Full Circle

It can be funny the paths life can take you on. And all you have to do is transpose two letters to switch from a 'trail' to a 'trial'. 

Life, for me, did some weird things for sure. I excelled in English all the way through school. In Grade 10 or 11 (I never said I excelled in memory work), my substitute English teacher wanted me to pursue a literary career. He took a sincere interest in me. He emphasized to me that I could be a newspaper editor, a proofreader, an author, or anything I wanted to be in the field. I just scoffed at him, and said, "I'm not going to spend my life behind a desk!" That was for pot-bellied, soft-handed sissies, and I was a fit, well-calloused Queen's Line farmboy. 

I have since learned that my older self would often be left eating my younger self's words, thoughts, or attitudes.

One particular memory of that kind of thing was my neighbour, King, always getting me to read some small print for him. I always chuckled at his optical shortcoming as I read it for him. Now, I'm the age he was then, and I can't read a darn thing smaller than a stop sign. Yeah, the joke is on me there for sure. 

Throughout school, I had no trouble with anything but music. Anything academic or physical or practical was easy for me. The problem was, most of it was TOO easy for me and I found myself bored. I would be done my work (or hadn't even bothered with it) and staring out the window, daydreaming about discing or harrowing or baling hay. Or even fencing. Anything but school work. I simply hated school. Oh, man, I detested it. There were just no redeeming qualities in it with me. I wasn't social, so that aspect of it sucked. I was a long friggin' piece from a teacher's pet, so their approval held precious little interest or reward. Once I learned to read and write well and do basic math, I saw no further use for schooling. That would have been about Grade 3. Certainly no more than Grade 4. After that, I believed school to be nothing but prison. At the best: a total waste of my time. As an easy learner, I figured I could teach myself anything more I thought was useful on my own time in my own way. 

The Queen's Line was where it was at for me. I wanted to farm. I wanted the space; the control of my environment. I loved the smell of the disc slicing into Fall plowing in the Spring. I loved the sight of a golden field of wheat revealing every eddy in the breeze. I loved the bawl of new calves or the angry mew of kittens fighting for the best teat. I relished the dark rolling in of a refreshing storm with its electric air after a lengthy hot and humid spell. I enjoyed the feel of a hammer in my hand and the satisfaction of the work I had to look back on I did with it that day. Most farm kids hated fencing, but the singing sound of a steeple being driven into a dry cedar post was music to my ears. The sensation of the farm being so much bigger than me and yet relying intimately on my input was a wonderful feeling.

A business program called FarmStart came up when I was old enough to start going on my own. There was a good-sized, carefully monitored and managed government grant that came with it. Just like school, having someone looking over my shoulder and breathing down my neck was the last thing I wanted in life, so I turned it down, flat. Dad was very upset with me, but it wasn't for me and I knew it. His Dad was mad at him when he bought one of the first vacuum line milking systems in Renfrew County. He eventally forgave me, and, deep, quiet thinker and observer that he was, no doubt realized I was yet too wild and untamed and independent minded for such a thing. 

I took a job as a rural paper carrier instead. I got to work by myself that way. I considered the job far beneath me on an intellectual and entrepreneurial level, but it suited my lone wolf, fervently anti-social personality. I just hoped something better would come along. 

It didn't. At least not for a long time. 

From seeing Americans placing ads in antique tractor periodicals for tractors we had here in Ontario, I bought and sold scores and scads of antique tractors, but never really could find a sign of financial light at the end of the tunnel in it. I kept plugging away on the farm, but one setback after another found me. And, contrary to the popular notion that the best people are in the agricultural field, my personal experience was I kept running into slime streamers that tried to attach themselves to me like leeches to suck whatever blood I had to let. That disillusions a fella for sure. Having to hound every bill that was owed me--and often ultimately getting shafted hundreds or thousands of dollars in the process, just took that farm fresh wind out of my sails. Out of that I was reminded why I was first and foremost a one man show. I developed a sardonic, depreciative motto out of those times and memories: "More people bring more trouble". I never had a cat or a dog or a calf or a tractor or a bale of hay try to rip me off. So it wasn't farming; it was the people IN farming that I found to be so distasteful. I am not talking about my neighbours here, because I was absolutely BLESSED with wonderful neighbours! I just was cursed with awful business connections. 

Every cloud doesn't have a poop lining, though. 

