I'm from Dallas originally, but I've lived other places.
You've been all around the world, man. You and Johnny Cash.
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So, all right. Well, I say we dive right in.
I'm really curious to hear what three books you recommend for other visionary leaders.
Yeah. So the first one would probably be Lean Startup.
It tells you how to start up a company without a lot of expenses.
It's a little dated now, but there's so many more apps,
but it really kind of gives you the concept for doing that.
Next one would be I just finished the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson.
If you want the biggest visionary there is, good, bad, and ugly, read about Elon Musk.
And then the third one, this is more specific to our industry,
but it really changed the way we see the world, is a book called Defending Thief.
And it tells you how there's a lot of misconceptions in that industry on impacts of beef on the environment
and health and all those sorts of things.
So that's changed the world, the way we view things with agriculture, animal agriculture specifically.
I'm so happy that I asked that question because I think a lot of us have the intention
to want to understand sustainable farming.
We have that idea, and if you never come across somebody who has your depth of experience in that
and you're just trying to figure it out based on YouTube videos or based on a local professor,
you may not get the same type of response.
And so the depth of knowledge gained by just knowing about that book,
anybody who's looking into sustainable farming, agriculture, what opportunities exist there.
Thank you, Chris. That's awesome.
It's glad to share that information. That's part of what, that's part of our mission is, right?
Educating people about the food system and where their food comes from
and hopefully showing them that they can make a little money with it as well.
That's cool. That's amazing. Well, we're going to bring Chris right back on.
We'll be back after the intro. And guys, look forward for an amazing mission.
This is going to be awesome.
All right. Welcome in to Vision Pros Live with Jackson Calame. I'm your show host.
We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders
who are building fantastic visions out there.
What is up, Vision Pros? Welcome into another episode of Vision Pros Live.
I'm your show host, Jackson Calame, founder and CEO of First Class Business.
I'm excited to have Chris Rawley on today.
We're going to be talking about investing the future of agriculture innovation
for farming operations and his extensive background in this process.
Now, I don't mind hosting visionaries who are fairly new to their visions
because I'm looking for people who have that heart, looking for people who have that good attitude
of I can lead and I'm headed somewhere.
But Chris happens to be one of those people who's been in the trenches for decades on this mission.
He's been all over the world looking and seeing what opportunities are out there
and really when I say opportunities, some of you might hear like some of the coolest
or the most money hungry mission. I'm actually talking about the pain and the suffering
that exists in the world that we have the opportunity to alleviate.
We have the opportunity to make massive improvements in the way that we're going about life.
There's a billion people to help in this world.
So we're going to talk about how that can happen.
He's also going to talk to us about how you can make money in the process.
And so I'm interested to hear about that and see where that goes.
And I'm sure he's going to give us some resources to check out like the Defending Beef book
that he's already mentioned.
Before we bring Chris on board, we want to also talk about some of our other sponsors,
some other visionaries that we're really excited to be connected to.
The first one is Sean LeChuga of The Wellness Shop 365.
Sean and his wife, Julianne, run Integrative Nutrition Health and Wellness
Coach and Consulting Practice. What the heck did I just say?
Integrative Nutrition. I'm talking about kind of more the naturopath approach
where you're not only looking at preventative health,
but you're also looking at how can I live my best life?
Well, when I saw this 365 Harmony of Life wheel assessment,
I was like, dang, I've never been asked by a health person about my joy,
my spirituality, my creativity, my career education, my relationships,
what I'm doing to volunteer and to give back.
I was like, that is amazing.
The amount of depth that they go into to really see what's going on in your life
and how to help you. They've got a beautiful family.
Sean and I have worked pretty closely together for the last six months.
I've really gotten to see and explore his heart and his mind, his dedication.
It's super cool to meet somebody who is really so dedicated to their virtues
and principles. You can tell that they live this.
And I can see when anytime I open the can of talking about health,
man, his eyes light up and his fire comes out of how amazing it is.
So I highly recommend checking them out.
Also, there's the law spot with Melissa Gray.
Now, I was very nervous about having a lawyer on my show.
I didn't get to meet her. She went to the pre-show experience,
I think with Sean, actually.
