Sometimes we have to fight for what God wants to give us.
Greg was quoting a grain-drying and ‑handling system for a prospective client. It had been a wet fall again, and dryers were in hot demand as more and more farmers realized that this purchase was the best insurance they could buy against unpredictable weather. It was December 2017 when he began general arrangement AutoCAD drawings in order to do an accurate quote. Over the next two months, as he continued to draw and consult with the client, new ideas took shape between the two of them and the design evolved progressively.
The client needed two “wet bins” side by side in a north-south orientation (which would receive the wet grain off the field before it was conveyed into the new dryer) and a cooling bin directly on the east side of the first wet bin (which would receive the hot, dry grain out of the dryer). In order to move grain from anywhere and to anywhere else in the system (to dry it, cool it, store it, blend it, and ship it out, an 85-foot conveyor had to run east and west directly under the first wet bin and the cooling bin and then ultimately (in a future phase of the project), a 230-foot, north-south conveyor would run perpendicular to the first conveyor, directly underneath the two new wet bins.
The client wanted 27-foot diameter hopper-bottom bins to obtain a certain capacity, so this was the size and type of bin Greg was working with in his drawing. There are 18 legs on a 27-foot diameter hopper. (The hopper is a cone shaped bottom on the bin that allows the grain to be efficiently discharged out the bottom into a conveyor.) He oriented the hopper legs on the cooling bin and the first wet bin so the east-west conveyor would nicely pass through. And then he suddenly saw that, because 18 is not divisible by 4, the perpendicular north-south conveyor in the future phase would run smack into one leg on each side of the two wet bins.
He informed the farmer that 27-foot diameter bins would not work, changed the bins in the drawing to 24-foot diameter, added a few tiers to each bin to bring the capacity back to the farmer’s specs, and increased the height of the bucket elevator to accommodate the taller bins.
The weeks went by with more changes and modifications, and with Greg putting in dozens of hours carefully reworking and redesigning. Meanwhile, there was another company vying for the project. And in all the time their salesman had spent so far with the client, there had not yet been a drawing produced or a design thought through.
It often happens in a situation like this that the supplier simply determines what equipment the client wants. Once they secure the contract, they drop all the equipment on site and hire an installation contractor to figure out how to put it all together to meet the client’s needs.
My husband has seen a lot of difficulties arise from this approach to sales. It’s all right with a simple job, but this was a complex system. A case in point: if Greg had not caught the problem with the 27-foot diameter bins and informed the farmer, and then if the competitor got the contract, it’s easy to imagine what could happen. The contractor doing the building would discover, too late, that the second conveyor wouldn’t fit. Whose problem is it then, when no one has taken responsibility for the whole job from design to completion? The client has to settle for whatever jury-rigged adaption the builders can come up with; it ends up costing more and being a huge and frustrating disappointment. And who shoulders the extra cost? The client? The supplier? The subcontractor? These things end up in court, and nobody is happy in the end.
The time came for the client to make his decision. Greg’s quote had come in at $980,000. The farmer called him to say that the competitor had come in at $900,000. Greg was almost 10 percent higher. The client would really like to go with him. Was there any give on that figure?
Greg had over a hundred hours invested in the design, and he was keen about the project. He was briefly tempted to try to cut some corners, but he’s been around this business long enough to know that any cuts can only come directly out of his margin and that he would be quickly putting himself in the position where he’s working for nothing. He charges a fair price, is open with his clients about his margins, and will do the job right even if he runs out of money before it’s finished. By taking the time ahead to work through the details, Greg had come to a legitimate and realistic idea of the true cost. He knew he had to stick to his guns.
We usually just shrug and say, “Win some, lose some,” but we went to bed that night with heavy hearts. “It’s not just about getting the job,” Greg said. “I want the guy to get what he needs. This was a beautiful system. It’s a good design.”
I awoke at 1:00 a.m., wide awake, with a deep burden pulling me to pray. Not knowing how I “ought to pray,”1 I began to pray, very quietly so as not to disturb Greg, “in the Spirit,”2 “in the tongues of men and of angels,”3 interceding “according to the will of God”4 “with groanings that cannot be [articulated].”5
As I prayed, I thought of a job Greg had quoted the previous spring for a large corporation. He failed to get it because, again, he was 10 percent higher than the competition. Another major factor was that the client insisted the terminal be ready to receive grain by the end of September. Greg maintained that it couldn’t be done in that time frame: he would need two more months to complete it. The competition, however, assured them they could pull it off, and they were awarded the contract. The following spring the job still was not completed. The whole project became an absolute nightmare for everyone involved. Oh God, please don’t let that happen to this client!
