Hey Andres, how's it going? Thanks for taking the call. How's it going today?
It's going great, how about you?
Pretty good, pretty good. Thanks for agreeing to answer some questions about your experience with Big House Technologies. You've been a client for some months now and I just want to see how your experience has been.
Can I ask by just asking what Watrous Valley Ranch does, your company, and give us a few more details like size of the ranch, age, whatever you want to share.
Okay, yeah. I work for Watchers Valley Ranch as a manager here. We have absentee owners. It's a working cattle ranch in northeastern New Mexico. We're a high elevation, low rainfall environment. We manage pretty conservatively. Our carrying capacity is about one cow per 78 acres and we typically run about 75 percent of that ahead of the droughts and then we fill in on better years with custom grazing.
Depending on the season we manage anywhere from 500 to 1200 head and really focus on managing intensive grazing, low cost and high efficiency production.
Andres shared with me some videos that I'm gonna present the screen for a second to serve as a visual of what they do so this is video number one. So that's like how many cows are walking around?
That's probably right around 200 head of H1's virgin heifers
Okay, which we've talked about quite a lot in the project, what that means. And then there's this other video here where you can just see a bit more of his day to day. That's your son, right?
Yes
Cool. So what's the main output of the ranch? Is it just the meat, the animals?
Yeah, we're predominantly a cow-calf operation, so our biggest product is the calves that we produce from our cow herd.
So getting on to some of the more why we came to have a business relationship with, what were the cracks that you started seeing in your internal process?
The biggest thing is as we added more enterprises like the heifer development and custom grazing along with the cow calf the systems that i was using weren't keeping up and they weren't tracking the data beyond forecasting so we had the data but not in a way that helped us make solid decisions and accurately track how it was actually going throughout the year so we couldn't track the gross margins clearly beyond the forecast and seemed like we were always chasing spreadsheets and double checking our numbers second guessing ourselves.
So a bunch of tracking spreadsheets, Excel, Is there existing software for the cattle industry? What were the issues that you saw with this off-the-shelf software and what made you go custom?
The biggest issue is there wasn't a tool like the one we're building. Most cattle software is built for inventory or compliance and not really for decision making on a managerial level. They tell you how many cows you have but not not how each enterprise is performing and they don't handle depreciation, opportunity costs, economics, KPIs and stuff like that and I just needed something to support the managerial decisions we're trying to make and not just tracking the animal IDs.
So you had spreadsheets, but before building something custom, what alternatives did you consider to solve the issue did you consider ERPs or what alternatives were out there for you?
We tried the spreadsheets but we also tried QuickBooks and and even talked to some consultants about building us something modular, but nothing scaled the way we wanted it to, and it seemed like we were spending more time updating the tools than making the decisions that the tools were supposed to help us make.
Okay. So let's dive into the tool that we built for you. Let me present the screen again. I'm gonna show Ranch Management Analytics, the software that we built for Andres. Let me go to the dashboard. Maybe walk us through what you're looking forward to accomplish, what are the main modules that you look at?
Yeah, I mean the main thing we want to accomplish is give clarity to all ag business. Specifically, livestock focused ag businesses, and really help them lock down their numbers and get a good meter of how their business health really is and what's making them money and what's just breaking even or costing them money.
So the biggest thing here is the forecasting. You run through all your forecasts of what you're going to do throughout the given year based on generalizations. So and we're not looking to make make it correct down to the a thousand dollar or even ten thousand dollars but just make a general plan of what you see your production here looking like and and what your cost might be and projects investments all that kind of stuff
From there, where the tool really kicks in on here on the dashboard you can see that we connect to your bank accounts through Plaid and you can allocate where costs are going, where incomes are coming in and see how it's tracking with your forecast versus with what the actual is and another big part of the app is the fuel and feed inventories and tracking this is where a lot of stuff really left you guessing here you as ranches a lot of us buy things in bulk and then give it to whatever needs it and we don't really have a good meaner gauge on exactly how much each enterprise is getting.
So this is really where we stand out in just tracking where you're at in the given year versus guessing how much cake or hay or whatever you're feeding, even fuel. It just really helps give you better clarity on your enterprises and understand how the actual gross margin of the business is is not just the forecasted version
Thanks for the run through it's definitely been amazing getting to learn the industry and what the different categories of cows there are and how a calf becomes an h1 and then it becomes an h2 and then it graduates to a cow so that I enjoyed learning that of the industry.