And then I got to meet her and I was like, wow, look at this lady.
She's like high nurturer. She's not condescending to me.
And she understands that legal for business doesn't have to be complicated.
And her nature exudes that.
She's got, of course, she has the professional background
and the ability to help in the tough situations that come up.
But I'm grateful for somebody who also is bridging the gap between your Harvey
Specters from suits that are probably going to cost you several million dollars
or those retainers that are even, I don't know, 600 to $1,200.
There's a lot of different price ranges.
I don't think lawyers are all evil.
I don't know one that is personally.
But when you're living in a big city and supply and demand is in your favor,
you may not have the time to nurture, take care of folks,
not if you're not super intentional about it.
And that's exactly what I saw Melissa is extremely intentional about,
is helping people understand what their opportunities are.
So if you've passed the phases of growth where you're using something like
LegalZoom or Crocodoc or using LegalShield and you realize, man,
this isn't quite helping me bridge my gaps and helping me have the
infrastructure I need to really build my vision,
then I'd highly recommend checking out the episode, Melissa,
or going to our website or just giving a call yourself.
My goal with this is to make sure that the entrepreneurs that are coming behind me,
the visionaries who are stepping up, that you guys learn to lead as wise stewards
of your venture far sooner than I did.
If you want more stories about that, just let me know.
And I'll let you know all the different types of legal ramifications
I've had to face in my 13-year entrepreneurship journey with my different startups and ventures.
Then there's the water project.
I refuse to use this platform, meaning my own platform and stage,
without looking at the opportunities to give back in this world.
We have millions of people who don't even have access to clean drinking water,
whereas most of us can access it with the tip of our fingers.
We can just go in the other room and get filtered water.
These projects are super special.
One of the things that the water project focuses on rural areas of Africa
that are very hard to get to, and they're looking for what I've seen as villages
that have between like 200 and 600 people who are in desperate need of a source of water,
and then they're teaching them how to do these borehole wells and these sand dams
and give them the equipment to do so with our investments.
You actually get to see the outcome of the project that you contribute to.
Now, if you're not in a position to give back, you don't have the money to do so.
One of the requests would be to pick up the microphone like I've done or to simply share it.
You never know which of your friends or family members might see this
and might invest $5, $10,000, $10 million in helping give back to this
and the generational impact of helping one of these communities.
Just imagine, what if your kids had to go out of school to get water?
What if you had to leave work to go find water for your family that might not even be safe?
The generational impact that we can make by supporting projects like this is absolutely phenomenal.
And if you've got another cause that you'd like to support,
do not hesitate to drop it in the comments.
So before I bring Chris on stage, I actually want to bring up his bio because it is super well written
and it drives this depth that I was talking about.
So as a career naval officer, Chris Raleigh visited dozens of war-torn and poverty-stricken countries.
He began to appreciate the importance of agriculture to every single person on Earth.
And as a professional investor with his newfound appreciation, he decided to invest in a farm.
But he quickly discovered these types of assets were inaccessible to the average person.
The problem drove him to create Harvest Returns in 2016 to democratize investments in agriculture.
Raleigh's held corporate management roles in Jones, Leng, Lasalle, Electronic Data Systems, L3 Communications,
and served as a defense consultant at the United States Special Operations Command for six years.
He's invested in real estate and income producing agriculture for over two decades now.
He's an angel investor in early stage agriculture and food companies,
including the Indian agricultural fintech company Jai Kisan, which we're going to show in a minute.
I hope I got that pronunciation right.
He serves on the advisory board of the ag tech startup Agro Fides, and as a retired Navy Reserve captain, he has served our country super well.
During his 30-year military career, he served in a variety of leadership positions in naval, expedition, expeditionary, there we go,
and joint special operations units afloat and ashore.
He deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, throughout Africa, the Middle East, and the Western Pacific.
Raleigh's got a degree from Texas A&M University, earned an MBA at the George Washington University,
is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College, and an author as well.
The man has brought his A-game to his operation.
So, Chris Raleigh, man, it is my pleasure and honor to have you on Vision Pros Live. Welcome to the show.
Thanks a lot for having me today, Jackson. Great to talk to you and everybody listening.
