This past weekend was the 4th of July holiday. Like many other families in the country, my clan decided to take in a fireworks display at the local music grounds. In our area, the venue we choose is called Blossom Music Center. This consists of a partially enclosed stage and a pavilion of seats, all surrounded by a spacious hill of grass.
What’s unique about Blossom is that folks can buy tickets for events in the pavilion or, at a substantial cost savings, a piece of the hillside, bringing their own lawn chairs or blankets. This year, however, there was something different going on at Blossom’s 4th of July concert. I noticed the music center now offers to “rent” lawn chairs to hillside ticket purchasers for a $5 charge per chair. I thought this was very interesting – something value-added for customers and a cost-effective alternative to lugging their own lawn chairs across vast stretches of parking lot.
Seems to me this kind of example is something ag retailers can embrace. For years, I heard many managers at dealerships say that they thought their companies were missing revenue opportunities with grower-customers by offering some services for free or making them do something themselves that could be done by ag retailers for a small charge.
Is your company in this same boat? Could it charge a relatively nominal fee for some precision ag services? Should custom application performed with automatic steering or automatic boom shut-off be priced the same as that done with an older rig?
Now that the marketplace economics have largely stabilized from the rollercoaster rides of 2008 and 2009, this might be the time to consider such potential revenue-generating moves. Who knows? It could just pay off, especially for those grower-customers who like a cost-savings but aren’t necessarily sold on “bringing their own chair to the table,” so to speak.
