(upbeat music) - Welcome to "A Shot of Ag."

My name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm your host.

What's it like to run a successful business, especially with family members?

Well, we're gonna talk to two brothers.

We're gonna talk with Luke and Chad Van Wyk.

How you guys doing?

- We're good.

- Good.

Yeah, I say run a business, but you guys, well, you've both been involved with it.

I guess we're gonna get all to it, yeah.

- Okay.

- You're from from Pella, Iowa.

- Yep.

- Where's that at?

- It's right in the center of God's country.

- I thought it was from Iowa.

- Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant.

You and I have very different perspectives on this.

Now we're about 40 miles southeast of Des Moines.

- Okay, so just about middle of the state?

- Yep, just about middle of the state.

- A little to the south.

- Yep.

All right.

- About 30 miles east of 35 and about 20 miles south of 80.

- Okay.

I know the Pella windows.

Yep.

- What else is built there?

- Well, Thunder Creek, which is the business we come from.

- Why did we do that?

- That's an unpaid promotion.

- (laughs) Got it.

Okay.

You didn't tell me the rules.

Vermeer Manufacturing is in our hometown.

There's a ton of - They make- - manufacturing and industry.

- So they do- - Hay equipment, right?

- Yeah, so a small part of their business is hay equipment.

They do bailers and hay cutters.

The majority of their business is industrial equipment, trenchers and, and things that bore fiberoptics and power under the ground and- - Boring stuff.

- Cool stuff, yeah, and boring stuff at the same time, so.

- Okay.

Who's the oldest?

Okay.

- This one.

How many kids altogether in the family?

- Five.

- Five.

- Five.

- There's five of us.

Well, Chad, where do you fall then?

- I'm the second in line.

- Okay, second in line, - Yep.

- best looking.

- The cleanup crew.

Not the best looks, nope.

Nope.

I'll pass that on.

(laughs) - Yeah, so he's gonna tell you I broke everything and he fixed it.

It's not exactly the way it went, but that's the way he tells the story.

- But there's a lot of evidence.

- (laughs) That might be true.

- Look, we interviewed you and your dad.

Very interesting story.

Now when you guys grew up, you grew up on a farm, right?

- Yep.

- Okay.

Do you remember much about that?

Were you guys out helping, or were you kind of the farm kids that maybe didn't get involved so much?

- I'd say growing up, it was more a matter of being the older two, it was a battle for who got outta the house first - Yeah?

- to go get the job or who was able to get home from school first to help get the better jobs, and that's all we did.

- Yeah, farming was the epicenter of our life growing up, right?

So we as a whole family were all involved.

We had livestock at that time, so we had fare to finish.

We had stock cows and feeder cows, and so Saturday was the day we worked livestock.

We spent as much time in the field.

Our passion was always row crop.

We did livestock 'cause we had to.

So as soon as we could get out of that, we were happy to see that part of it go away.

- It's a very cool story about how your dad survived the early 80s because not a whole lot of farmers did.

It was a mass exit.

Okay, let's jump way ahead.

You guys, you were involved in manufacturing.

Your dad started, what was it?

LD- - LDJ.

Yep.

- LDJ, and let's jump right into the whole Hurricane Katrina.

- Yeah, yeah.

So as manufacturing became a bigger part of our lives back in the late 90s, we got into biomass heat.

So we built furnaces and boilers that used corn as a fuel source, and so we manufactured those.

We built a dealer network and sold them, and it was a nice little business for awhile, and then we were out here in Illinois for Farm Progress Show when Hurricane Katrina hit, and it changed everything.

So if you remember back then, fuel prices, all petroleum prices skyrocketed overnight, fuel, LP, natural gas, all of that, and corn was really cheap.

I think we were still drawing LDPs at that point for corn, and so you could take a dollar- - That just means that corn was super cheap, yes?

- (laughs) Yeah.

- We were not gonna describe what LDPs were.

- If you know, you know, right?

- Yeah.

(laughs) And so, yeah, $1.80, $2.20 corn versus five, $6 propane at that time made it really viable, and so our little manufacturing business grew considerably really, really quickly.

