscule. We have very little warranty whatsoever.

We are most expensive and so that’s a drawback when it gets to the marketplace. And right now, the economy is down and the volume of buying is down. When they do buy, they want to buy the best price. We kind of lose both ways — the volume goes down and we are the most experience, so our market share drops. But when times are good, we have three shifts going, we can’t hire enough people, we can’t deliver fast enough.

Ben Hellbusch: We exponentially grow in the good times, but we feel it when it comes down. The other side of it too, is we’ve improved our facilities, we’ve added on numerous times over the last five, six years. We’ve got robotic equipment, lasers, CNC machinery. Our shop looks much different than it did five-plus years ago. Obviously, the automation has allowed us to push costs down. It’s allowed us to become more competitive with a higher quality product, which is a winning recipe when you can do it.

That’s kind of our goal right now in this downturn, is to keep pushing efficiencies and push getting better. When we have the slower times, we have opportunities to improve process —  improve fixtures, jigs, whatever — to make sure that when it turns around, we’re in a better position. That’s what we’re focused on. We’re diversified enough that we’re doing just fine. It’s not all ag like it used to be and we’re doing a lot of other things. But you’ve got to be nimble and you’ve got to move with what’s going. That’s what we do.

Jim Hellbusch: Our challenge is to be the most efficient we can at all times as a plant. Like Ben said, we had two major expansions in the last couple years. We’re right at about 102,000… 110,000 square feet. Along with that, we added a second paint booth, a second complete paint line to keep up with our demand. Like Ben said, we’ve got a laser cutting table. We’re on our second one now, second new one. We have three robotic welders and CNC equipment. We even designed and built our own conveyor for a part of our process at one of our product lines. Yeah, one of our paint lines. It goes from welding —

David Hellbusch: It goes from welding stations all the way through the final assembly stage. It always stays on the conveyor until it’s complete or going for shipping.

Ben Hellbusch: Dave is in charge of the plant so he’s the one that drives the efficiency side of it and pushing the costs down and all that.

Mike Lessiter: Maybe real quick, have each of you starting with David, the year that you joined the family company officially and what your current roles are. Why don’t we start with that, David?

David Hellbusch: I started in 2007. I started in the sales department and then I moved into manufacturing in 2010, on the plant side of it. My official title is Vice President of Plant Operations.

Ben Hellbusch: I started in August of 2006. I came back and worked in the sales department, inside sales, fielding calls on that stuff. Gradually moved through the process. I believe it was 2012, I became Vice President of Sales and Marketing. We kind of restructured the way our sales department looks and all that. We’ve got two guys that take care of both halves of the company. I do mostly sales and general administration type stuff.

Ben Hellbusch: There’s two directors of sales. We just split our company into fertilizer equipment and then ag and commercial equipment. So fertilizer would be like anhydrous ammonia stuff, liquid fertilizer stuff, things of that nature. That’s put through distributors in certain territories. Usually, one to three states is what a territory is. It’s an exclusive deal, so that’s the only guy that can sell in that area. That’s kind of a dying thing. Everybody is just selling to everybody. We are holding true to our roots. That’s what helps keep us going too, is that we have loyalty on both sides so we’re getting as much as we can out of those people. Then on the commercial side, that stuff goes through John Deere, Case dealers, implement dealers, short liners, things of that nature. The commercial side is all over the board. We have some dealers, we have direct sales, we hold state contracts.

Mike Lessiter: Jim, tell me about the history of Duo Lift.

Jim Hellbusch: I’ll make a very long story short. In 1943, my dad was a young man and he was scooping corn off of a wagon and he hurt his back. The doctor said, “Lay on the living room floor until your back gets better.” You know? So he thought there should be some way to get that corn off of that wagon without scooping it. We think he was the first guy to invent the idea of taking cables and pulleys and a crank and lift the wagon box up off the running gear and let it run off it the back end. He took the box off, put a complete scissors-lift type thing in there, and put it back on. He did it in the back of our milk barn. Every milk barn had a little mechanical area and he did that. He sold it to a neighbor and the neighbor’s neighbor and the neighbor’s-neighbor’s neighbor and that kind of thing.

But he was a farmer at heart. I remember going to bed as a little kid in the farmhouse. It was pitch black outside but I could see the weld glowing across our farmyard there in the back of the milk barn, where the welding flash was going and so on.

So in 1946, the wagon lifts were doing pretty decent. The State of Nebraska came out and said, “You know, you’re not a farmer. You’re a manufacturer. You have to have a name and stuff. Well, okay.

Ben Hellbusch: Tax ID, right? That’s why they came out.

Jim Hellbusch: The tax ID. The story goes that mom and dad are around the kitchen table. Well, should it be Columbus Manufacturing or Hellbusch Manufacturing? What should we do? What should we be? In 1946, tractors came out with hydraulics. So Dad took off the cables and the pulleys and the crank, put on two hydraulic cylinders. That was in ’46. So my mom says, “Well, you used two cylinders, you lifted it a bunch. Call yourself Duo Lift Manufacturing.” So that’s how we got our name. We don’t make any lifts today, of course, but that’s how we got our name in the first place.

In 1952, he brought on an irrigation pipe trailer. Because the irrigation pipe was very strong at the time. My sisters and I would sit on the four corners of a hay rack to hold the irrigation pipe on the hay rack to move it around. We’d fall off and the worst thing is the irrigation pipe got ruined, you know?

So he went in a grove on our farm and kind of started all over and made a pipe trailer. We were the first people in our county to irrigate our crops. We had a very good crop that year. Then same story … The neighbor bought a pipe trailer and the neighbor’s neighbor and so on. It was all just… I don’t want to belittle it but kind of like a hobby for my dad.

1969, I graduated from University of Nebraska. I told my then wife-to-be, which is Connie, that I’m going to see if I can’t turn dad’s hobby into a business. I gave myself three years. If I can’t do it in three years, I’ll go back on my degree, which is teaching drafting. The rest is history. The good Lord has blessed us tremendously. I’m not an engineer by education but I did all our own designing to begin with in the early years. Now, we’ve got five people that are engineering in our engineering department. As we’ve added on, we’ve added on a conference room and larger office space and the engineering department and so on. So now I’m still heavily involved in the design work, but those guys carry the load. I get the easy part; I get to tell them what to do and then they have to go do it.