One evening, the phone rang. I picked it up, and the solid, authoritative male voice on the other end asked, "Is this Danny Bowes?"

"Yeah".

"This is *** ********, from ***** **** Tractor Supply. You're pretty well known in the old tractor circles, aren't you?"

"Yeah".

"Would you like to sell tractor parts?"

"No".

I was always pretty close-minded. I sold tractors, not parts. Parts of tractors were for losers, tractors were for winners. The caller seduced me through my stomach, though, by offering me a free breakfast the next morning at the Northway Restaurant if I'd just take a look at their catalog. I had nothing to loose, and a full tummy to gain, so I went. I brought the catalog home (it was mostly for British and European tractors anyway), and it set to collecting dust.

At this point, and with that said, I want to impart one of the most important life and business lessons I have ever learned, and it came from my own foolishness and close-mindedness in that presented opportunity: you never know what's around the next corner. A golden opportunity can spring out at you when you least expect it. Don't ever forget that. You just have to have your eyes--and your mind--wide open, all the time. Through the perception of defeat, my entrepreneurial radar had and was switched off, and I never saw the blinding blip of an inbound. Don't be now like I was then.

I said, "No", and it was only the bribe of bacon and eggs that got my attention. That one phone call--and its resulting plate of bacon and eggs--changed my entire life. If the guy on the other end hadn't offered me that breakfast, I honestly and truly don't know where I'd be today. Don't wait for a bribe like I did; it will likely never even present itself. Keep your eyes wide open, all the time, and let your instinct guide you. It's there, and it's real. You may have to learn how to hone it to a keen edge, but I can almost guarantee you it's already there.

There is also your gut instinct, and it is never to be ignored.

Ok, so that catalog was now languishing on the shelf, and I was dredging a groove into the earth on the paper route; a dead end job if there ever was one. Out every single night, in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of the night, in the black dark, ripe and waiting for any crazy thing to happen... and not getting paid more than a welfare bum's handout. Flat tires; washed-out roads; stuck in the snow; breakdowns of every name and description because I wasn't paid enough to have a decent car; hitting deer; dealing with hopelessly lost people; wayward or passed out drunks; half naked parkers blocking my paper boxes; and middle of the night couple's squabbles pouring out onto the road and needing a referee--you name it: the hazards were there. Barfing in the ditch when I was sick because there was no one else to do the job. About 360 days a year (we got, like, Christmas, New Year's, Easter, Canada Day, and Thanksgiving off) of thankless, pay-less, mindless monotony... except for the myriad obstacles that constantly reared their monstrous heads, resulting in instant, super-stressful logistical situations of figuring out how to get hundreds of papers from one broken-down car in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night to another car and getting done, and then retrieving the other car and getting it fixed. So, either mind-numbing boredom, or tear-your-hair-out anxiety and frustration; that was my life as a paper carrier. And no weekends, with a 7 day-a-week paper--and there wasn't any money to play with even if there had been. High, high responsibility and performance expectations, and low, low pay and respect. Dead end, bottom of the totem pole employment. 

There's gotta be a better way... 

Good grief, something had to give. My sanity was a prime candidate. Be nice to your paper carrier if you're ever up early enough to see him--his life sucks!

End of rant.

Ok, so, from the repeated promptings of my friend, Wendy Roy, I got a computer.

Being a tractor guy, I naturally migrated right to the tractor websites... and discovered inquiry after inquiry of owners of imported tractors looking for parts that were in that dusty catalog! My eyes flew open and my entrepreneurial instinct clicked back on. Just as before, when my entrepreneurial instinct spoke up and said, "Hey--I can get those antique tractors...", it now spoke up and said, "Hey--I can get those parts..."

As grumpy and judgmental as I am, I can still quickly make friends, as my integrity is one of the first things people realize about me, and it garners fast friends. I'm not Irish, but I do have a bit of the 'Gift of the Gab', and, if it's tractors, well, you can't shut my mouth once it opens.

One of the tractor buddies I made online was T16. He always made interesting posts as he could manipulate fonts, and add images. He showed me how to do some, and I played with it in my posts. I quickly realized this was how websites are constructed. As almost anything in the way of knowledge is available online, I thought, due to all the inquiries for parts I was seeing, that I could find some tutorials that could help me script up enough of a web page that I could start collecting those parts inquiries myself. So, I learned some rudimentary HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) code from websites specializing in the subject.