We went from about a dozen, 15 employees to almost 60 employees inside of six months - Oh wow.

- just building biomass furnaces and boilers, and we were farming about 3,000 acres of row crop at the time.

- Which is, that's a good size farm.

- Yeah, so it was just a lot for our family to try and sustain it all, and after harvest of 2005, we both had loving wives and families at home that we didn't really spend any time with because we were trying to balance the demands in the manufacturing and the farm, and that's ultimately kind of the inflection point where we said, "Hey, if we continue to chase both these rabbits, we're gonna lose 'em both," and so prayed a lot over it.

We're a very harmonious family.

We always agree on everything.

- Really?

- Is that true?

- Well, that's true if it's business.

- I'd say it is.

- I know that's what you said.

- We can settle that up later.

(everyone laughs) - So anyway, after a little, we call it cussing and discussing, we felt that manufacturing was the way we were being called to go.

So we stepped out of farming and kind of went all in on the manufacturing business, and that ultimately a couple years later is what became the catalyst for the creation of the fuel trailer in the Thunder Creek equipment line.

- Okay, before we get to that, 3,000 acres, that's a big farm.

- Okay.

- Okay.

I'm sitting here trying to fathom that as a farmer.

And if something was good, you know, you can make even more money.

Boy, that had to be really tough to kind of walk away from that.

- If I could add there, at that time, it was more about the family and the relationships.

So my son was just about a year old at that time, and seeing him just on Sundays when we put all the equipment in the shed and didn't go into the shop, that wasn't gonna work, and that wasn't sustainable.

So, you know, we fell into the vision that, well, the manufacturing would be more of a start and end time, and you could have more time at home with the families, and it was that way for a while, but no matter what you do, it's the passion of what you put in it to develop it.

So it's been beneficial for our family, but Luke and Lauren would both add the farming never came out.

So we still ended up finding ways through in-laws, through friends and all that stuff that we're still heavily involved with, helping other people with their farm operations and some of that 'cause it's in our blood, so.

- Yeah, farming was what I always wanted to be when I grew up.

I wanted to be a farmer.

I still wanna be a farmer when I grow up, and I'm fortunate that I still get to indulge in that.

I've got a good friend who I get to go play in the dirt with, and Chad's got family who he's involved with.

But yeah, I think, you know, that decision happened, I don't know, just short of 20 years ago.

I still don't know that we as a family have peace with that decision.

I mean, we live through the what might've been, but what does give us peace is we know that God put us on this path.

We know that he's been faithful to us beyond anything we can ask or imagine.

So we know this was God's plan.

We still get to play in the dirt, which is a good blessing from him.

We love that.

So it's been just this really interesting journey.

- Company mission, you're grounded in faith and focus on people.

You know, I would say it's sometimes not so hip in today's culture to talk about faith and openly confess it.

You guys don't shy away from it at all.

- No, it's who we are.

It's in our business.

You know, God's given us the opportunities we have.

It's our responsibility to make the most out of 'em and to give him the praise for 'em.

So, you know, we talk about it in our business routinely.

We don't force it on our staff, but we share it.

We let 'em know and we pray for 'em and all that, but yeah, it's important to know where it's coming from and the blessings that he gives out of it, so.

- Yeah.

Okay, LDJ Manufacturing.

Probably people don't know who that is, but Thunder Crick.

Tell me about the start of that.

- What's the difference between a crick and a creek, by the way?

- What'd I say?

I say crick, right?

- Thunder Creek.

E, E. There's Es in it.

- Okay.

(everyone laughs) - That's how we say it in Iowa.

- When did Thunder Creek- - Sorry, I'm talking to an Illinois audience.

I should be much more careful.

- (laughs) Oh, wow.

Okay, all right.

We're throwing down.

That's fine.

Tell me about the damn trailers.

(everyone laughs) - All right.

Hey, yeah.

So when we stepped out of farming, the acres that we were farming, we kind of partnered up with some friends of ours, and so it doubled the size of their operation, and, as you know, when you double in operation of that size, there's just a lot of logistics, and one of the needs that we had in that operation was just a better, more efficient way to handle fuel.