Absolutely, guys. I love you and go Longhorns.
So, I also come from a family of Texas A&M fans.
So, in fact, I have a nephew who just graduated from there.
So, are you stay close to Aggieland? Are you still a big fan?
I do. I have a daughter who just graduated from there.
So, that gives me some good excuses to go down there and try to watch football, of course,
and all those good things and have a massive Aggie network as well.
Absolutely. Congratulations, Dad. That's amazing.
So, going into some of our questions here, let's start out with what's your vision for those that you serve?
Yeah. So, that's really good. And it's interesting. You mentioned the water project,
and you started out with talking about 8 billion people.
Let me back up. When you try to set up your, whether it's your personal vision or your entrepreneurial vision,
I like to start from the macro. Start with what are the big trends out there and then kind of narrow down
and how does my mission or my company impact and influence those?
So, for us, we started saying, I've been thinking about this for years, but now I've got the demographics.
When I talk about the demographics and the compelling demographics in agriculture,
it's the one industry that impacts every single person on earth, right?
So, unless you're out in the woods, living in a cabin, foraging for yourself and hunting,
you're part of the agriculture industry. You're a consumer of it.
So, you're buying food, whether that's growing your own food or buying in a restaurant or a grocery store,
some combination of all of the above, you're part of the ag system.
Most people are very far removed for it, though.
There's a tremendous gap between people who produce the food and the people who consume the food.
Even though they're one and the same, there's a big gap there. And so, part of our job is to close that.
So, we started using this thing called 20-30-40-50.
And that's what drives our thesis about investing in agriculture.
So, 20% is the amount the population is supposed to grow between now and the next 25 years.
So, we're sitting at roughly 8 billion people.
That population, depending on what source you're looking at, is going to grow to 10 billion people.
So, there's that amount of growth. 30%, this is where things like the water project are so important.
30% is the amount of water consumption, global water consumption,
and it's going to happen during that same 25-year period.
So, why is that exceeding the population growth?
Well, societies get richer. They like their golf courses. They like their swimming pools.
They're consuming barely enough water to sustain themselves to wasting water like we tend to do here in the U.S.
So, 20-30-40 is the amount of calories that growing population is going to consume in that same period.
So, and again, why is that? As societies get across the planet, get more wealthy, which they tend to do.
You know, even though we still have hundreds of millions of people on the planet that are extremely poor or have food insecurity,
gradually, those problems are going away.
So, people tend to consume more calories when they have more disposable income.
Not only are they consuming more calories or consuming more protein.
So, 20-30-40, and that's all going to happen by 2050, right?
So, that's what drives us to see, to explain why somebody might want to invest in agriculture.
It impacts every single person on earth and the demographics are very compelling.
And then I can also get into, you know, why it's a good investment and why it's a good way to diversify your portfolio and all those sorts of things.
But helping transform the food system through investments is kind of what we believe in.
Produce more food, more sustainably, less water consumption, do it in a way more affordably, all those things in a way to make farmers profit.
Because farming is very low margin business.
So, the farmers we like to work with are the ones that have kind of figured out how to make a profit doing it.
Absolutely. So, to me, it's pretty clear what you're...
I want to take a stab at this shot too before I ask what I ask. So, what's your vision for you?
Yeah, my personal vision is to grow this company, make it successful and impact as many lives possible,
whether that's helping entrepreneurs, helping our investors make money.
That's my focus right now is growing this company.
Very good. So, I want to talk about the other side of those that you're serving.
So, the ones who are impacted by the investments that are driven. What can you tell us about their experience?
What are they going through right now? These farmers, the people who... these communities.
And what is the vision for them on the other side of getting help?
So, we've worked... we've done a number of deals all over the planet.
You know, we've done West Africa. We've done a few outside the United States.
Most of our investments are focused on United States.
And, you know, there's a couple of things to know about American farmers.
There used to be a lot more of them.
When this country was founded, late 1700s, early 1800s, 90% of the population was farmers.
Now, there's a much... there's less than 2% of the American farmers are in the farming industry.
And they're producing food for the rest of us.
So, it's getting rarer and rarer to be a farmer. And why is that?