So the tool is built on Bubble. What surprised you most about building with Bubble and no code?
I think what surprised me the most is the speed that it can be built and altered. We went from spreadsheets to a working dashboard in months, maybe even quicker than that. It's smooth and it's scalable and with the right partner, it's a completely different experience. I think no code really changed how I think about building these kinds of tools and how effective and fast they can be.
The math is very interesting and so Andres and I often have conversations first on Excel and then we put on no code. And sometimes it's less than a 24 hour turnaround from when we have the Excel conversation to when it's live. And no code has enabled that.
In that sense, how has your experience been with Big House relative to previous agencies that you worked with?
Big House was different. In my opinion, they didn't just build an app. They really took the time to understand the logic behind the numbers. And my experience with other dev companies is they want to take your idea and re-package it. And Big House helped me translate my spreadsheets and processes into clean workflows. And I felt like I wasn't trying to build this solo, I was building with a partner and not managing a freelancer.
That means a lot to me a lot to me Andres thanks for saying that.
Yeah thank you for your work.
If you could go back, what would you do differently in the build process?
I definitely would have spent more time on the front end before we went to development, just locking in every calculation, back end rule and formula before scaling the interface.
We've had to take quite a bit of time to rework some things that were wrong in my formulas but the good thing about that is Bubble made it fairly easy to go back in and rework those without having to scrap the whole thing. We're able to make those adjustments fairly quickly and get things fixed.
Amazing yeah, I can add that on our end we we obviously are external to the industry and we're learning as we build with a client and as we see what's required in the excel then there's some back and forth to understand the business and that's how we have we grown together in terms of learning what we're building
As CEO, how does the tool change your role and that of other CEOs of similar ranches?
I think more than anything, it's going to give a lot of clarity on what's actually happening. It's not running on gut feel anymore.
I'll know what I forecasted and what the actual means and why that changes so much is you know of course we got ranch accountants and all that stuff but there's specifically looking at tracking for tax accounting and what I need to know is the managerial accounting side of things.
So this tool is going to change that for me big time. And it'll change the way I converse with ownership and the way we run meetings. I can pull up live enterprise margins compared year over year and then make quick and confident decisions and it ultimately just helps me lead better and build a better plan.
How do you see this tool evolving in the next phases of the app?
I have plans to add AI models for cattle price forecasting, cattle valuation APIs, expense optimization, grazing estimates and forecasting there.
And then we're also building a financial education and onboarding videos for the users of the tool to help them along through this if they get stuck and really understand the numbers that they're putting in and why they matter.
Excellent. Yeah, we've talked about some of those before. There's definitely a future in what we're building for sure.
Absolutely.
What advice do you have for CEOs considering internal tools?
I think if your software doesn't help you make better decisions, it's just an overhead. You can't settle for tools that aren't built for your operation. You have to own the systems that bring clarity to your numbers.
Amazing. I'll highlight that. If another company is listening, maybe with a similar pain, could be any company not necessarily a ranch, what would be, and the similar pain would be tracking spreadsheets or not having clarity on the numbers, what's your advice to them?
I would ask them if they know their gross margins by enterprises. If they can project cash flow are they tracking the value created or just transactions? If the answer is no, I would say stop patching spreadsheets together and build a system that works for you.
Amazing. Yeah, that's what we're trying to help you out with and we're getting somewhere for sure.
And the last question, would you hire Big House Technologies again?
Absolutely. I really feel like they didn’t just help me build an app. They helped me build a system of thinking, and that changed everything, and I hope it helps a lot of people in a lot of operations.
Sweet. Thanks for that. It's been amazing getting to know you and the cattle industry and even as a person, right? We were talking about your family earlier, I don't have a family yet but maybe one day I'll share some of that as well.
Anything else you want to add before we close. That was my last question.
The only thing I would add is, I really hope the tool helps other ranchers thrive and this platform will give somebody no matter where their location in the Sandhills or the Panhandle of Texas, real clarity and control over their business. And that would be a success for me. I just want ranchers to really feel like they're running companies and not just surviving. And I think that with the help from Big House helping me build this tool, it's going to really help a lot of places.
Amazing, great well that's it for me I'll close the interview and thank you very much Andres. I'll chat to you later bye bye!