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Iowa, the land of fields. Whether it's fields full of corn or fields full of baseball dreams. And those fields, they're often full of tractors. The sight is so common, most people don't even notice them. Until they notice that they're driving with no one at the steering wheel. I'm just kind of sure this office can help you. I just saw something a little strange. A tractor out in the cornfield that was driving along by itself.

That's just one of many times that Craig Rupp had 911 called on him.

And not because he's going around pushing people out of tractors, but because his company, Sabanto, is changing the way America farms forever. I knew agriculture. I knew machines. I wanted to disrupt the industry. I wanted to send a message that autonomy is coming in agriculture. That's why I think the next generation tractors are already sitting in your machine shed. Welcome to The Unshakeables, from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.

I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. If you're new to the show, welcome. If you've been listening, welcome back. Over the next few weeks, we'll be highlighting exceptional small businesses from across the country. We'll also be hearing from experts in those markets who can tell us what the business and communities supporting them mean for America.

But this week, we're firmly in the Hawkeye State, and we have two great guests joining us today, Brian Lamb and Sachin Sehgal. You know, the more we learned about Sabanto and Craig's business, the more it made sense to have those intimately familiar with the local market come on and chat with us.

Sachin is the founder of Elevate Digital Marketing, an agency based in Des Moines, Iowa. Sachin, welcome to The Unshakeables. Thank you very much, Ben. It's great to meet you. So I really love Iowa. I grew up here. I have a small business here, and I really love it as a place for innovation. I know most people picture the coasts when they think about AI and tech, but there's so much happening in the Midwest that I'm excited to show off.

All right, let's get into the show. This is Sabanto Agriculture from Ames, Iowa. I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Iowa this summer. What really stood out to me is just how much Iowans love Iowa. I talked to some terrific people, and it's amazing how people all over Iowa seem to have this real emotional and almost physical connection to agriculture. It's just a way of life in Iowa. So as soon as I met Craig, there was one question I had to ask immediately.

Craig, I believe you grew up on a farm. Is that right? I most certainly did. I grew up on a farm in northwest Iowa, a little town called Cherokee. It's about 5,000 people now. And it was corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle. What was that like growing up in an agricultural community? Uh...

You know, it felt normal while I was there. I guess that's what you knew, right? That was your life. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone I knew had something to do with farming. Chores in the morning, chores in the afternoon. When you got home from school, you know, you had to feed the cattle, feed the hogs. You know, I just assumed that this was part of growing up outside working. So when you were growing up in this rural community on a farm, did you have any

Did you imagine someday you would own a business? No, it was never really a plan for me. I never would have imagined that I would ever start a company. The little town I grew up in had a radio shack. And then by God, they had books and you could learn about electronics. It was like the Internet for me back in the early 80s.

1984, when I graduated high school and went to college to become an electrical engineer, I was convinced that was the last time I would ever set my foot on a farm again. Craig followed that engineering track, working at Motorola in the 90s, where he did hardware development for mobile phones. Around 1995, Craig and some fellow Motorola-ans saw an opportunity. Mobile and cellular devices were taking off.

We had decided that we're going to start a consulting company. We would meet in the mornings at a local restaurant, and then we kind of did the old pinky promise that if we could get $30,000 in contracts, then that would hold us out to the end of the year. And it turns out about two weeks later, we had $30,000 in contracts. So we gave her two weeks notice and went out and started what was called Alliance Technologies Group.

Craig kept chasing his curiosity, working at John Deere, Apple, BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung, and a few other household names. And while he never imagined he'd be an entrepreneur, once he started Alliance Technologies Group, he couldn't stop. You have started how many companies? This is my sixth.

So the fifth company he started was called 640 Labs. It combined his work at John Deere on internal cab displays with his work on the Apple iPad's cloud data storage system. My brother still farms. I was at his farm. I was sitting in one of his tractors that he just bought, and I saw this little port there.

All the engine data is on this port. And then my friend and I, we started this company and the whole idea was we're going to take data off of that port or off of these vehicles, agriculture data, into the iPad, iPad up into the cloud. So it was a very inexpensive way of collecting data. 18 months later, we got acquired by Monsanto. At Monsanto, he was back in regular conversation with farmers.

I had a unique skill set. I knew farmers. I knew, you know, what made them tick. I can talk with them about planting corn, soybeans. And, you know, I'd always ask the question, what keeps you up at night? And it was always labor. It wasn't the cost of labor. It was the lack of labor. The availability of farm labor has changed over the years. The average age of the American farmer is 59, and farm families are much smaller than they used to be.

I have 57 first cousins. Wow. And both my parents had double-digit brothers and sisters, and all of them had a lot of children. And now just, you have four kids now. That's a big family. I thought, you know, autonomy is the answer for it.