We’ve evolved in that regard. But what really helped is that, as a kid, working on our own farm equipment, I would say, “Why did that designer put that brace in the way so I’ve got to take that brace off to get off this to fix that?” So we tried to design our stuff to make it user friendly as you can, and by the way, don’t ever break down in the first place. That’s where we have our roots of being a very high quality product.

It’s been a fun ride. We had to elbow our way into the industry. We were the only kids in town… The brand new kid in town with a brand new toy, most expensive, and no track record. Why should I buy from you guys? Well, we had to prove ourselves. That went through farm equipment shows and just having our equipment prove itself in the field. There’s lots of stories about that.

David Hellbusch: It wasn’t until ’89 or ’88 when we got into fertilizer.

Jim Hellbusch: 1980. We built a lot of pipe trailers, is our main thing. We build 4,000 or 5,000 a year. We had depots in Stuttgart, Ark. and Pocatello, Idaho. We delivered to those depots plus everything in between. It was really good.

In the meantime, the Lord has blessed me with designing abilities. A guy would come on our yard and say, “I’ve got to have a trailer to carry that widget over there.” Well, I could just see the trailer already built, just build it. That’s kind of how our commercial side got evolved into this farm equipment.

Our name got to be known as a very high-quality product. 1977, a guy from Wichita came in and said, “You guys make really good equipment. Would you want to make ammonia wagons for the fertilizer trailer business?” I said, “I don’t have a clue what it is. What are you talking about? Bring me something.” Well, he brought me one that was built in Hereford, Texas. It was, quite frankly, not very well built.

I said, “Why is this pushing?” He said, “Well, about two or three times every year, someone is killed on a highway because the trailer in some fashion or another breaks down, this ammonia tank is a bullet. It’s a bullet going 40 miles an hour. It will hit an oncoming car and it kills people.” He said, “There’s so many competitors out there that all copy each other so much, they make them so cheap. We need somebody that builds a high-quality product.”

And so I said okay. I took that unit that he brought me and I got rid of the bad stuff, I enhanced the good stuff, and came out with that product. It was about 25% more expensive in the marketplace than what they were. But this guy in Wichita said he thought he could make it go. That’s how we got into the fertilizer trailer business in that regard. It was tough at first…

David Hellbusch: When you talk about elbowing your way in —

Ben Hellbusch: The dirty 80s to begin with and you’ve got to ask for 25% more on something. The only way to do it was, “You buy 10 of my competitor. Well, instead, buy nine from him, buy one from us. Find 25% more somewhere for one trailer and put them out there and see which one breaks down and see which one still runs at the end of the day.” It was the product that proved itself. That’s what really gained traction.

Mike Lessiter: Would you say that’s the defining moment in your history, getting into that?

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah. Getting in the fertilizer trailer business, yeah, that moved us in that direction. That became our flagship product line. It still is today. It still is one our main products that we make.

Ben Hellbusch: I would say that is one of the defining moments. It took Duo Lift from somewhat of a production and somewhat of a job shop to making consistent product with a dealer network and taking it to the next level. Without that step, we’re still a job shop in little Columbus, Neb., doing whatever somebody asked us to do.

Jim Hellbusch: I’ve got several stories but I’ll just tell you one about how did we get where we are. You know? It was in the mid-80s and we were trying to break into Kansas. We just couldn’t get in there. There was a couple of big co-ops there. Back in those days, if you had 10 co-ops, that was big. Now it’s 30 or 40 or 50 even. But we couldn’t get in there. I finally got this co-op to buy one for each store. Our color is dark blue and our competitors were all red; all of them, they were all red. So we did that.

So we go to the Wichita show, Connie and I do. I think it was ’85 or ’86. I’m talking to people. We’ve got our equipment staking here. I’m talking to about four or five potential customers. This guy comes up and I turn to him, he taps me on the shoulder. He’s a huge, seven-foot tall Texan, big old hat. He said, “Pardon me. Are you the so-and-so that makes these …” I won’t say... I said, “Yeah.” He wouldn’t even talk. He said, “Do you know what you did to me? I’ve got a whole wall full of red parts. Now I have one blue trailer to have parts for.” And he just went ranting on. I said, “Are you done?” “No, I’m not done yet.” And he just kept ripping me. These guys were laughing because they knew who this guy was. If I tell you his name, you would… That’s kind of who the guy was, why he would do that.

So anyway, I said, “Are you done ripping me now?” He said, “I’m done.” I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You paid about 25% more than all the red ones didn’t you, for that one?” He said, “Yeah, I did.” I said, “Okay. I’ll make you a deal. You go down to the courthouse, you get a marriage license, and you marry my one blue one with any one of those brand new red ones. You make them do the same thing all year. You come back here at this year. If that wasn’t the best, say $300 more it cost you, I’ll give you your money back and you can keep the trailer.” “You’d do that?” I said, “I sure will.” And then we went on with the show.

So we’re at the Des Moines show and the Fargo show because we’re trying to build our business. Here comes Wichita. I totally forgot about this guy. So same story, I’m sitting there, talking to potential customers. This guy taps me on the shoulder and I thought, “Oh, no.” He said, “Son, I’m here to say one thing and one thing only.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “Crow tastes like…” And you can fill in that last four-letter word, starts with an S. And so he became my best advocate. It was out of Johnson, Kansas, down there. We won that company over that I sold one to each store. They were our best customer for many, many years.

We go to a show two, three years later. He walked up and he said, “Don’t listen to a blank and blank thing this young man says. Just buy his stuff. Because it’s good and he stands behind it.” That’s the best thing you can have, you know?

I think that’s part of the movement. Then since we became known in the fertilizer trailer. That’s spilled over into other product lines. When we started getting the farm equipment line, the farm equipment dealer.