You know, why... well, obviously, agriculture is modernized.
There are a lot of people that are... farming methods have improved.
Their yields are higher. All those sorts of things.
Economies of scale, everything like that.
But at the same time, today, farmers are struggling. And why are they struggling?
A couple of different things. One, because especially if you're a small farmer,
you know, large farms, even though most farms are still owned by family,
even though the very large ones are owned by families, but they're still...
it's hard to say they're family farms anymore when they've been around for multiple generations
and they've got, you know, all those sorts of things happening.
Farm credit right now is really tight. It's tight for any kind of small business.
And most of the farms we work with are considered small businesses.
So, because interest rates are much higher than they were a couple of years ago,
bank lending is tightened. It's harder for these farmers to find sources of capital.
So, we are able to put together offerings that are flexible for the farmers,
whether that's, you know, the terms, the rates, the durations, all those things,
that are way more flexible than they could find with a bank,
while at the same time, you know, putting deals in front of our investors that are helpful for them
and provide some sort of diversification for their portfolio.
Okay. And what are some of the challenges the local communities are facing right now
that need the investment capital?
Yeah. So, there's been...
the gap between urban America and rural America has been growing, you know, decade by decade.
Most of our population is concentrated in these urban centers.
Most of the food is produced outside these urban centers in rural areas.
So, there's a cultural gap, there's an economic gap.
So, farmers are in cities, even though their farms might be doing well,
they're in cities, they're dying or towns, I should say towns, small towns, rural locations.
So, that's part of the dynamic that makes it hard for farmers.
Their, you know, their farms have to be where their farms have to be,
which is where there's land and things like that.
Now, all that said, we're looking at new kinds of farming, like indoor farming,
whether that's vertical farms, hydroponic greenhouses, things like that.
But for the most part, most farming in America is rural.
So, those people have, you know, whether it's access to broadband,
access to services that we might find in urban areas,
there are challenges there, there's economic challenges,
there's challenges with labor, finding enough labor to work on the farm.
So, all those things are driving, you know, certain challenges in agriculture industry today
that the companies that we work with are trying to get ahead of
by using innovative processes and methods and technologies and things like that.
That's awesome. I'm excited to see, you know, the use of modern technologies
for the sake of communication, much like a podcast, you know,
where we end up diving deeper and deeper into what those realities look like
because, I mean, I could be wrong, but I think most of my generation and younger
have probably spent very little time on a farm.
You know, and when I say very little time, I wouldn't be surprised
if more than 50% of metropolitan youth have spent less than five, 10 visits,
you know, seeing what a farm looks like or how, you know, probably had a field trip
or something like that, but the field trip, you're worried about your crush,
you know, you're worried about your friends goofing off to,
and you're not really paying attention to what's going on.
So, getting the exposure for what life's like, I mean, I grew up in a family
where we do have farms and I have opportunities to go,
but I still rarely think about these realities, you know,
even though it's pretty close to home for me.
So, let's move into, so anyway, visionaries, if you're hearing about this, you know,
and this is of, hasn't been of interest to you, my invitation is,
I hope you take interest in what you can learn about this stuff
and dive in and see how does this affect your future, your generations,
and not from a fear of missing out or, oh my gosh, the world's going to burn.
I'm just, I'm not going to buy into the hyperbole that exists in life,
but is there an opportunity for us to learn how to impact and is there a win-win?
Then, cool, it's probably worth taking a look at in that case.
Let's talk about a darker subject though.
Maybe not the world's going to burn, not that far,
but what's your worst leadership experience ever, Chris?
What does that look like? Who was, you know, it could be somebody else, it could be your own.
Wow, yeah, it's interesting because I've worked with a lot of leaders.
I've been on my own, you know, doing this company for about seven years
and before that I was, you know, an entrepreneur, different consulting
and investing and things like that.
So it's been a while since I had a boss,
other than accountability to my investors and my board of directors,
but way before that I had a lot, well, I take that back.
I've had, I had maybe bosses for a long time.
So I've had the great experience to work with amazing, amazing leaders
and a few bad ones, mostly amazing.
