Hi everyone and welcome to episode 8 of the From the Field podcast. In today's conversation, I meet with Greg Peterson, also known as Machinery Pete. We discuss how he got started, his take on auction trends and equipment values, as well as what makes people choose to buy used equipment in today's economic climate.
Before we get started, I'd like to announce our next From the Field giveaway winner. This month's winner is Alan Flagstad from Webster City, Iowa. Alan, thank you so much for listening and for being part of our growing podcast community. If you didn't win this time, don't worry. There are still nine more chances to win. If you haven't entered yet, simply scan the QR code and submit your entry for a chance to be our next winner. We'll announce another winner on the next episode. So, make sure you're subscribed and tuned in.
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Hi there, Kodiak Shears here with the From the Field podcast. I'm here with Greg Peterson, also known as Machinery Pete, and we're here in Rochester at the Quarry Hill Nature Center. We're going to do a little walk around. So, looking forward to learning more about Machinery Pete and all the things you do. Thank you so much for joining us.
You bet. Glad it worked out, Kodiak. And hey, thanks for coming to Rochester.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's funny how like when we had talked, I had no idea that you were a local.
Yeah, my wife Jackie grew up here. We got married. So I've lived in Rochester since, yeah, fall of 1989, just months before I started our Machinery Pete business, actually. So it's been a great place to live.
So tell me a little bit more about the brand Machinery Pete. How did it get started? You know, how did that all get going?
Well, it was kind of slow motion. Actually, Kodiak, so I started in November of 1989, and I was 23 years old and grew up in a little town in western Minnesota, Benson. My dad Jerry was a third-generation John Deere dealer there. So I kind of grew up around the farm equipment business and then went to college to study accounting. I've always liked numbers and my wife Jackie was here, well, my soon-to-be wife Jackie was here behind me at Gustavus where we went to college. So I was doing accounting work in the Twin Cities. She was finishing up. We got married July of '89 and then she got a teaching job here in Rochester very last minute, Labor Day weekend. So we were over the moon happy. It's like, wow, we can move home where she grew up. Rochester is a great town. So I was looking for work about a month, four, five, six weeks and at one point my dad Jerry called me up and he said, 'Greg, come back to Benson. I got to show you something.'
So I went home and we had lunch down at the Whistle Stop Cafe and he slid across the table this little, almost like a big leaflet, which at the time was the original auction price book. So I didn't actually technically start the business, but there was a banker in Morris, Minnesota named John Bain, great guy, he started it. And in the mid-80s the bank had need for the, you know, unfortunately with all the pain in ag country, the bank needed the hard cash valuations. And my dad as a dealer got a hold of this book and just loved it because of course there was no internet back then, information was scarce. He found the hard cash auction pricing to be super valuable.
And John had like 100 subscribers at 15 bucks a pop a year. So it was just kind of a little hobby or idea.
And dad just said, 'Hey, John is looking to sell. I'm going to miss this thing if it goes.' And he said, 'You're 23. You don't have kids yet. I think this is really good info. I don't know what you could do with it.' So that's what I did. I ended up buying John's computer, a big old Acer hard drive like this big.
Oh boy. A huge... When was this?
Massively heavy computer with five and a quarter inch floppy disks. If anyone, if you have really old listeners or viewers, they might remember those.
I remember, I've heard the legends.
So anyway, you know, now I'm 23 and I'm in business and all I'm going off of is the fact that my dad, who I trust, said this is really good info. So building the Machinery Pete business was slow motion. I just had to poke forward and get to know auctioneers. So I would spend my days on the phone literally all day. I got 25 ag papers a week from around the country. I'd clip out the sale bills, call up auctioneers like Scott Sager in Clare, Michigan. I introduced myself and they were very, very helpful providing me the data. So, I'd put this book out and I did that till '96 and then we came out, the internet was still super young, so we had a computer program on a three and a half inch disk that we'd send out and did that till 2000. Then we put up our website, machinerypete.com, and again just slow motion over the next 36 years.
And so the auction piece again, my dad just highly valued the brutal honesty of the data because it doesn't matter what you or I think this two-year-old dozer or three-year-old combine or 50-year-old plow is worth. The only way you figure out what it's worth today is you put it up for sale and when that hammer falls, now we know. You don't have to like it, but it's worth 1,200 bucks or 48,000. And that's what my dad was sensing back in 1989, that this is really valuable. And again, it's hard for younger viewers or listeners to remember. They probably get tired of old folks like me telling them there was a world before the internet, but information and data was just really hard to gather.
And so that's, I did 20 years of that. And then of course the world changes and the internet comes along. So our brand and business was slowly growing and there was always something coming along that was the next thing. So I got into television in 2007. I just had a strong belief that the farm audience would love to, you know, tag along with me to the auctions around the country and tell stories. I didn't have any training to be a writer or, you know, do television or whatever, but what I found is that it's just conversation. So it resonated and it's been so much fun over the years doing the TV side. And then 2009, social media was becoming a thing in the ag world. So I immediately, I just knew that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube at the time, I got a start on these things. I didn't know how, but I just started, I jumped in and I've actually now, I've posted every day on social media. In two weeks it'll be 17 years on the dot. Posted every day.