I was still praying an hour later when Greg woke up. We talked and prayed together for 3 or 4 more hours. We prayed that if the competition could best serve the client, that things stay as they were. We told God that if He didn’t want us to have this job, we didn’t want it either. We reminded ourselves aloud that God is the One who knows the end from the beginning; we cannot foresee ultimate outcomes. We submitted all this to God.
Finally at about 6:00 a.m., I went back to sleep and Greg got up and drove to town to talk it over with our son Lindsay. The pervading feeling overall, from the night of prayer and the discussion with Lindsay, was that God wanted Greg to contend for the job—for both his and the client’s sake.
On the way back from town, Greg placed a call to a man in upper management of a commodities group for whom Greg’s company, Western General, had recently completed a big commercial job. This man—I’ll call him Lance—had been Greg’s main contact for that job, and he had been very pleased with what Greg and his crew had done. Once he got Lance on the phone, Greg briefly described the situation and asked if our client could call Lance as a reference; also asked if he (Greg) could tour the client through the plant Western General had built. Lance graciously assented on both counts.
Now Greg put in a call to the client: would he give this man Lance a call, and would he drive an hour and a half to meet with Greg and tour through this plant? This client is a very busy man with a large and successful business in addition to his farm, frequently flying here and there. That morning, it turned out he was supposed to be catching a flight somewhere within a few hours. With a tinge of exasperation, he acquiesced: told Greg he would phone Lance, postpone his flight by 24 hours, and meet Greg at the plant a couple of hours hence.
When they met, the first thing Greg said was, “I don’t like to blow my own horn, but it’s the only way I can show you where the value is in what we do.” Then they went through the plant, phase by phase, beginning with the building that housed the seed-cleaning part of the operation. Greg explained how Lance’s company had got the engineer to just rough out some general arrangement drawings because they felt it wasn’t in the budget to do detailed blueprints at that point. As Greg quoted the job, he took those drawings and pored over them during a period of six weeks, drawing out every detail. He came face to face with a glaring problem: with the height at which the engineer had designed the building, the downspouts through which gravity would carry the product into the machines were not at a sufficiently steep angle for the grain to flow. He would have to add four feet to the height of the building to make it work. “It would have been a disaster if I hadn’t caught that,” he said to the client.
He had told this man earlier in the process, during a visit to the site, “God helps me. I depend on Him, and He makes things work out even when they shouldn’t.” He summed up by saying, “He has our backs.”
This kind of talk often makes people a little uncomfortable, but sometimes Greg feels compelled to point to the One to Whom so much credit is due. Now, as he and the client continued touring through the plant, piece by piece, Greg pointed out things that could have gone wrong but were discovered in time, changed or adapted, and brought into the flow of an overall better system.
When you think about it, that’s a paraphrase of Romans 8:28: “God works everything together for good for those that love Him.”
Well, the client liked what he saw and heard, and he awarded the contract to Greg. It was a tremendous victory, a large part of which was in the spiritual realm, where we had fought the real battle. I wanted to tell the story right away, but we’ve seen enough jobs go badly and end up being a curse rather than a blessing. I would wait until the job was successfully completed. As I said above, God knows the end from the beginning; we, on the other hand, would have to wait till the end before we knew for sure that it was good to get the job.
In the end, the project came together extremely well, and the client was very pleased. Our son Ben, working in the administrative side of the business, targeted that site to film for a 90-second promotional video on YouTube. I am providing a link here for those of you who have always wondered what exactly it is that my husband does. In it you will see our other son, Lindsay, who is our site manager, jumping off the skid-steer and striding here and there around the site. And although you won’t actually see Ben, you will “see” and "hear" him through the videography and the original music score he wrote and orchestrated for the video. To God be the glory.
1. Romans 8:26a
2. 1 Corinthians 14:2
3. 1 Corinthians 13:1
4. Romans 8:27
5. Romans 8:26b
