In this third and final segment on land management with Rackology‘s Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller, they talk about the types of clients that they deal with and the importance of finding out which one you are – the one that wants to do everything on his own or someone who doesn’t have the time and would rather have things “done for them.” Eric and Jason also set a realistic view on maintenance and emphasize the rewards of knowing you have done your land good.
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Rackology From Ground Up Part 3 with Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller
Welcome back to Rackology and Whitetail Rendezvous presents, The Plan. Plan about what? Plan about land management. We’ve been talking about, what is land management? On sight, on the ground, eyes in the air. Jason had a good thought about using drones in that segment. We’re going to talk about the plan, so all the work’s been done, all the communications been done. The audience are at a point that you’ve got to make some decisions. Just what you want to happen and how do you want to happen, and specifically what kind of investment is this going to take? Eric and Jason are going to talk to you about their three buckets and what’s in each bucket. We’re going to close up the show with this segment, so have at it.
The biggest thing is when we get homework done. We get boots on the ground. We go over everything with the tenant or the landowner or whoever might be. We’ve got to change things. There are times the ecology might be working well for him, so we might come to a conclusion that, “You’re doing a lot of good things here. I wouldn’t change up too much.” That will be one side of the spectrum and the other one would be going in there and doing food plots and doing feeding stations, trail cameras, more drone work and stuff like that. There’s that wide range.
What we like to do is we get test results back from the lab, from the soil samples and we know where the person is. Maybe they just want to put food plots in. They’re travel corridors, we’ve looked at stuff and where bedding areas could be, other feeding areas could be and what their neighbors are doing, and everything we’ve done up to this point. We start looking at how are we going to finalize the plan? How are we going to get equipment in? Do we need equipment? Do they have equipment accessible or do they need to rent something? Rent a tractor, a harrow, rotary tiller. How big are the areas? Can we get stuff back there? It’s part of what we’ve done before. For the plan to come in fruition, that’s what you start looking at.
At that point, we’ve got to decide who’s going to do what. With that, it breaks down into three parts. We’re going to give them the ideas, the information, potentially the Rackology products. It boils down to where they’re going to be the ones who does all the work. Are they going to need to have help with it? Are they going to be somebody that requires help from some outside sources? Are they going to be the type of client who’s going to totally need the whole thing done for them?
Probably the majority of the people that we’ll be talking about here are, they will do it. Most of our customers want to do it themselves because it goes back to the first segment we talked about, the “why.” If you do it yourself, you have a huge sense of accomplishment and a huge sense of reward. It doesn’t matter if you go out and kill a doe or a monster buck. You did all this.
The majority of the clients are going to be somewhere in that realm. There are some that are going to need a little help. It might be at the very least, they have to go out and rent equipment, because they don’t have any equipment. They can probably do a lot of this stuff but they need help like, “Where do I get this? Where do I get that?”
Doing something yourself brings you a huge sense of accomplishment and reward. Share on XIt could be a landowner that doesn’t live on the premises or doesn’t need to live close by that needs us to line something up if they can’t.
The far end of the spectrum is your landowner, land manager that guides, “We’ve got a piece of property in this state. We can’t go there to do this. What do you suggest? Somebody else needs to come in and do this.” If it’s close, whether that’s us coming in and doing it for him or if it’s far enough away, we help him get people lined up to come in and do these things. As our business grows, that’s another realm that we’ll be going full force into. I can already see it in the future. Doing 100% of the whole gamut, rather than helping him line things up, we just come in and knock it out. That’s just part of the growth of Rackology. Spending, I wouldn’t say more of the time on, is the “they do it type guys.” Those are the guys that once you tell them, “Here’s what we’re going to do. This is the plan. This is what you decided on. Get to your tiller, get whatever it is that you need to get and you can do it,” whether it’s going out and hinge cutting an area.
There’s a guy who I was talking to. Our sanctuary plot is a plot that’s got food source, but it’s a bedding plot. It’s a huge screen plot, tall plants. He wanted to create his own bedding area. He’s going to be able to go out there and till that up. He’s going to be able to plant that by himself. He wants to plant it around where his stands are, then he must have planted it where he likes to park his pick-up, all the way to this one stand. It borders the edge of the trees. He’s thinking, “If I put this all the way along the edge of the trees, effectively I can walk on this side of it. The deer that are bedded in the trees are not going to see me.” He’s going to be able to do all of this on his own. Those are the landowners or hunters that take a lot of pride. We did this ourselves. They may have family that helps them, may have friends, there’s a whole gamut of people that fall into that “they do it.”
The ones that do some hiring, they may hire somebody or have a neighbor go over and do the tilling for them. Then they’ll do the planning and packing. Those are the two main tiers of people I think that we deal the most with.
Also, the do-it-yourself guys, the guys ask questions and just say, “We know what we’re doing. We need some information on the plots. Where do we plant them? Here’s an aerial view.” Something that doesn’t take a lot of time from Jason and I, if you’re buying our product and you’re using it. We’re answering questions because you’re buying it. We feel that’s a customer service thing. We wouldn’t charge if you’re buying a new series and you’re buying our product. It’s a simple type of thing, that you’re going to do everything yourself. You need some questions answered on what to plant where, “Here’s an aerial image, can you tell me?” That’s something that we do for our dealers and for our guides and our customers.