That's amazing. So, it's 6,200 days in a row of posting like content. This sold for this or here's an auction preview. People take that for granted. It's like a full-time job to be effective on social media and to be that consistent and post every day. So, that's no small thing.
But I had the sense that it was interesting because even back then I was very busy. I didn't have time to do it, but I just knew in my gut that I didn't have time not to do it. Because I knew if I leaned in that the value of the business would hopefully expand and grow, which it did. And anyway, that led five years later in 2014, I took it as far as I could on my own and I had one employee. I'm pretty much a low-overhead guy. I've been sitting in my basement for 36 years, but I partnered with Farm Journal, North America's largest ag media company, and they were great. They said, 'Greg, we love what you do. You just keep doing it. Let's build out the website. Let's get dealer listings, upcoming auction listings.' And so that's been really, really fun as well.
It's been a fun ride. But, like I say, it was slow motion. The real secret behind it was my wife Jackie was patient along the way and knew that what I was building was a good thing.
And yeah. Sometimes the world we live in now is very, very short-term focused. All we see is what's right in front of us.
But if you have a goal or a vision, what you want to do, sometimes that takes 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and that's okay.
And so I just tell people it was sort of like I envisioned it as a crockpot. You know, you put some good ingredients in a crockpot. Now, if you try and eat it five minutes later, it's going to taste terrible, right? But if you let it simmer all day, then dinner time it's like, 'This is pretty yummy.'
This crockpot analogy is a new one for me. I'm going to have to use that.
Well, again, I didn't train in business school or any of that stuff. I'm just living life and, you know, number one was being a dad. So, we have two daughters. Now, we have three grandkids. And I'm very thankful that as I was building the machinery business, I could be at home. So you get, you know, one shot to be a dad, right? And, you know, hopefully the best husband you can be.
How did you create the brand of Machinery Pete? And what values did you kind of put in the forefront so that people knew that you were a trustworthy source of information that could be relied on?
Well, it's a good question, Kodiak. Again, I didn't have any advisers in my ear telling me what to do. It was just from the gut. As I was posting content and writing stories, I just tried to keep it personal and I think it resonated with people. The way I thought about it, Kodiak, was everything I wrote, every farm column, been writing them since '92 now, every month in the magazines, I just imagine sitting in my hometown bakery, Benson Bakery, which is a third-generation bakery right off the main streets in Benson. And, you know, guys go in there in the morning, have coffee, solve the world's problems. And I just imagine writing a piece like, 'Hey, wow, did you see that Magnum 7250 yesterday with 1,200 hours? It brought 925. Wow.' I felt like I was trying to give the folks in the coffee shop something to talk about, maybe smile about, and at the same time, hopefully our data could help them if they're, you know, trying to figure out buy, sell, or trade, what's my value?
So it's business purpose, but also it started to play into people's passion for their iron.
Which American farmers, it's interesting. We get a lot of feedback from Europe on this that it's a little different over there. They look more at their equipment as just assets.
Almost like the construction view here.
This dozer just does the job, whatever. Whereas I was in Illinois last week and this guy, we did a whole interview about his modern equipment selling. Then he goes, 'Hey, come here. I got to show you something.' Go around to the last shed and there's a restored Minneapolis Moline. He said, 'My dad bought this new.' Now we could stand by that and talk. And what it turns into is now he's telling me about his dad and his grandpa. And that's the two ears, one mouth part. It's like, 'Tell me about your dad. Tell me about your grandpa.' And it gets really interesting now with data as marketers, whether you're trying to market a two-year-old, you know, huge Class 10 combine with 200 hours or you're trying to market, you know, a vintage muscle tractor. We're humans. And the most effective way to market is, okay, here's the info on this item, but then tell me a story about it. And when we see that done on the auction front or for sale by owner private, the price goes up because you've engaged people emotionally about this asset you're selling. So when I described when COVID hit and people were bidding once more on their phone, that was without a personal hook.
If you can give them an appropriate personal hook, now that can be, not every piece of equipment is, you know, Hall of Fame quality. I mean, a lot of it's beat on and that's totally cool. But even if it's beat on, tell me a story about it. Tell me what's wrong with it.
And then the people who are looking at buying it, instead of just looking at eight pictures going, 'Huh, this field cultivator is really pounded on.' If the owner tells me about how it was used and what's wrong with it, now I have more confidence as a buyer. So, yeah, it's maybe a five or six out of 10 on a 1 to 10 scale. But Kodiak, the seller was honest and told me about its faults. So here again, guess what happens to the price? Goes up. So the trust, the personal touch, the trust factor is really, the older I get, the more I just realize how powerful it is. And when I was building the brand all those years ago, I couldn't have verbalized that, but that's what I was playing into and just trying to be like a friendly face every day in the Facebook feed or in the back page of the magazine or Saturday 12:30 on RFD.
Hey, there's Pete. What's Pete yacking about this one? And a lot of times I would just, hopefully it wasn't just me yacking. It was we were telling stories and then discovering together. Oh, hey, this combine brought X. Wow, that's interesting.