And so we said, "Okay, if we were gonna design a fuel trailer," see we built boilers.

So we had a specialty in tank manufacturing, which is a really unique specialty, and so we knew how to build tanks as good as anybody in the world.

We knew how to build trailers.

So we could put those things together and say, "Okay, we want a trailer that's gonna move down the highway at highway speed safely," you know, that I would feel safe with my wife and kids pulling down the road.

But then when we got to the field, we took that pit stop mentality.

How do you fuel and service fast so you can get the machines back and running?

And that became kind of the impetus of the first trailer we still use on the farm today and where Thunder Creek was born out of.

- They are incredibly, incredibly well built.

I know because I have bought one.

It did cost me additional money, too, because, after buying this, I had to buy a new pump on our farm one because I would get, you know, to fill a combine up in the morning, you know, 30 minutes, and then we got this thing, and you can fill it up in, I don't know, probably less than 10.

- Oh yeah, four or five.

- So then I had to get another one, and yeah, so thank you.

- We just messed everything up for you.

- You really did.

- Yeah.

That's great.

It's all part of our master plot.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I'll be honest, when I first saw these, I thought it was kind of ridiculous to pay that amount of money for a fuel cart, and then as time went on, you talk to people that have 'em.

My neighbors got them.

We did end up buying one, and it's kind of like one of those things that's you don't realize how you've got along without it 'cause we're constantly hooking up to it.

- As we came out of farming a little bit and started doing manufacturing with farming, you know, things you learn in a factory are how do you be efficient with what you're doing?

How do you make the use of your equipment and some of that stuff.

So when you start applying that to the farm, you know, how do you get your time back?

And that's where a lot of it came, and you gotta trust the quality, the repetitiveness of the machine, and also the value and what does it bring for your time.

So that really builds the basis of the product that, yeah, it's not the cheapest product up front, but if you look at the value that that product brings over time and how much does it speed up your operation or give you time back that you can do something else, that's what our customers learn after the fact.

You know, it's hard to communicate that up front.

- How'd you know that?

How'd you know that farmers would be, and everybody, construction, I know you guys do everything, how'd you know they would be willing to pay, you know, a good amount of money when, really, that wasn't the industry standard?

- Yeah, I don't think that we did know.

I think that we saw an opportunity with it.

We saw a niche that wasn't being exploited.

Like Chad said, we took a manufacturing mindset and a farming mindset, kind of merged 'em together and said, "Hey, we can make this safer.

We can make it faster and more effective, and we hope the market's gonna respond to that," and they did in some really cool ways, and it's been, man, just such a fun journey to get to do this.

- Yeah, you guys also, marketing has been phenomenal with this company.

You guys, you tried and failed with the millennial farmer to give him a cool tank.

Oh, that was a- - It didn't work.

- That was a disaster.

It still is a disaster.

- Randy the Farmer didn't work, but you guys eventually got one right, and the custom paint job that we got on ours is second to none.

- Third time's a charm.

(everyone laughs) - Sad thing is they'll probably never watch this.

(everyone laughs) So Chad, what is your role at Thunder Crick now?

- I lead the operations team at Thunder Creek, so, and LDJ, so yep, I'm responsible for the production and the facilities and with all that, so yep.

- Enjoy it?

- I do.

- I love building things, I love producing quality, and I love meeting the customer expectations.

So it really fills my bucket to hear the feedback from customers on what the product does for them, so.

- It's gotta make you feel good, too.

It's like Kleenex, you know?

Nobody says, "Hey, give me a tissue."

They say, "Give me a Kleenex."

I mean, Thunder Cricks are fuel trailers.

I mean, I know you have competition, but they're all referred to as Thunder Cricks.

Yep.

- Cricks.

(everyone laughs) - Eek, Creek.

- Yeah, so we've invested a lot in that brand and keeping up to it, so that's been a huge benefit.

- Sorry, we shouldn't, no fun.

Let's have no fun.

- Well, not at my expense.

You can have fun at your brother's expense.

- This is gonna be so bad in editing.