My worst leadership experience ever, way back when I was on a destroyer,
we had a, some, the commanding officer who's the guy that runs the ship,
he was fired and then the person they brought in to fix the ship was even,
was a worse leader, at least from mine and others.
You know, what I would call toxic leadership and that was,
you learn every time you work someplace, you learn good and bad things.
And that's, and that's good.
You know, that's part of life and the way you improve yourself as a leader
is to take those bad lessons and put them aside and embrace the good ones
and try to use those as your own personal,
part of your own personal leadership philosophy.
Absolutely.
Well, I appreciate you sharing some of that.
I'm sure there's, there's some other,
I like that you mentioned the term toxic leadership that summarizes a lot.
There are different types of leadership and, you know, it may work to some extent.
It may work for certain situations,
but it's definitely not a type of leadership that I want to be involved in.
Or that my team members would want to be involved in.
So, well said. Let's talk about the opposite.
Am I cutting out?
It looks like my, my systems might be bad.
Yeah. Yeah.
Can you hear me okay?
Yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. Go ahead, Jackson.
What's your best leadership experience look like, Chris?
Oh, best?
Wow. Okay.
When I worked, you know, another military experience,
working in special operations, just some really motivational people,
high performing people.
And, you know, this is sometimes leadership is just great because people are leading from the front
and they're right there with you.
And they're so competent that you can't help but want to try to be as good as they are to meet their expectations.
And that's, to me, that's the best work environment you can be in where everybody,
really high performing team and everybody wants, you know, oriented towards the same goal.
And everybody's very mission focused and there's no sort of, you know, drama involved with it.
Absolutely. Do you have a specific story in mind?
You know, I don't, but it's so the type of thing, one of these time periods was I was in Afghanistan.
Admiral McRaven, Austin guy, retired, four star admiral, ran SOCOM, did all kinds of interesting things.
He was, you know, he was the ultimate leader of the organization I was in.
This was a good while ago, but he set such a great example.
William McRaven and I worked, had the opportunity to work for him on some other occasions, you know, several, several steps below him.
But he's the kind of guy that you want to wake up and get excited about going to work for.
That's awesome.
And for those, you know, that is if you don't have somebody that you work with.
Yeah. And if you just, you know, a lot of people, you know, you may not have heard of Admiral McRaven,
but you probably have because he's the guy that wrote that made a speech.
I think it was at UT several years ago that said, you know, first thing I do every morning is make your bed.
Make your bed. You've done one thing.
And then from there, you do another thing and another thing and another thing.
I'm paraphrasing. He said it much better, but that's that's sort of, you know, the feeling behind it.
That's the one. That's the one. That's awesome.
That's really cool that you got some. Now, did you get to work with him personally?
On several occasions when, you know, Afghanistan specifically, but there are other times I've had some encounters with him.
But like I said, I was a couple couple rungs on the ladder below him, but still got to be impacted by his leadership.
Absolutely. The sign, the sign of a great, a great or a terrible leader impacted, whether you're directly working with them or not.
Let's go into the most powerful question, I would say.
So if this was your last opportunity to share a lesson with other visionaries that they can learn from your experience about what's that powerful lesson you would share?
It's keep trying. You're going to fail in life. You're going to fail in endeavors.
And what you learn from that adversity and those experiences is more important almost than what you accomplish.
So just don't don't ever quit. Just keep keep going. You know, there's thing about grit in never quitting whatever the situation you're in, work life, relationships, keep pushing forward.
I love that. I would agree that tenacity, resilience, diligence, opportunities, persevere and go through all said.
All right. Well, let's let's take the rest of our time to talk about the investing in the future of agriculture innovation for farming operations.
So we'll probably show Jai Kisan and Agro Fides while you talk. If you want us to strap on, let us know if you want to go in a specific direction outside of this, feel free to.
Yeah, I'll talk about Jai Kisan. The guys that founded that company, their Aggies, so they're much younger than I am. They came to us several years ago and I like their company so much that I decided to invest in it.
And what they do essentially is you'll hear this term called small hold farmers. And these are not so much in the United States, but definitely in the developing world.
You know, we count India there, we count Sub-Saharan Africa there, Southeast Asia, places like that. It's much more like farming was in America that 200 years ago where you have a lot of people that are farmers and now have small amounts of land, you know, their backyard or a few acres.
