twenty five cents when a few years earlier it had retailed for twenty dollars. Experiences like that helped to keep things in perspective!


LeAnna has always been the one that provided that balance and ballast to the operations. She never let the highs get too high or the lows too low. She was raised to live a simple, non-hedonistic life and no involvement with a business was going to change that perspective one way or the other. We’ve often remarked that while LeAnna may be the brakes on the engine, she is definitely not the caboose!


When one starts a business in the basement of a rented house, one has to be willing and able to wear every hat. Our business started with design, followed by production, shipping, and concluding with collecting payment. What one doesn’t know one either learns, and learns quickly, or sinks.


Our existence was tenuous at best, yet it was walking the tight rope that I found exhilarating. I kept my day job building silos, but I now had the bit firmly in my teeth that this was going to be a business that would support our family. I kept looking for the opportunity when I could work full time in the business and quit my job with the Mast Lepley Silo Company.


That opportunity came when a gentleman walked through the door of our rented house and asked if he could sell our products for us. His name was Russ Churchill, a retired minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church. He had seen our products in the Berean Bookstore in North Canton, asked the manager Paul Satterfield where the products had come from, and made a trip over to meet with us.


I was intrigued. I had never had a sales person work for us prior to this. For the first several months when starting the business I took it upon myself to sell our products to stores in our surrounding community. I would take a week off of work, and peddle our products to as many accounts as I could, picking up more than one speeding ticket in the process as I crested the hills of Holmes County in my 1964 white four door Dodge.


I discovered that I enjoyed sales as much as I enjoyed production. To walk into a retail operation with products in your hands that you have hand crafted yourself and then walk out with an order is powerful medicine for a healthy self esteem.


Yet I recognized that in running a business no one person can do everything. We had never hired a sales representative before. We were a little hesitant to do so. First, we asked Russ what kind of working relationship we would have. He responded by saying that he would cover all the costs incurred in selling our products in exchange for a percentage of the product he sold. That seemed reasonable enough. It assured us that we would not be running up a big bill for sales without at least getting orders in return. Secondly, we asked Russ for references. He referred us to Paul Satterfield, the manager of


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