I know this.

- Yeah, we don't edit.

We don't have have Thunder Creek money.

(everyone laughs) - Yeah, especially not after this.

(laughs) - You've stepped away from the company though.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

So what are you doing now?

- Yeah, so three years ago, just through a lot of prayer, felt God calling me into a different direction, and the Lord had said, "Look, all that you've learned through this journey I've had you on will come to serve my kingdom."

And so I get to work with an organization called C12, and I get to serve Christian business owners and CEOs all around Central Iowa who recognize that God owns their business, and they wanna steward it for his honor and glory.

In the marketplace, I don't work with churches or nonprofits.

I work with for-profit businesses, construction, manufacturing, a really broad array, and we just get a figure out, you know, stewardship is something we talk a lot about in agriculture, and I find in business, maybe not as much.

And so it's really interesting to take these stewardship conversations into the business market and work with leaders who run large organizations and say, "How do we not force our faith down people's throats," right?

That's never our goal, but how do we love and care for people and use business as a unique vehicle to honor and glorify God and advance the gospel?

And so it's a really cool and exciting and interesting and challenging thing that I get to do now.

- You didn't make this, well, the C12, this was- - Yeah, no, C12 has been around as an organization for 30 years.

A very faithful man started it 30 years ago, but it had never been in Central Iowa.

And so as I left LDJ and Thunder Creek, through a lot of prayer, God ultimately led us to this organization and to launch it in Central Iowa.

- Okay, how long have you been doing that?

- Not quite three years, two and a half.

- Okay.

How are you liking it so far?

- Man, I love it.

- Really?

- Like, I love the Lord, I love business, and I love people, and so this is just one of the greatest convergences of that where I get to work with people uncovering their passion for God.

And, you know, stewardship is the active and responsible management of God's resources for God's purposes.

And so how we get to work through the challenges and the opportunities of doing that in business, man, there's no easy button for that, and so it's a challenge every day.

I love the leaders and the people I get to work with.

It's awesome.

It's the best job I never knew I wanted.

- You know, it's funny, your faith in your workplace, some people are really afraid to like even talk about those two going together.

I know with like the different shows that we do, we've never shied away from it, and we get that question a lot, you know?

"Can I talk about my faith?"

Or whatever because people are afraid to talk about it.

Obviously, we encourage it because, you know, we're Christians, but we never feel that like just someone giving their story, their testimony is offensive, and we've never had that feedback.

I mean, we've probably had 3,000 interviews at this point.

We've never had feedback, and we never really had feedback going the opposite way.

When we talk to, you know, people, homosexual farmers or something like that, we never get bad feedback.

People are interested in the story, they wanna hear it, and they wanna learn from it no matter what side it is.

I think it's sad when people are afraid to declare actually who they are.

- Yeah, yeah.

We've got a tremendous amount of freedom in this great country that we live in to represent what we believe and who we are in a way that loves and respects other people, right?

It doesn't give us the ability to discriminate against people, to hurt, to harm them, to disparage them in any way, but we can do it in a really loving and a kind and an edifying way, and yeah, we've got a lot of room to do that and a lot of opportunity to do that.

- Are you the head of HR at Thunder Creek, too?

- Absolutely not.

(everyone laughs) - Do you guys have one?

- Nope.

We do, we do.

- Yeah.

- Man.

- She's so busy.

- But it's- - Are you joking?

- No, I'm not.

She's really busy.

- No, it's- - (laughs) Because of him.

- Well, not because of me.

- No, no, no.

But like this, in these conversations.

If you address these things with your staff on the floor, those conversations go well, and everybody knows the expectations and the standards, but everybody's dealing with stuff, right?

We all have battles that we're fighting, and we help walk each other through it, and, you know, at the end, we're there for each other, and, you know, the outcome is usually pretty great, so.

- I think the problem is when one person thinks they're better than the other, and if you wanna declare yourself as a Christian, you know, that's not the truth.

- Those two ideas are not very compatible, right?

- No, no.

- If you read the book.

- Not at all.

So going back to the Thunder Crick, anything new coming down?