And those folks have a hard time, you know, making money because they don't have the scale to do that and they don't have the scale because they don't have access to funding.
So what Jai Kisan does in particular, we just thought it was brilliant and the team was brilliant and they've executed brilliantly, was provide credit opportunities for small hold farmers in India.
So that's one example of the companies out there in the space that are just really changing things. We're doing it kind of on a different scale, different types of companies.
The farmers we work with are a little larger. They're taking, you know, larger investments, but it's similar manner where we have a pool of investors and they come together.
Farmers come to us that want to raise capital, either they need loans or they want to raise equity. And then we pull our investors together when we invest in those companies.
And it's not just farms and ranches. We love working with farms and ranches, but we also do agribusinesses. So businesses involved in that whole food chain from the production to the time it, you know, hits your dinner plate.
We also work with agriculture technology companies. So agriculture technology companies, AgTech is what we call it. Are these companies that are applying technology, whether that's, you know, AI, Internet of Things, biotechnology, the cloud, all these things, you know, used in different ways are improving
agricultural production and making it more sustainable, making it more profitable for the farmers, higher yields, all those sorts of things. And we're in, I think, you know, some people call it the fourth agricultural revolution.
The last big agricultural revolution was kind of the 50s where it brought a lot of progress to yields, but it, but maybe some environmental damages. And that was using, you know, large-scale chemicals, whether that's synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides.
And now we're kind of backing away from that in agriculture with things like regenerative agriculture. So we're using hoofed mammals and in most cases, cattle, but also sheep and bison. We've worked with those producers as well that are mimicking in the soil, mimicking what used to happen on the Great American Plains with bison.
Right. So there used to be tens of millions of bison all over North America. They got kind of hunted to near extinction in the 19th century and cattle have gradually replaced them. But the way that cattle was traditionally grazed was not great for the soil.
So the farmers that we're working with, they're doing things like, you know, intensive grazing. So you take a cattle and you graze them in a little section and you move them onto another section and you move them onto another little footprint. And they use things like electric fencing and invisible collars, just like the dog shock collars that might invisible fences.
They train the cattle to kind of respond to move along. So all those things, you know, organic growth. This is agro-feedees. Another, they're doing the same thing, similar-ish thing in sub-Saharan Africa as agro, as Jyakasana is doing in India. So they're doing, you know, impact, impact loans, things like that.
And, you know, if you want to invest through them, you can go there and talk to the CEO of that company, really sharp guy who also happens to be another naval officer. That's how I met him through the Navy. But he's a native of West Africa, of Ghana.
That's amazing. That is so cool. Just, I just, as I look at this and I'm, you know, you've done, you've done a really great job on putting your presentations together and helping it be, you know, be very clear what's going on and how this stuff works.
I'm sure that took time. How did you get guidance? I'm going back to helping the visionaries real quick. You know, how did you get guidance on pulling your assets together as well as you did and helping people catch the vision for what you're up to in the agriculture?
Yeah, so, so we were some of the early pioneers. My, my co-founder, Austin Maness, likes to say that, you know, the thing about being a pioneer is that you tend to get arrows in your back.
Yeah.
So, you know, we, it, I guess it looks like it's all come together, but we continue to learn new, you know, new lessons and lessons we probably should have learned, you know, lessons you learn a hard way that feeling pain is the best way to learn a lesson, right?
So, it's taken a lot, but that for the company, I knew when I started this company, that we needed, you know, it couldn't be a one man show. So I brought on an amazing team, starting with Austin, who, who, you know, grew up working on his family farms.
But then expanded into people that had deep agriculture experience, deep investment experience, private equity experience, accounting, marketing, all those sorts of things. We've been fortunate to have that team. And we also brought in an advisor.
So I would recommend to any entrepreneur, even if you're sort of a solo entrepreneur, that you think about putting together an advisory board. And so it's, it's, you know, there's corporate governors. There's different levels from a public company that has a massive board of directors that are all super compensated and very formal and have audit committees and all these sorts of things, down to a couple of people that you trust that bring a different skill set than you bring, that you can, you can incent them and incentivize them to do something.