Ben Hellbusch: I was going to say… The whole reason we got into the farm equipment line was because of our reputation and in everything else. It was independent reps in Iowa and Nebraska that came… Known Jim for many, many years, having problems with a certain trailer that they were repping for. Strolled into the office one day, asked … This was before Dave was back yet. Asked if Jim and I could sit down in the conference room and just have a quick chat about something. That’s our header hauler line was born, header trailers. It was kind of a commodity and a simple thing but we put our flavor on it, we changed it to the way we wanted to do it, and made it a step above everybody else as far as quality and options and functionality and all those things. That spearheaded a whole new division of our company. That was back in 2007.

Ben Hellbusch: So that’s when we started and that’s when we divided the company. At that time, it was just one person doing it all. It was small enough to do that. As we grew, that was a whole ‘nother… It was running a second business. I mean, it just put us into markets we’d never seen before. It was great timing. I mean, 2007, right at the beginning of things that were going to… If we knew how good the years were going to be, we would have done even more. You know? Just kind of how it evolved.

Jim Hellbusch: What I think was surprising to me what that our customer base were the fertilizer dealers, the co-ops. That’s kind of an island by themselves. Then the implement dealers; it’s a different way of marketing. As we grew the farm equipment line, the implement dealers had heard our name. They knew who we were. They had no reason to know.

Ben Hellbusch: Which surprised the crap out of us. Because we’re over fertilizer co-op stuff over there. Didn’t even think about John Deere dealers and Case dealers. Oh, you guys make that blue stuff that we see everywhere. The co-ops got 100 of them sitting over there. I know who you guys are. That stuff never sits. It’s always moving.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah. That opened a lot of doors that we thought we were going to have to open ourselves.

Ben Hellbusch: Surprised us.

Jim Hellbusch: That’s when we contracted with independent reps. And guess where they came from? FEMA. At that time, it was AIMRA. We did a good job. We had two or three really, really good ones. Say okay, now we want to go into Indiana. Who is a good rep in Indiana? Well, they would recommend a guy. We could go searching, bird dogging, but —

Ben Hellbusch: They gave you the top three.

Mike Lessiter: Vetted out guys.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah, yeah.

Ben Hellbusch: And wouldn’t you know it, they’d be at the FEMA convention and so we’d get a chance to sit down and talk to them face-to-face and meet them. The rest is history. It’s been a great … A plug for FEMA, man. I mean, that’s a great resource. It has grown our business on both the supply side and the sales side.

Mike Lessiter: Take us back to ’69 and your conversation with Connie, who you had not yet married at that point, right? So, you had given yourself a three-year timetable. What were those first three years like? Could you envision the boys back in the business and the business of the size and scope that it was in 1969 and ’72?

Jim Hellbusch: ’69, I wasn’t even married. I couldn’t have had no boys in my vision. But no —

Mike Lessiter: Something tells me you were thinking about it.

Jim Hellbusch: I graduated in ’69 and I was offered a job at a junior college in Des Moines for $5900 a year. Now, that’s right at $600 a month. That was a gazillion dollars back in 1969, a lot of money. My dad said I was probably the dumbest person on this earth to turn that job down to come to do something at home, you know? But it was my passion, I wanted to do it.

Those first years were really tough. Connie, you could ask her. Her friends called her a honeymoon widow. I was never home. We had a farm, my dad and my grandpa, we had a family farm. I would help them farm in the morning, like say from six until eight or eight-thirty. I’d go in the shop, which was a 32x80 building, and I would weld —

Ben Hellbusch: Which is now our main office, the whole shop.

Jim Hellbusch: That’s about half of our main office. Where was I heading with this? Anyway, then I would go home at six o’clock at night, throw down supper, and go back out and farm then until dark. Did that for four or five, six years. Because farming was putting food on the table; manufacturing wasn’t back in those days. Duo Lift had $50 in the checking account. I’d take out $5 to go buy milk, you know? I think most people you probably already interviewed, they all say that same story. They all started on a shoestring and they all had to start from zero. It was tough times.

I’ll never forget, the very first employee I ever hired, his name was John. I’m welding away, had the helmet on my head. I looked up and he was gone. Where did John go? I looked around the shop, couldn’t find him. Went into the restroom, he wasn’t back there. Back in those days, we had a cattle yard behind our manufacturing building so I walked back there, looked in the cattle. Where did he go? Did he quit? So I walk in the front. Here he’s sitting in his pickup.

And I said, “John, what are you doing?” This shows my naivete. He said, “I’m on my break.” I said, “You’re on your break. What do you do on your break?” “Have my ham sandwich and my cup of coffee.” “Okay. Well, how long is your break going to last?” He said, “10-15 minutes.” I said, “Okay.” So I go back welding and here he comes. I’m embarrassed to say that story but it’s true. Being from the farm, you go 100 miles an hour all day long. You don’t worry about break time and lunch time and the clock; you just do what you’ve got to do. He came from the manufacturing world, so he had his time set. Which is great. Now we are overboard on our benefits. We really do, don’t we?

Ben Hellbusch: But you’ve got to treat your people right. It’s not just an employer/employee relationship. We really truly believe that and try to create that culture and that atmosphere, whether you’re in the plant or in the office. We’re all together, we’re for the greater good and we work together. So yeah, we do. We treat our people very well, give them benefits that other companies don’t.

David Hellbusch: The buy-in is very important to us. We want them to feel like they’re on our team, we want them to feel like they’re part of something good, something in agriculture. So that’s kind of how we run it. We want them to feel part of something greater than just a job and so we treat them that way.

Ben Hellbusch: Even to the point like during farm show season, we’ll get a bus and we’ll take half the shop, go to the farm show.

David Hellbusch: Go see what our equipment looks like in an actual setting of how we’re going to sell it. Go see the competition, go see what this is all about.

Mike Lessiter: Great team building.     

Ben Hellbusch: Yeah, absolutely. And we use it as an opportunity to show them that their work matters, you know? What you're doing, people come and look at. They see it. It’s not just going to a farm yard and getting put behind a shed. This is equipment that is marketed as high-end and it is high-end. The paint job you put on it matters. That’s what people see. The weld you laid down that bead, people see that.

Jim Hellbusch: Our welders look at the welds on the machine. They don’t look at the paint or the tires, they look at the welds. And they’ll say, “Look at that crap weld.” Or whatever and that kind of thing. The painters look at the runs, they look at the painting system. It gives them, like Dave said, a lot more buy-in to that.

