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.