Can you give us any spoilers?

You got one coming out with three wheels or- - Nope, nope, nope.

Three wheels doesn't work.

- Hovercrafts?

- We like keeping the fourth wheel attached.

(Luke laughs) No, I really can't have anything I can share there.

I don't lead the engineering department.

- Wow.

That's fine.

- from that side.

Huh?

- You act like you don't know.

- No, no.

I gotta be welcome back when I get back there, so.

(Luke and Rob laugh) - In 2009 is when you guys started all this, right?

- Yeah, so we started - The Thunder Creek?

- manufacturing in '95.

Thunder Creek started in 2009, yep.

- How does a company become that much of a staple in ag in that short of a time?

- Yeah, I mean, you can clearly tell by talking with us for the last couple minutes.

It's not because we're really that smart or good.

- No, I wasn't gonna bring it up.

- Yeah, I know you weren't.

So I just, yeah, I think by God's favor and God's mercy, right?

- Yeah.

- The thing that we wanna really encourage people is, I mean, we're just a couple farm kids, right?

And that's what I love about agriculture and that industry is I think the thing that we have in agriculture in abundant measure is we have ambition and we have desire and drive, and when you mix that with just an ability to know that you can go out and do things, right, you can take on a lot of challenges.

We have lived over our skis.

Like I don't have a business degree.

Neither does he.

God's been faithful to surround us with people to bring incredible, wonderful, talented people into the organization and around the organization to help us grow and to help us thrive over time in how we market, in partnering with you, and even the missteps with Zach and Randy and a few of those guys, right?

We've been able to- - It happens.

- navigate some - It happens.

- of those muddy waters by God's faithfulness.

- So the other side I'd add behind it, Rob, is it's also listen to the customer and the brand.

So, you know, we grew up in ag, so we had some understanding for a lot of the ag customers out there on the challenges they may be facing, but we're not the expert in their operations.

So listen to that feedback from the customers, those who have our product, if something's wrong, making sure we stand up, stand behind it, having the honest conversations, but then also developing the quality into the product that makes sure it's reputable and it's reliable when they need it, and that does a huge amount to build the brand.

- Everything you see on a Thunder Creek trailer is there because somebody has has asked us for it at some point, right?

The utility box that's on the back of your trailer that has the compressor in it?

- Yeah, so you got- - It wasn't sot brilliant engineering mind that thought we should do this, right?

It was a farmer like you who said, "Hey, it's really helpful for me to be able to carry these things with it.

Can you give me some space for that?"

And so it's listening, like Chad said, to that voice of the customer and figuring out where and how can we respond to that that's helped to make that product really successful.

- So it's more like a tool truck, really, 'cause you got air compressor, welder, your generator back here, fuel tank, and then up here you got your toolbox, you got your DEF fluid, - Definitely.

- Yeah, oils.

- oil tanks.

- Plus you got the hydraulic jack, which is, what percent is farming?

What percent is construction?

- So we're now sitting probably about 60% ag, 40% industrial construction mix in what we build and put out the door.

- You would only think that would grow in construction just because of how fast that thing fills.

- It is.

We've only been in the construction market for about four years, so developing and getting that brand out and known, and our MTT line, which is what we serve that market with, really fills a need and a niche there.

It's same as ag.

Everybody's used to the way they've done it, and it's something new, so you gotta train and educate and then build trust.

- Real quick, where can people find you guys online?

- Thundercreek.com.

- Okay, what about the C12?

- Yeah, joinc12.com.

We're a national organization, so I'm one of almost 200 people like me all across the country who get to do this.

C12's active here in Illinois.

It's all over all over the country and even the globe.

- Okay.

Well, it's very cool.

Appreciate you guys making the drive over from Iowa.

I hope you filled up - Thank you.

- before you paid Illinois taxes.

- Yep, and we have enough to get us back across the river.

- (laughs) Luke Van Wyk and Chad Van Wyk.

Guys, very impressive, and your family is very impressive.

Enjoyed talking to your father as well.

So thank you guys very much.

Everybody else, we'll catch you next time.

(upbeat music)