David Hellbusch: Why we are the way we are and why the quality is the way it is.

Jim Hellbusch: David preaches and preaches and preaches — quality, quality, quality, efficiency and that kind of thing. This is the reason why. There’s no one out there with a gun to their head making them buy our stuff.

David Hellbusch: For more money.

Jim Hellbusch: For more money. They have to want to come and buy our stuff. That’s a challenge, that really is.

Mike Lessiter: You guys grew up around the business. You probably can’t even separate your life from the business element. Tell us a couple memories about having grown up around this fledgling upstart business.

Ben Hellbusch: I’ve got one about the farm and I’ve got one about the business. You’d probably say the same one. The farm, growing up, Dad bought us a go kart as soon as we were walking, taught us how to drag race right out of the gate. We used to tear around the farm. We had more than one close encounter with a tractor or a combine or something with the go kart. But you know, you learn a lot out there.

Jim Hellbusch: We were really safe though, we were really safe.

Ben Hellbusch: But, you know, you learn a lot about farming and a lot about the industry, the guys that were farming our ground. You ride in the combine with them, you grow up around it. We were kind of hybrids. We lived in the city but had the farm, had all that stuff. Our roots are certainly out there. I mean, we’re farm boys without growing up on the farm, is the way I’d say it.

Then in the shop, that same go-kart. We packed all our own bearings with buckets or 55-gallons drums of grease for years. There was a little room in what’s now our office but back then it was the shop when we were growing up. Our go kart was stored in it and that was our garage. And every day, I believe, they had to haul that dang go kart out of there so they could go to work. Because at night, Dave and I were out tearing around on our go karts, having a good time. We grew up out there, playing on the equipment. We learned how to weld, put stuff together. It was some of the best life lessons, being in a facility like that.

David Hellbusch: One story about that is we had the one go kart. Well, there was two of us. So Dad bought us a second go-kart but what we bought that time was a kit. We had to put the kit together. We had to go put that second go-kart together.

Ben Hellbusch: We wanted to drive it, we had to put it together. Figure it out.

David Hellbusch: And so he said, “Here you go. Put it together.” He didn’t help us at all. I’ll never forget that. There’s ____ right in the center of the shop, we put it together on a Saturday. And there was two big old iron workers, big casts… Huge, you know, 10-foot tall.

Jim Hellbusch: Do I know this story?

David Hellbusch: 10-foot tall glass. So we get this thing put together, we’re all excited it’s done. So we start up the engine. Alright, let’s go. Well, you had to go around this… In the center of this shop, you had to go around this rack where steel was to be able to get outside the door. So we go. Well, the pedal sticks and we turn this way to swerve, hooked up the steering backwards, and swerved right into that big machine. We hit that thing and it started rocking back and forth. That was pretty scary but it’s a funny story now. You know?

Ben Hellbusch: At the time, it was kind of like, “Whoa, everybody’s got to stop for a second.”

Jim Hellbusch: Don’t tell dad.

David Hellbusch: But we learned and then we learned that we hooked the steering up backwards and we fixed it ourselves and we went out. So an excellent life lesson there of how to put something together from scratch.

Mike Lessiter: So this is a blessing in itself, I take it. How did growing up and watching your parents launch a business, essentially… How did that prepare you for the roles you’re in today?

Ben Hellbusch: Work ethic, just like Jim had said. He was around as much as he could be. Never missed a sporting event, never missed anything. But there was never any other time, either. It was work or that. Family was always first, but work was on its heels.

David Hellbusch: A very close second.

Ben Hellbusch: If you ever wondered where Dad was, you knew where he was. He was out working. He was out on the farm, he was out in the shop. He was whatever. In the office, doing paperwork or welding or whatever the case was. I would say growing up around it… For me anyway, you’re probably the same way. It was the work ethic. And knowing that if you work hard enough and you commit yourself to something, you can make it go. But the downfall is a lot of people don’t put that 100% commitment in there. And without his buy-in and commitment to Duo Lift, it wouldn’t be where it is today, not by a long shot.

So I would say the life lesson there is don’t give up and keep at it. No matter what gets throw at you. There’s plenty of stressful days and all of that. But you can persevere if you put your mind to it. That’s our attitude. That’s our attitude in the shop and the office, running the business.

We’re not the guys that are going to tell somebody else to go do something and then go horse around, doing something else. We’ll never ask anybody to do anything that we wouldn’t do ourselves. That’s a big key, too. I think we got a lot of respect, Dave and I did, because we worked at the shops, summers coming back from college. In high school, we were out there alongside the guys. Now we’re in the office but some of those same guys still work for us. The amount of respect we earned doing that was great, not to mention the life lessons that we learned in the process.

Jim Hellbusch: You know, the neat story about that is… I don’t know how old you guys were. I had already taught you guys how to weld. It was the middle of July, just so dang gone hot. Oh, man. I don’t know what you guys were doing; you were working on the farm doing something. There was sweat lines and dirt coming down their face. They came in the back of the shop and they had… I don’t know even what it was. It was a part that had been broken and they had to have something welded.

So I’ve got guys that have been there for 20 years. “Okay, I’ll weld it for.” No, no. One of you guys said, “I just need your helmet and your gloves.” “What? No, I’ll weld it for.” “No, I’ll do it.” So one of you guys —

Ben Hellbusch: That was me.

Jim Hellbusch: Took the helmet, put the gloves on, welded this thing, and left. These two guys have been there for 20 years, “What the heck just happened here?” So they proved themselves, that they are not the boss’ kid that wear a white shirt and tie and they come into the company. The older guys that work for us remember that story. And of course, that gets told over and over and over again.

So Ben or Dave — now especially with Dave being the plant manager, when he goes out there, they know he knows what he’s talking about.

David Hellbusch: And they can see me go out there… They have this question, they don’t know the answer. I can go out there and tell them exactly what to do. Right then and there, it shows that we know what’s going on. I know how it’s put together, I know that if there’s this issue, you do this or do that, just by growing up in. Now being in the managing role that I am, to have that knowledge and then to prove that that knowledge is valuable, it’s that buy-in. Everything goes back to that buy-in from them.

