In their first year on the farm, Quint and Leah, husband and wife, planted tomatoes. Their aim? Break even. 

One year, fifty acres, countless hours of labor, and a lot of disinterested Italian restaurants later, they walked away from tomatoes forever. 

The promised margin of specialty crop farming didn’t materialize. Quint and Leah reverted to a focus on corn and soybeans. Or so they thought. 

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“How do I start?” 

Whether it's starting a new business or business model, building a network in a new sector or country, or even thinking differently about the status quo, I hear this question a lot. 

And it’s a tricky one, because no one wants their first year to go like Quint and Leah’s tomato experiment. 

But that’s not how the story of Affinity Farms ends. 

Another specialty market

One day, Quint was in a hardware store and spotted a 40 pound bag of corn marketed as deer feed. Some quick mental math told him that this corn was selling for nearly $15/bu. In an instant, he decided he was going to figure out how to play in this market instead of selling to an elevator for sub-$4/bu. He invested in some equipment (a bagger, a cleaner), did a lot of manual labor himself, and ended up selling 10,000+ bags his first year. 

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Cast in this new light of subsequent success, the year of tomatoes looks more like a necessary experiment than a failure. 

Quint wasn’t afraid to walk away when something didn’t work, and was more than willing to try something else unconventional. He maintained his discerning eye, and stayed attentive to new opportunities.

This is a pattern for Quint, owner at Affinity Farms in Kentucky, USA – he’s excellent at generating enough momentum to get going. 

I recently got the chance to speak with him on our podcast, and he had several more stories about starting out.

Put yourself in opportunity’s way

One of the most surprising anecdotes Quint shared was about opening up his farm to be a filming location for a movie about a harrowing grain bin accident. This was not a simple question of letting some Hollywood-types hang around the farm for a day or two. It involved, among other things, getting to know the Director deeply, hosting him for dinner, and touring him around town seeking local resources and support for the film.

I get the impression that Quint found this all pretty fun, but more impactful for Affinity Farms, it led to introductions into financial circles in New York City. Fast forward, and Quint partnered with a hedge fund to grow his operation.

Through his willingness to say ‘yes’ to an opportunity that ostensibly lay beyond the scope of his farm’s work, Quint put himself in a position to not only make a powerful media connection, but also to tell his story to a person who could then connect him to their own vast networks. 

ABCC (Always Be Connecting with Customers)

Quint also told a story about how hearing a rumor of an Italian buffalo dairy company that was desperately looking for animal feed, convinced him and his wife to fly to Italy to see if they could help. Problems with supply from the Black Sea had messed up this dairyman’s soybean supply chain, and he was struggling for an alternative. At the same time, Affinity was working on a model to integrate distillation facilities and livestock operations, by turning spent grain into feed.

Though the trip was promising and they ended up signing a contract around delivering dried distiller grains, the price was never quite a win-win, and Quint didn’t end up delivering any feed. But the experience taught him a lot about a geography and a market he wasn’t familiar with, and about how their model could be adjusted to plug into different contexts. Now as they talk to investors and potential partners about their strategy, they can speak with authority about how this is not only proving effective locally in Kentucky, but how it could (or could not) also work in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

Activity begets success

When I first came to Australia, I didn’t know anyone in the whole country, yet I knew I needed to start building a professional network. 

When we started Tenacious Ventures, we hadn’t run a fund, but we had conviction it needed to exist. 

As I often do when I’m stuck, I heard my dad’s voice saying, “activity begets success.” 

That’s what I did, and that is the lesson, to me, from Quint Pottinger. 

Whatever your goal, the best way to get started is just to start– start talking or writing about it; get on a plane or a bus and start meeting people; come up with a hypothesis and start testing it. 

Your story doesn’t need to be perfect at the beginning; you’ll get better and better at telling it over time. Mistakes along the way are lessons, not failures. 

While progress toward an ambitious goal is rarely linear, it does require motion. And the more you move, the more momentum you’ll have, and the closer you’ll get.