On the other end of the spectrum like Jason said, every case is different. If somebody comes in and we’d go through the walkthrough, we have the boots on the ground and we develop a plan. Prior to that plan being done, we let the person know, “This is that product plus this is what we have for our time and what we’ve been doing.” That’s on the other end. Everybody wants you to do everything. It might be that one day, you can have everything lined up to put the food plots in and go over the different areas, set some trail cameras up. Sometimes it might take you two or three days. It might take some travelling and that would be on the other end. That’s something we go over with the landowner or the customer prior to doing anything. When you first start talking to them on what they want and getting that information from them, and knowing this is going to take a lot more time, they want us to do everything.
We usually get that figured out right off the bat. When the phone conversation starts, you can easily get a sense of whether or not they’re going to do it or if they’re going to need help with it. It’s not like we show up and then, “By the way, I can’t do any of this myself.” All three parts of this plan, we pulled them apart for these segments. It’s something smashed together and it’s always changing and whatnot throughout the whole process of finding out what exactly they want, what they need, what they need from us. That’s a big thing too. A lot of hunters and landowners may not always know where to get the materials that they need to do it. Some of them may have their own chainsaws, some of them may not know you can go and rent equipment. I’m not going to throw any rental places name out or anything because there are tons of them. We got one that’s about 40 miles away, that when it comes time to get our plots ready, unless you’re doing this year-round, it doesn’t pay to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a tiller and a tractor. You can rent one. Around here, you can rent one for a weekend for $200, $250 and you have it for the weekend to do your plot, but they don’t know where to get it at.
A lot of our consulting with them is, “Here’s where you can get these things. Here’s where you can get these things cheaper.” Even if it’s in another state, you have this rental place, you have that rental place. Give them a call, find out what they rent, what their rates are and to be honest with you, rather than going out and buying some of this equipment or using a buddy’s. Another side note to this. I’ve run into this. I’ve had friends that have used my brush mower before and then they hit a stump or something and something breaks. The next thing you know it’s like, “Who’s going to replace that?” They usually do because they broke it. If you don’t want to run into tight situations with friends or put something like that on the line, for economical rates, you can go out and rent these pieces of equipment. Whether it’s tillers, whether it’s chainsaws or things like that, that people can use on their land. That’s something else that we can guide people towards, “Here’s where you can get these things.”
We’ve been there, done that. I grew up on a farm. Equipment is expensive. If you’re looking at a tractor and a tiller, you’ve already wrapped up $40,000 in a decent horsepower tractor. Now, you can buy an older 420 John Deere, and probably come out a little better than that. Renting stuff is so much more economical. There’s insurance on it. If something happens to it, it’s not your baby. We try to make it as economical as possible to the consumer, to the customer. Whether it’s, “All I need is a small tractor and a tiller, everything else I have.” “Here’s where you go.” These people rent out for $150 to $200. Take a look at that. This food plot, if you get a good seed bed, it may not be tilled up, but everything’s out there. You could go out there and seed it on there with a whirlybird seeder and take a harrow. We’ve told people that you don’t have to go at all these auctions and stuff. I’ve used a chain-link fence with a cinder block on it and one steel bar and pull that behind my four-wheeler, harrow.
You can be creative about things and you try to accomplish mixing that soil with that seed. There are things like the tricks of the trade that we’ve done there. I never came from much. We didn’t have enough money to go ahead and buy all this stuff. We’ve learned on our own what’s economical, what we can use to do the same thing. If it’s somebody that’s interested in doing on a lot of property, we’ve got friends and people that we know that do sell equipment, and you can get them going in that direction too.
When you look at the plan, you set expectations all the way along, so you’re taking document, digital or through ring binder and handing up either maps, even stand locations and new water sources. It’s all encompassing. That’s what I sometimes heard over the years, is people get too wound up. That’s why I like working with guys like you. Let’s go stage one, stage two and mature this whole thing and bring the aged class through and take care of the does. Provide habitat for a lot of different critters. You can go out on a ridge and you don’t know what you’re going to see. That’s all part of it. I love to shoot deer. I love to hunt deer. I’ve hunted a gazillion hours more than I’ve ever pulled the trigger. If you count the seconds it took to pull the trigger or let the arrow go, it’s less than an hour in a lifetime.
That’s another thing too, we use the KISS method. You also got to keep it simple. I’ve worked for some other organizations, whether it be government organizations, about what needs to go out here, what needs to go there. They overcomplicate things where it deters people from saying, “I didn’t know there was this much involved in doing something like this. I didn’t know I have to do all this.” Keeping a common sense approach to what’s possible out there is huge. You don’t want to overwhelm somebody, and you want to keep them to the point where they know. It doesn’t take a lot. There are some properties that will but something small can help. We want to keep it on the simple side as well and to give that information in that way, so it’s not overwhelming.