Mike Lessiter: Did you guys know this is what you were going to do with your career early on?

David Hellbusch: I did, yeah. I just had a feeling in me that this is what I wanted to do. I love the mechanical stuff, I loved building stuff. And yeah, I did. I wanted to go away and work for a while. It didn’t work out that way. To work somewhere else, get experience elsewhere. I ended up coming right back after college, right after I graduated. So I didn’t get that experience of working for somebody else but still, I don’t regret it at all.

Ben Hellbusch: I would like to say yes. I had doubts in the beginning, nothing to do with Duo Lift or working with Dad or anything like that, just kind of wanting to make my own path, do my own thing. I have regrets that I did do that, I think. But I did get to experience of working with some other people, which has helped me. At the end of the day, I suppose I did always know I’d end up here sometime, just didn’t know when. I thought maybe I’d go do something else for a while and then end up back.

Looking back on it, I wouldn’t have done it any other way. I’ve loved every minute of it. The stressful times and the times I want to pull my hair out, I’d still take that over not being involved in this. The thing about it is working with family, there can be some pretty interesting conversations.

Jim Hellbusch: Positive and negative, yeah.

Ben Hellbusch: I’ll say things to him I would never say to a boss. And I know you would, too. To be a fly on the wall sometimes in some of our conversations would probably be pretty funny. At the end of the day, I would never change it and I know you wouldn’t either. With all the stresses and all the things that come with it, I still… The ability or the opportunity, I guess I should say, to work in a family environment. I mean, some people see their parents at Christmastime and that’s it. You know? They’re off in Washington and they’re over in Florida. That’s the way some people are. We’re a close knit family that I think the big man upstairs had plans because we’re all back in it. 

Jim Hellbusch: To bring that down to reality, I know when you went to college — being the older one — you had that conversation. But Ben said, “Is there room for me at Duo Lift? What should I do at Duo Lift?” You know? They get inquisitive questions of should I be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or business administration? What should I do with my life? I said, “Well, I’ll answer that with a question. When you went to bed at night and I tucked you in a gave you a kiss, what did I do?”
“Well, we’d always hear the garage door go up and down and you went to work.” I said, “Yeah. What did I do most Saturdays?” Outside of Nebraska football games. You said, “Well, we always went and work.” In our office, they had little bitty cars, little battery cars. They’d play on the racetrack. They did that. They came to work with me as little kids. I’m working but we’re together.

Ben Hellbusch: Saturday mornings consistent of going to McDonald’s and getting an Egg McMuffin or cinnamon roll and eating at the shop while he works, and we’d play with those cars.

Jim Hellbusch: And then as they grew up, it was the go karts. But I said, “If you want to do that with your life, then there’s room for you at Duo Lift. If you want to do an 8-5 job, I’m going to love you with my whole heart but you need to go work for somebody else. This is not an 8-5 career that we have here.” So he goes on to Business Administration. Then Dave, two years later.

David Hellbusch: Similar, yeah.

Jim Hellbusch: When we hire people in higher positions, like in the office or management, Connie and I have about a two-hour very grueling interview. I mean, we’re not easy, we’re hard. We want to know who the guy is, we want to know how he ties his shoes. Because we’re going to pay him decent money, really good money, but he’s got to be a team player, he’s got to be on our team. So we put Ben Hellbusch through this two-hour grueling interview, offer him the job, and guess what he does? No. He turns us down.

Ben Hellbusch: You’re going to do this to me, I’m going to send one back at you.

Jim Hellbusch: So he lived in Lincoln for about what, two years, wasn’t it? He went to work for a company for two years but the neat thing… You’ll probably tell this story. But he learned in his world how not to treat an employee.

Ben Hellbusch: It was a startup and they didn’t know much… I didn’t know much. I was green, out of college. I wanted, like I said, to make my own way. I wanted to be part of something new and see if I could make it go. And I did to a point, you know? We were successful at it but I learned a lot in that year and a half about employee/employer relationship and how you treat people how you want to be treated and those types of things. Not that they were bad guys, it was just their style was not what I would do, not what I would like, I guess. So I do have that valuable experience. But yeah, I told them no and went and did my own thing for a while. Then things changed, circumstances changed with home.

Jim Hellbusch: That was a time when our company was growing. We needed the help. Hire Ben or hire somebody else and that kind of thing. Then when David graduated, he was on the fence, I think, a little bit. Matter of fact, you had applied at jobs in Lincoln and you had a second interview coming up. Then something happened within our family and so he said he had to come home now. So he forewent… He came right away. And I know sometimes you do regret that you didn’t get that outside exposure. It would have been good for you. But the Lord’s got his plans the way they work out.

Mike Lessiter: I imagine you had these, like most of our family businesses, everyone I talk to… There were s moments where you weren’t certain that you were going to come out on the other side. Can you share a couple of those that came along during the way and how you got through them?

Jim Hellbusch: Well four-and-a-half decades. And in four-and-a-half-decades, almost every decade at one point has a peak and a valley in agriculture. We all know that; 8, 9, 10, 12 years, there’s always a peak and a valley. And learned a long time ago that when things are good, you better take care of yourself because it will get rough. So that was our plan. We weren’t extravagant, we were very conservative people.

But the tough one was in the 80s. Interest rates were 18%. You couldn’t sell a piece of equipment. It was just terrible. I would have to say if it wouldn’t have been for our farming operation… And by that time, I had owned some land and stuff. If I wouldn’t have had the land for the collateral, I don’t know what would have happened. Been with the bank, same bank, a long time. Everything was good. But you know what? You can only do so much. It was hard, it was tough. People were not buying anything, they couldn’t afford to, 18% interest. It was really a tough time.

It was a struggle but we made it through. You just… You pinch your pennies and you quit buying paperclips. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. And for, gosh, eight, nine, ten months, Connie and I didn’t take one dime out of the company whatsoever. And on the farming, by that time, I had gotten rid of the cattle feeding. I had as many as 600 head of cattle. In 1980, I got out of the cattle feeding business and went really heavy into manufacturing. But I still had some of the land and so that land was the assets that I had for collateral. If it wouldn’t have been for that, I don’t know.