Maybe it's simple. They, they agree and are passionate about your, your vision and your, your, your mission, the mission of your company. Maybe you give them equity in a company. And then just call on them regularly and, and formalize it to the extent that you, that we're going to have a quarterly meeting. That's what we started doing. We're just going to have a quarterly meeting in person, Zoom, whatever, and get together and talk about the challenges that the company faces. And it will make a massive difference in what we do.
It will make a massive difference in the way you do things and also hold you accountable. The one thing that entrepreneurs need, I think, I mean, most entrepreneurs are very type A-plus people. So they need a team of men and women that can kind of keep them in line, is one way to put it, but also, you know, kind of, kind of give them, make, make you think about things in different ways that you may not think about things.
So I would strongly recommend any, any company out there, any entrepreneur, even if it's just one person, you're a one-person show, get a couple of trusted advisors and bring them on, on board.
Well said. To double down on that, visionaries, and again, this, this can be very depleting if you don't receive it with love. This can be, you know, brace yourself before I say what I'm going to say, realize that we're, we're, our goal is to help. You know, that's what we want to do. That's what Chris and I are trying to say is if you can't, if you can't inspire somebody to be on your advisory board for free, you're going to struggle tremendously to ever get a client worthwhile.
You know, that is, mentors are not hard to find. They're actually very easy to find if you go with, you know, you don't even have to go hat in hand, but if you go humbly and you ask mentors, especially, you know, there's a small business development center, you might start there.
Every university has a free resource to go to, but you probably know some people, you know, some doctors, you know, people who would again be, they have experience to tell you where you're wrong.
They have the experience to tell you, hey, you might not, you might not go that way. And my, my greater advice in that to dive a little too deep is the greatest mentors will not tell you what to do.
They might tell you you're wrong about something, but they will, they will invite you to take action. They won't take control over what it is that you're doing, and they won't be, they won't force you into paying them to be part of it.
They will anticipate that one day that you'll, you'll reciprocate, you know, it's, it's a relationship. It's a, it's a given, not necessarily a give and take relationship, but law of abundance says that, okay, that we are going to be able to share victories in this long term.
What would you add to that, Chris?
I mean, I think that was exactly right. Reach out, you know, people probably watching this via LinkedIn or whatever. LinkedIn is a great resource. So reach out and find somebody in the industry that you're looking at or that has experience that kind of complements
whatever your gaps are, and it just link, link into them or whatever, connect with them, and you may be surprised that they might be actively looking for to get involved with a company like yours. I mean, heck, I'm looking for board opportunities right now.
If any of your listeners are watching and like what I have to offer, give me, give me a shout. I'll, I'll at least have a conversation with you. I don't know if I can help you a bit. I'll at least have a conversation with you.
But there's a lot, there's a lot to learn anytime you start a business. You may be an expert, maybe you did something for so many years and you think you're an expert in an industry.
That doesn't mean you're an expert in sales, marketing, accounting, legal, all the different things that go into HR, all the different things that go into running a small business, risk management. That's a big one for us.
All those, all those things. There are people out there that are very experienced in those specific fields that might be really excited about helping you out.
Absolutely. I got to dive into that a little bit. You said you're looking for board opportunities. What types of board opportunities are you looking at?
I'm not really sure yet. I haven't, I haven't thought that through. You know, on a couple of these advisory boards and of course in the course of my company, the investments that we work with, we're constantly having conversations with those.
Sometimes it's, it's more give than take where we're asking for things, information, whatever. Sometimes we're offering advice or just, you know, listening to what they have to say.
For me personally, I don't know. I'm, I'm not a tech guy, but I have a strong sense of technology and have worked with a lot of tech companies.
I'm not saying I want to be on the board of a tech company, but you never know. But you might. Right. Any small business, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm based in Texas and Texas is an amazing place as Jackson can attest to for entrepreneurs.
You know, the business friendly environment, great people, great resources, great networks.