With a free website hosting package, I put up the plainest, simplest, one page 'website' that you could imagine. Just a hastily-cobbled Photo House pic of a shipping crate with "Import Tractor Parts" 'stamped' on the side of it, and some text information about the tractor brands I was targeting, and my email address and phone number. That was it. But, the inquiries did start coming in. Granted, I was submitting my 'website' to search engines also, but just being in the nest of the right unaddressed niche helped. You must remember: I was a total web newbie, and as wet behind the ears a greenhorn as ever there was, but I was clumsily doing the right things.

So, as the enquiries grew, and I was learning in the industry what the 'fastest moving parts' were, I decided to start adding them to the 'website' using a Paypal shopping cart to reduce the phone calls and emails that had to be answered. Those were things like water pumps, fuel pumps, hydraulic pumps, filters, and switches. Now, for some of the fastest moving parts, the customers were actually helping themselves. My own little tractor parts Wallyworld had its own little self checkout! That really helped.

Now, as the website--make that webpage--was getting rather long, because it still was only one page, I started adding more pages. Once I started adding more pages and the customers helped themselves more and more--and I found they were often helping themselves at 3 in the morning--I naturally started adding more parts. The more parts I added, the more the customers helped themselves, and the less I had to do to generate an order; just fill them instead. The added bonus of this was that the website was becoming what the internet refers to as content-rich, and therefore more search engine traffic was being generated. More instant purchase items=less work, more sales, more content, and more traffic.

The website was now getting broken down into subsections of tractor brands, and parts subsections, ie: Cooling, Engine, Fuel, Front Axle, Hydraulics, Transmission, Rear Axle, Brakes, Sheet Metal, and Electrics. In time, I learned to add a navigation box at the top of each parts page to related parts, ie; the hydraulic pumps page linked to the filters page so the customer could easily find a new hydraulic filter to go with his hydraulic pump, or, the starter page linked to the switches page, so the customer could easily find a starter switch to go with his new starter. Most of these navigation boxes had three to nine links in them, and so the website was constantly 'cross-selling', and the shopping cart orders that came in grew in size and complexity. I could often see, right in the customer's shopping cart order, the route he was circuiting through the website, and how well the navigation boxes were working. The website was constantly prompting the customer's thought process for ways to make his or her tractor perform and look better. It all depends on the customer's pocketbook, available time and ability (if they're doing the work themselves), and what he or she happens to be satisfied with. The website makes it easy, and the rest is up to them.

Paypal requires a 'back page' on your website for the customer to 'land' back on, and I made this a 'Thank You' page, and added information about how the customer's order would be processed, what they were to expect in the matters of shipping and delivery times, and other fees and expenses (ie: Customs brokerages) they may incur, being that 99% of my products were leaving the country in the early days. I added tips on maintaining your tractor as 'value-added' content, and then, for the last minute revelations, yet another, generalized, navigation box at the bottom of the page, sending them back into the website if they chose. Many times, another order would directly follow an order from the same customer, so that last navigation box definitely did and does work. 

Very soon there was no need for a paper route. It's been 16 years since I handled my last bundle of newspapers. And my own tractors got parked and my equipment started to rust as the business grew and commanded more and more of my time. For a long time, I would automatically wake up at route time: 3AM. I'd look over the clock, out the window at the cold night weather outside, then pull the covers up to my chin and smile in deep, luxurious contentedness as I rolled over and went back to sleep. What I used to have to do was someone else's living nightmare now. 

Import Tractor Parts just kept growing... while I grew older. 

So there's the Full Circle: from saying I wasn't going to live my life behind a desk to having desks all around me, even though I shied away from writing as my means of income. Now there's a Front Counter (which is just a tall desk), my secretary's desk, my office desk, my packing station (which is really just several industrial desks in a row), and my photography room desk. And the desk in my old shop office, and the laptop desk I am writing this on in my recliner. How ironic I said I wouldn't be living my life behind a desk! What did I know? 

After dropping out of high school, I used to meet that English teacher on Argyle Street in Renfrew when I would go to the old Powell's Auto Parts store there for parts for my paper route cars. As soon as he would see me, his Stephen Leacock face would don a knowing look and he'd ask, "Started your book yet?" 

Now if I do write a book, he will have that on me, too. He knew me better than I knew myself.