It worked out good but those were really tough times. Connie worked at that time at the middle school. We literally lived off of her wages. That was it. It was tough. That taught us even a deeper lesson. Look at four or five years ago, you couldn’t ride any higher. Now we’re in… I hope at the bottom of where we are. We’re financially very, very sound. We’re very fortunate on that.

You’ve got to watch your Ps and Qs. When things are good, you’ve got to be careful because you know they’re going to be bad. We all know some manufacturing friends of ours that are not in business anymore. That’s a shame. But anyway…

Ben Hellbusch: We’re conservative by nature. In the last, the big times of ag, ’12 and ’13 in there, where everything was going great, we did take the opportunity to improve the plant and the facilities. The reality of it is that was 10 years too late. We were shoving 10 pounds in a two-pound bag. You were tripped over everything and it was just… It was just crazy.

So we kind of looked back on it thinking, “Man, did we really have to do all that?” And you look back and it and the answer was definitely yes. That’s probably the most lavish thing that we’ve ever done and it was all … Nothing wasteful. I mean, everything was planned and meticulously done.

David Hellbusch: Geared towards efficiency.

Ben Hellbusch: Yeah. And put with the greater good in mind. So the good times were good and now, like Jim says, everything is good. We’re a healthy company. Not near as big a company as we were but a healthy one. I don’t know how many other people can say that out loud, you know? I think that’s something to be said for Jim’s leadership, bringing us young guys in when it looks really cool if we could get another laser or something like that. And he goes, “Hey guys, we don’t need it. Cool your jets and we’ll get through this.”

He taught us some very good lessons in that big time — you watch yourself in the good times and you watch yourself in the bad times. That part of it shouldn’t change. You make the good decisions for the business and you don’t go hog wild, you don’t go too far one way or the other. You kind of keep everything level and in check. That’s how you manage the storms that we’re in today.

Mike Lessiter: If there was a decision either with regard to the capital spending and expansion or distribution change or a new product opportunity you didn’t jump on or did jump on.

Ben Hellbusch: I know one we shouldn’t have done.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah, don’t go there.

Ben Hellbusch: Yeah, that’s an unfortunate one. There’s been some things that we’ve passed on that maybe we shouldn’t have.

David Hellbusch: Some product ideas that we could have developed and started selling and we didn’t.

Ben Hellbusch: Yeah. I guess one do over, on the timing side… Timing is everything, as we all know. We’d been talking about a few products pre ag boom that had we just got off our dead horse and done something, we would have been in a great position. A huge opportunity would have been staring us right in the face. But hindsight is 20/20 and you didn’t know.

That particular product had… The competitors out there were really just making it easy for somebody else to get in. They were making a lot of questionable decisions and they were doing things that just… It was not going to be a long-term success and we could all see it.

But by the time they had done that and we had found out, it was already too late. The timing had already passed. If we had executed two years prior like we kept talking about, then we would have had a whole new market and a whole new product line and a whole new customer and everything. Unfortunately, we didn’t. All that does is teach you to look harder at things in the future. But yeah, there was definitely one big one.

Mike Lessiter: The fact that you’re reflecting on it, you’re learning something. You’ll recognize that next opportunity that may have been bigger than the original one but your ears are open to it.

Ben Hellbusch: One other thing I would say, too… If you’re going to partner with somebody, you’ve got to make sure they think like you do. Sometimes there’s a great opportunity staring you in the face but the people side of it isn’t going to work, it ain’t going to fit. We’ve learned that, too. There’s more than just the products and opportunity to sell. It’s a full circle thing that definitely —

David Hellbusch: Teamwork. The teamwork needs to be there.

Jim Hellbusch: One thing about having a reputation of building a good product is that people come to you. A lot of times, we turn them down. Right now, we’re on a project that we can’t divulge yet but a guy came to us, he’s got patents on things and we wants us to manufacture it for him. It’s a great idea but it didn’t work, so we had to redesign it all to make it manufacturable. That’s an opportunity that we’re going to take it and we’re going to manufacture it for him. That’s going to be another little finger in the dike type thing that when things come, this will be a perpetual thing. It’s more of a diversification is what we like. We have an R&D department and we are always looking at new stuff, improving stuff and new stuff. We come up with ideas ourselves and sometimes people come to us, which is nice.

Mike Lessiter: I was out with a dealer and we went out to a farm yesterday and did some combining. The questions that I was getting about this event had me wondering whether all of ag really understands what the short line manufacturing role is. Tell us about the short line business and the family element of it, innovation.

Ben Hellbusch: I agree with you. I don’t know that farmers or dealers have a true appreciation for it. I’m biased, obviously. But the reality of it is we as small, family-owned companies bring a lot to the table that a big boy won’t. You know? What I’m talking about is working with a customer, it’s a family feel. We’re all about teamwork, partnership, things like that. One of the philosophies that I push in the sales department is we will always be more than somebody trying to peddle a piece of iron. That is just one part of what we do.

Our goal is to partner with you, our goal is to provide a solution, our goal is to not shove something down your throat that you're just going to have to have because that’s all we offer. It’s let’s get together on this and how can we better help your operation? How can we make you more profitable? How can we partner with you to make you better? Because if we’re doing that, then they’re going to come back to us. That’s what we want. We want that perpetual motion.

Not saying that the big guys don’t do that; they obviously do. I guess I would call it the human element. We’re not a calloused corporation. We are regular people like everyone else. We’re just out trying to make a buck and have fun doing it.

The other side of it on the business part of it from my eyes is that short line manufacturers, most generally add more to the bottom line as a percentage to a dealership. In the farming practices, we offer a wider range of things that can help the farming practice become more profitable, make life easier for them, all those things.

I can probably say I’m speaking for every short line manufacturer. We have that homegrown feel and we have that connection, we feel like, with a lot of people. The short line industry is something that’s never going to go away. I think that the people appreciate doing business with people like that. That’s what I see from the sale side of it and what I see from the customers and the people I deal with. 

