Page 210 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 210

 Peterson has helped us a lot in our business by being an excellent partner.
– Rod Phelan, owner, Phelan Enterprises, and co-owner, PacificAg Solutions
It’s about living the Golden Rule—treating others like you want to be treated. “When Duane [Sr.] hired me in 2003, I told him that I would entrench my life into this business to make it successful,” says Grimes. “And I’m instilling that culture into our sales group. I want every one of them to feel that same sense of ownership and responsibility to their customer, as if it was their dad or brother.” That means going to a lot of weddings and birth- day parties. It means dropping everything to drive a part out to the farm on Saturday. And sometimes getting up in the middle of the night to head off a crisis. That’s Customer First in action.
RELATIONSHIPS THAT LAST: PHELAN ENTERPRISES (2005)
As a thirty-year veteran, Grimes knows the ag market and its challenges very well. He’s worked for Case, New Holland, John Deere, and Peter- son. He understands people’s frustration at being overshadowed by the demands of the construction market. Oregon farmers were aloof and disinter- ested after being ignored for years. So Grimes had to start from scratch. “Our customers didn’t need us, and our competitors didn’t want us here. We basically came in and put our shoulder pads on and started plowing our way into this business.” With- in two years, Peterson’s ag team had pushed the competition to the side and was making believers out of their customers. Custom hay producer Rod Phelan was a key catalyst in that transformation.
“Rod was extremely instrumental in helping Peter- son engage back into the ag business,” says Grimes, “because no one was ready to jump on the Peterson bandwagon when we started.”
Phelan goes around the country organizing har- vest operations for other people. He’s an innova- tor, just like his father. “My dad started harvesting alfalfa in Dixon, California with my grandfather in the 1960s and offered his services to the local farmers. In 1970, he moved us to southern Idaho with the same business plan. He told the farmers that he could sell their crops into California and make them more money than they’d ever made,” says Phelan, “which he did.” Twenty years later, they moved to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. “When the burn restrictions hit in the early 1980s, farmers saw that they weren’t going to have that tool to use in their farming practices anymore. My dad saw that as an opportunity. He was one of the pioneers in the valley to harvest grass straw residue and ex- port it to Japan and South Korea.”
When his dad died in 1996, Phelan took over the business and has grown it a hundredfold since. “We’re always looking for different uses for ag residues that have never been tried before,” says Phelan. Today, he operates two businesses—Phel- an Enterprises (Tangent, Oregon) and PacificAg Solutions, which goes nationwide. “We look for opportunities to work with farmers and growers to help them get added value out of their crops.”
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