If you count the seconds it took to pull the trigger or let the arrow go, it’s less than an hour in a lifetime. Share on XThen you have to think maintenance and long-term too. You don’t want to set a client up in a direction where they’ve got all this. They’ve got all this stuff going on now and then once we’re gone or leave the property, they get it done by themselves. Each year, it requires maintenance just like anything. If you build something or do something, it requires maintenance. The more tree stands you put up, the more maintenance you’ve got on your tree stands. The more pads you’ve got to trim, the more everything you’ve got to check. The more cameras you have out, the more you have to have more parts or so. That’s part of feeling the customer out too. How much work can you afford to put into this? How self-sufficient do you want your property to be? How much time do you want to put into it? The last thing a person wants to do is get a customer set up with a whole ball of wax. Then a year down the road, they got all these big food plots that they can’t get out and mow themselves for putting in perennials. Where they’ve got all these food plots and their annuals and now every year, they’ve got to figure out how to go out and have them planted.
There are all these things that go into this whole scenario because we’re not in this to go out there and make a whole bunch of money. Let alone make a bunch of money at one time and then we’re gone. Got to think about the customer like ourselves in long-term. What are they able to put into it? What can they do without it turning into more work than it is fun? Last thing you want to do is, “I want to be able to go out and hunt but at the same time, I don’t have time to go turkey hunting this spring because I’m too busy with my plots. I’ve got this all summer long.” It’s got to be manageable. It’s got to be rewarding. It’s got to be fun. It’s got to be something that at the end of the day, they feel like it was super valuable that they did it. You don’t want them sitting there thinking, “What did I get myself into?” It’s not about the money and all that. What does that customer want and what’s best for them?
A lot of our stuff is it’s year one, two and three. We’re not going to go out there and say, “Put these food plots here. You’re running.” I will see if you got other questions. It’s like when you want to follow your brassica plot up with maybe something different. You maybe want to put some clover in there if the brassicas are bringing them in and that definitely is a harvest plot. Or next year, that cornfield is going to be soybeans next year. They might call us and say, “Switched up,” and they’re asking me alfalfa. How does that change the whole scenario? It’s year one, year two and year three. It’s not just one year, you’re gone.
To sum everything up of what we do. I’ve always thought about, “Is discovery a reward?” Your discovery could be different from everybody and your reward could be different from everybody. That reward a lot of times is putting your head on your pillow at night knowing, “I’ve got something out there.” I’ve done my part every year. Your reward might be that picture that you show your buddies of a 180-pound deer that you shot on the plot that you put down. Your reward might be a landowner leasing a piece of property out because the property has been managed well. Maybe making more money, as far as leasing that out. That opens up a whole new world of how I feel about leasing but that’s the rewards. It could be taking your kid out. It could be running out there watching the ducks come in. Kids’ first deer. That reward is huge and discovery is our part. Knowing if you called us, Bruce, and you said, “Here’s everything and learning everything we can about you. Land and watch what you want on that discovery phase.” Is rewarding to me, and rewarding to Jason. I always say that what we do at Rackology is discovery to reward. When it comes to stuff like this, that’s what the double helical drop-tines represent. We’re in for the long-haul. We’re ever-changing, ever-evolving and humble and willing to help people out whenever we can.
One more time, how does somebody get ahold of you if they’re going, “I like these guys, I want to talk to them?”
The best way to get ahold of us is [email protected] or get on our webpage, Rackology.org. Our phone numbers are on there, emails are on there, as well as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. What we always like is on our social media. If you do work with us, carry your results, good and bad. We love seeing a kid’s first deer. We love seeing food plots time lapses or growing in the summer. Somebody sent us a picture on Facebook saying, “This thing’s awesome. We applied your fertilizer and you can’t believe how well your thing is doing.” The Instagram and the social media, that’s what that’s there for. To get a hold of us, to physically talk to us, our website, our email and our phone numbers.
Eric Fitzgerald and Jason Obermiller, it’s late in the day. A good friend of mine has a saying, “That’s a wrap, time for a nap.” I’m ready for time for a nap. With that, Rackology are good guys, good friends. They know what they’re doing. They’ve been in the business. They have the background to give you some answers or at least cause you, my audience, to ask more questions. To ask questions that are meaningful to you because you can’t put this land management thing in a bag, as people do with seed and fertilizer and all that. You can’t bag it, wrap it, ship it and apply it. It’s all different. Just keep an open mind when you talk to anybody in this land management business. Whether you’re trying to improve your habitat, grow deer and discover what you have on your land.
To our audience, if you haven’t done this, when the snow clears, go out and take a kid, take your grandkid, take your wife, girlfriend, whatever and just walk your land with different eyes. Then give the guys a call at Rackology, you’ll be surprised what they can share with you. With that, next segment is coming up. We’re going to be doing segments with Rackology on food plots. Jason knows a little bit about minerals and proteins. It’s been a pleasure reconnecting. I’m looking forward to catching on down the road. We’ll be talking to you in doing the second part of Whitetail Rendezvous and Rackology on Food Plots.
Thanks, Bruce.
Thank you, Bruce.
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