Jim Hellbusch: One thing, we have a lot faster turnaround than the majors do. Not that we’re adversaries, that’s not the point. We can just do things faster and quicker. And we encourage our salespeople to talk to the end user, talk to the producer. We make what works for you. Or if it doesn’t, what do you think? We should move this piece over there? Would that make it easier for you? Sometimes we’ll listen to them and sometimes we won’t. It’s all manufacturability and things like that.

I think the short line industry is so much more open to the end user. There’s not a wall between us. We are all on the same team. Like Ben said, we don’t want to just push iron… We are developing a relationship with our customers. We want them to be able to call us for any reason whatsoever. And so a direct line. That’s not a problem.

David Hellbusch: To expound upon that, I guess with the innovation … We feel and we’ve always kind of felt that the short liners are more innovative than what the majors are because of the simple fact of the corporate world that we just talked about. It might take them five years to develop a product that we can do in three months.

Mike Lessiter: The majors might not ever say it but I think the acknowledge it.

David Hellbusch: They acknowledge that that’s what it takes and so those farmers and dealers come to us. I mean, if they went to a major company, it could take three to five years for that product to become available for them to sell when with us, we could in some cases turn around in months or it could be

All those things… I don’t think they appreciate that because it’s just not… They don’t think about it. You know? It’s I need this product so who is going to do that for me. That’s where I think we play a big part in this industry with any facet of an agricultural product. It may be some other company doing the same thing but we can turn around quickly and we listen. We’ll design it to their needs. They came with the idea and we can talk to them and then we go talk to our other key people in our organization saying, “Okay. We’re thinking about this idea. Do you have any input?”

I don’t have any experience, but I don’t think those major companies will probably do that. They’re going to take their engineering staff and they’re going to go through and say, “This is the idea. Let’s make it work.” They’re going to do it their way. We do it the customer’s way. Or a blend of some sort.

Jim Hellbusch: A blend, yeah.

Ben Hellbusch: That’s where a lot of our new products come from. Some of our main industry leading products came from a farmer calling our sales rep, sales rep calling me or David or Jim, “Hey, what do you guys think if we could do something like this? I think I can help this guy out if we can figure out this one way of doing it.” And boom, two years later, it’s a flagship product for us.

Jim Hellbusch: This is really tough on David, being plant major. But the philosophy that I had from the very beginning, the early days, that I found our really quickly with farm equipment shows. Our competition would say, “I’ve got 10 models. Pick one that best fits your needs. Which one of my 10 do you want?” And I would say, “We’ve got 75 or 100 models. What can we do for you?”

That one question might spring a brand new product line for us, a major product line. We’ve got similar equipment that’s for the carrot field in Arizona and the tobacco fields in Kentucky and the strawberry fields in Michigan and the wheat fields in Canada. Our competition says, “Oh, this will work all of them.” Well, maybe not. You have to tweak a little bit to make it just exactly what they want.

Ben Hellbusch: And you find that competitive edge in the last 10%. You know? You’re willing to do that last little bit different but that makes all the difference in the world to the industry. Yeah, it may not work for Dave because now his fixtures aren’t going to work in —

Jim Hellbusch: His conveyor’s already full. Uh-oh, stop the conveyor. You’ve got to make these three.

Mike Lessiter: You just know Dave will figure it out.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah, yeah. Just go do it.

Ben Hellbusch: Just send Dave an email. It will be fine.

Mike Lessiter: I have a personal question for you guys but I guess before I go there — is there anything I didn’t ask you guys about that while I’ve got you three together?

Jim Hellbusch: I’ll go first. I think we pretty much nailed it. There’s lots of stories about how our evolution started in the 70s and 80s and we hit some of that. One thing I do want to mention is something about Connie. Connie was always behind the scenes. She worked for the middle school … At that time, it was called junior high. In ’81, when our daughter was born, she quit the junior high school for maternity leave. At that point in time… From ’69 until then, I would come home and I would write the checks at night in my office at home and I’d write letters and I’d send off purchase orders and do all that stuff at night. Eventually, she would start helping me doing that because as we grew, it was more demanding.

Then in 1981, we decided… We thought about that she would not go back to the school, she would come to Duo Lift full-time. She was that first office people. She ran the office, she did that type of stuff because I was doing it all myself. Well, now she’s got a whole office staffed full of people. But she’s the stable one. When I get off track, she’s say, “Now, wait a minute.”

Ben Hellbusch: She was good at reining all of us in. What are you guys thinking?

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah, that kind of thing. So she has been there from ’81 on and she’s been a major part of all this. I don’t want to ever forget that, because she does a lot of stuff and we’re just happy to have her there.

Mike Lessiter: I think you married pretty well there.

Jim Hellbusch: I married up, I married up.

Ben Hellbusch: That’s along exactly the same lines of what I was going to say. I’ll speak for you, too. All of our wives deserve a big shout out because they put up with a lot. Us growing up with him always gone and part… I mean, we grew up that way. That was kind of a normal thing. My wife grew up with an 8-5 mom and dad. You know? They were there when they took them to school and they were there to pick them up and they were there for the whole night. That wasn’t us. That was not us.

We were so busy as kids, doing whatever we do and events and sports and all that stuff. Like I said, Dad was there when he had to be and he was at work all the rest of the time. That has translated into our lives. But it goes back to what Jim said in the very beginning. If you’re not willing to do that, this isn’t the place for you. That’s the reality of it and he wasn’t lying. You know? That’s what it takes to run a business and it’s what it takes to grow one.

Like I said, our wives put up with a lot. David gets here at six in the morning, he leaves at six at night. I go there seven-thirty/eight, I leave at eight at night. It’s tough. I go back out to work at nights, work on Saturdays, all that stuff. That’s something just needs to be said, because they put up with a lot. I mean, God bless them, they still stay with us.

David Hellbusch: That’s what I was going to say, too.

Ben Hellbusch: I figured. We’re all very committed to the business and we’re all very committed —

Mike Lessiter: Your wife’s name is?

Ben Hellbusch: Abby.

Mike Lessiter: Abby and?

David Hellbusch: Lisa.