All those things. But that, you know, now the benefit of, I suppose the greatest thing to come out of COVID was technologies like these that the people embracing these technologies where we're having these conversations and people are watching live and can watch
five years from now, you know, all these, all these sorts of things that enable you to work with companies all over the world even. And, you know, whether it's virtual assistants and, you know, so I don't care where you are in the world. I would love to have a conversation.
If you're looking, if you just need advice on getting advisors, I'll have a conversation with you.
That's awesome. And I'm glad Chris brought that up tremendously grateful all you entrepreneurs visionaries you have the opportunity to do the same, you know, if I spent if I went door to door in my apartment complex.
I live in a decent apartment complex. There's a lot of good people here. I went door to door for two of the buildings.
I would have I'd be hard pressed to find somebody with the types of ambitions and the types of vision that Chris Raleigh has. That's nothing against my neighbors. My neighbors are great people. I would find wonderful people who could probably be friends, but I can go on
and get in and target the types of people that are that have the CEO experience. They have 10 plus employees, etc. And I can knock on their doors. I'm going to get almost as many nos.
If I'm too aggressive in our case, you know, we find fine tuned our messaging to where we actually get like eight yeses for every one to two no thanks and people are nice about it. That's new. You know, we've got three years of getting kicked in the teeth.
Trying to figure out how do we inspire people to understand we're not we're not some scary threat. You have you know, that's the nature of knocking doors. That's the nature of stranger danger. You have to learn to appreciate it.
Well, if you learn to appreciate it, you can learn to have greater impact. So what I'm what I'm getting at with that, like Chris putting this out there, I'm going to be talking to him about this on on both directions.
After the show, my first investor in first class business was Dr. Todd Snyder, and he's obviously still one of our investors. He was my original 50 50 partner. He now owns 5% of the company and he's a silent investor.
Well, he grew up in Rwanda on a sustainable farm. His dad is a professor and actively goes out and builds these. So he didn't actually move to America for the first time until he was in sixth grade.
He has this really interesting cultural upbringing, and he's a peak performance coach at the absolute highest of levels. And he's still, you know, I've always wanted to pick his brain about the sustainable farming aspect. I've never had a reason to dive into that.
Now all of a sudden, Chris comes on my radar and I'm like, Oh, maybe this is an opportunity to connect those two, let them go to bat and then later knock on their door and say, Hey, guys, what happened?
Did something cool come out of this? That is great. The more people you meet, the more people you can connect. And I think it's if you try to be a connector actively that pays dividends. A lot of people don't realize that.
Yes. If I go to a farmer today and they have they yielded their harvest two weeks ago, they sold everything and they're in the you know, I don't know how farming works perfectly. So forgive me on the analogy, Chris. But if they're in the process of planting seeds, right, that's what they're up to. They got nothing to give in the moment, right?
They might not have anything to give you yet. Those if you get in there and you plant seeds with them and plant seeds with them and plant seeds with them when the harvest yields fruit, it's amazing what type of feast you can have with with individuals.
So as Steve Harvey says, Steve, if you look up Steve Harvey, YouTube, Steve Harvey, planting seeds, you will probably find a very, very great motivational talk on why he just goes about life planting seeds, planting seeds, planting seeds every single day, knowing that that you'll reap what you sow.
Chris, this is super inspiring. Where should if people want to take action with your vision, where's the best place for them to start, do you think?
You know, you showed it our website is a great place to start. Of course, we're on social media, all those things you can follow us. But you're good website, we try to in order to get whether it's farmers to embrace this new idea of funding or investors to embrace something that they probably never invested in.
There's an educational component. So we part of our job is to educate both sides of the equation there. So go to just start out at harvestreturns.com.
Awesome. And we are not talking about only farmers.com or whatever that dating site is we're talking about investing in agriculture and helping change the world of sustainability. So I just dropped that link one more time.
All these links will be in the landing pages while everybody you can you can catch up more about what the mission looks like the vision looks like there too.
And if you have a vision, and you want to share it in the top right corner, you'll see a button that says be our guest, we would love to invite you to come in, share your vision with us and even possibly join us on the stage.
We hope everybody has a fantastic rest of their week and Chris, thank you for being here, man.
Thanks for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned into vision pros live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward is going to get more and more fun, more and more engagement as well.
We invite people to participate in the show, and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out.