Ben Hellbusch: We’ve got two kids and David’s got one. That adds a whole new mix into it, you know? Obviously, that’s a game changer. Wouldn’t change a bit of it. I have two boys; they both love coming out to the shop. I’ve tried to give them the experience that I got, which is growing up out there. Dave and I still farm, whatever, the 180 acres that’s left out of the old farm. That’s our test ground and our playground. We still do that and the boys do that and love every minute of it. It makes me happy that they can have the same type of experiences that I did.

Mike Lessiter: That’s a perfect segue into that personal question I was going to ask you here. So you two grew up in a fledgling business, with the tough spots, all that. Connie and Jim passed something down to you that is internalized with you now, is part of your DNA. You both have young kids here, that you want to make sure that your kids learn, that was passed down from Grandma and Grandpa.         

Ben Hellbusch: I will go back to work ethic. It’s what it takes. Whether my sons are going to be in this business or not, whether yours are or not, is somewhat insignificant. I want my kids to be committed to whatever they want to do. I would support them wholeheartedly in whatever they want to do. I would hope that someday they do want to come back. I hope that I get to sit in that chair and my son gets to sit here, and same for David.

David Hellbusch: Agreed, absolutely.

Ben Hellbusch: But if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But I would say that I want my kids to have passion. And you know him; there’s a little bit of that in him.

Mike Lessiter: A little bit.

Ben Hellbusch: Just a little. But I certainly want that, the work ethic and the passion and the commitment. Whatever it is, that’s what I’d like to somehow pass on to my little guys.

David Hellbusch: I’ll kind of expound a little bit. Kind of back to the life experience. When we grew up, we were out on the farm, we were out in the manufacturing facility. We were doing all those things just growing up. When I went to college, and I’m sure the same for you, a lot of the friends that I made were not farm people. They were from cities, they were from totally different backgrounds, as that all works out.

Well, those guys would sit there for three or four hours and play video games. I had played maybe 10 video games in my whole life up to college. We never had a gaming system, we never had of that stuff because we were always outside. We were always doing other things. We were building things, we were doing all that stuff. And that, to me, made a realization in me. It was like, “Wow. I’m really glad I grew up the way I did.” Looking back, getting into that college side of it and just seeing that and saying, “Wow. What a waste of time.” You know? Sure, it’s enjoyment. Sure, there’s some of that level. But in my head, I was thinking, “What a waste of time.”

Ben Hellbusch: Look at the experiences we had. We would have been sitting behind a TV or we were out building a go kart. And in our world, that’s just what gets us going. You know? We’re manufacturers. We tinker. We like to put stuff together, we like to tear stuff apart.

David Hellbusch: So I hope that I can pass something similar.

Ben Hellbusch: Just don’t buy them a video game system.

David Hellbusch: Not sure I can do it these days. There’s a time for fun and there’s a time for other kinds of fun, which is not sitting behind a TV or on your phone or on an iPad or whatever. Let’s go do something other than that.

Ben Hellbusch: I’m going to contradict myself a little bit because the other thing I would like to pass down — there needs to be a balance. I think that’s kind of what you're talking about. There is a level of commitment that has to be there and you have to stay committed, but you can’t forget to just relax for a minute and have some fun. And in these down times, it kind of reminds you of that. Because stress levels are high, you're doing everything you can to keep going and keep it in the black and all those things. You can kind of forget that there’s more to life than just working.

Jim Hellbusch: That’s a really good point.

Ben Hellbusch: It takes a level of commitment but you’ve got to have a balance. If you don’t, you’ll burn out, you won’t last. I learned that from him because I feel like your commitment level is a little higher.

Jim Hellbusch: Well, our family vacations were FEMA meetings. The FEMA summer board meeting and Connie and myself going to a FEMA meeting. They’d stay with grandma and grandpa.

Ben Hellbusch: That’s another thing you passed on; that’s the only vacation we’ve taken, summer board meeting. Not much of a vacation for the boys and Abby.

Jim Hellbusch: When you didn’t have anybody supporting behind you, financially or anything else, you had to do what you had to do when you had to do it. You’ve got to do when it’s necessary. I couldn’t justify going to Disneyland or whatever. We just didn’t do it. You guys never went on vacation. We just didn’t do it. And that’s bad on me. I mean, that’s my fault. They’re learning that and that’s a good thing, because they’ve got to have… Ben’s right; you’ve got to get recharged.

Mike Lessiter: They’ve turned out alright.

Ben Hellbusch: Right. Look what you’ve built and look what you’ve instilled in us, I mean, to that point. And honestly, it taught us too that maybe there is a time for a little more play than what we’re used to.

Jim Hellbusch: Sure, yeah. The neat part about being a small company, owning your own company … When these kids were growing up, I had the opportunity to make decisions. And I love sports, so do they. So they both played football, basketball, and baseball; club basketball, minor league baseball, that kind of stuff, and midget football. Who was the coach? I was the coach at four o’clock in the afternoon. I could stop my business world and go be coach and give 100% of my energy to coaching fundamentals in football, basketball, and baseball.

David Hellbusch: That’s where I learned I could say whatever I wanted to my dad but I couldn’t say it to my coach.

Jim Hellbusch: But the point is, after practice, I could go back to work and finish what I didn’t get done that day. So it’s a balance and Ben’s dead-on right. I wouldn’t ever do it differently.

David Hellbusch: Well, we enjoy what we do and so it’s not all work to us, either. We do enjoy it, even with all the stresses and stuff. That’s another component that makes it harder to remember you need you need to go take a vacation, you just need to go recharge for a weekend, you’ve got to go do something fun.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah. We go to football games together, too, when they used to be fun.

Ben Hellbusch: We’re in a rebuilding year.

Jim Hellbusch: Yeah, we’re in a rebuilding year. That’s it.        

Mike Lessiter: That’s what I was after.

Ben Hellbusch: I enjoyed it. We appreciate that. It’s fun to sit and talk about this stuff because we don’t. You live in it and you don’t reflect on it really.

David Hellbusch: You don’t have time for it, exactly.

Ben Hellbusch: You’re living in the moment and you're rocking and rolling. It kind of reminds you of what you’ve done and what you need to do.