Okay, so this is where I want to bring Sachin back in. Sachin, you've lived in Iowa your entire adult life, and it seems like you have no plans to leave. So what did you think about Craig's departure? He said he never wanted to step foot on a farm again. You know, it's interesting. I bet many people had the same ideas, Craig, but there's a lot of people moving back to the area post-COVID because they kind of realized that Des Moines has quite a bit to offer in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship. So it's kind of nice to see a boom coming back in.

We've heard from Craig about the path he took and his background leading him to a place like Sabanto. But what's striking to me is that this is a guy who said he never wanted to be back in Iowa, never be back on a farm. And now he's created an agriculture company and is farming full time. What do you make of that?

You know, we've seen a lot of companies in Iowa and Des Moines specifically come out of the agricultural space and a lot of companies providing new innovative solutions to older problems. We've seen recycling companies doing things like plastic recycling. We've seen fertilization companies with different types of fertilization techniques and planters with different planting companies.

So Craig is really pioneering his way in that field on the agricultural side of things, using AI and automation to bridge that manual to tech divide. So much evidence of innovation in that sector. But I do want to talk about AI for a second because it's everywhere. You can't pick up the paper without reading about it, assuming you actually pick up a paper anymore, but that's a different issue. And people are talking about it changing the way we all do business. So do you use AI in your work?

We use AI all the time. We use multiple different tools. It's kind of a common theme that we're seeing with a lot of businesses actually using AI in different ways to bridge that gap between maybe manual processes that they've been doing in the past and

completely digitally native processes that they're moving in towards. Even if that's just an email follow-up automation when a client checks out or just finding AI chatbots or even callbots that someone can call and interact with. Yeah, automation and AI are going to be a huge help for small businesses.

One of my clients in particular, similar to Craig, their business leads with AI as a solution. They're a telecom provider and one of the things they provide is an AI detection of safety equipment for schools, organizations, municipalities. So, you know, when you see someone with a fire hazard or some sort of threat to, you know, the safety of a building, this company is using AI to basically dispatch emergency services

So Craig's goal with Sabanto is to make up for the lack of human labor and farming where he sees a shortage. And that could stoke a lot of people's fear about AI replacing human jobs. What would you say to them? There may be roles that are just moved around in the company, but at the end of the day, you definitely need a person before you can just push AI content out there unless it's pretty much just gathering information.

So we see it on our end a lot where the AI will get you really close to the end result that you're looking for, but you still need to do a little bit of manual input. It does a great job with graphics design, things like that as well, but it just still needs a human touch at the end of it to get it ready for production.

I tend to agree with you, Sachin. I think we've had other technological revolutions before, and there's always been the threat of job eliminations. And there always have been some, but they've always created more jobs than they've eliminated. They've just been different. And I think this time will be no different. So back to Craig. He, like Sachin, knew the problem. Not enough help on the farm. And the solution? It's autonomy. If this was a math test, this would be the part where Craig would have to show his work. I'll let him walk you through the steps.

So I've written software, done hardware. I have started companies in the past. I knew farmers. I knew what made them tick. And I used to work at a lot of automating manufacturing plants. If there's anyone that can do this, I can do this.

That's a commercial driver's license, by the way. Craig got it so he could drive the semi-truck to haul his tractor to farms across America. And I spent the winter writing software.

Wow. I know. I promise I'm tracking at least... I know what a planter is. When you start telling me what kind of planter, I confess I've lost the plot, but to anyone who's worked on a farm, I'm assuming they know. Yeah. It's a standard 18 or 20 inch, and we're planting soybeans. Farmers are kind of an odd group of people. They...

You know, they won't trust anyone to plant corn. The only thing I know about corn is it's supposed to be thigh high by the 4th of July. Yeah, that was, you know, back in the 30s or so. But now, you know, now it's typically shoulder high by the 4th of July. With corn off the table, Craig went after soybeans. He set his sights on having a minimum viable product to test in the spring of 2019. He spoke to a few people about testing the tractor out on their fields.

Agriculture has two degrees of separation. So I swear to God, I can get to any farmer in the U.S. through two people. If you're keeping score, that's four degrees less than Kevin Bacon would need to get to someone. Yeah. I've met him, by the way. Word of Craig's wild autonomous planter spread quickly.

After about two weeks of word on the street that some crazy guy's going to stop by with an autonomous tractor and planter and autonomously plant their crops, they were lined up. Craig launched Sabanto on May 3rd, 2019. He didn't choose that date because it was some momentous occasion. It was, once again, all up to the farmers. It was the farmer that told me early May that

We're going to be planting, so you better have everything together. Craig didn't, but he launched anyway. I slept in the sleeper of that Peterbilt. There were some cold nights because I didn't have a heater in it, but it was a learning experience. The software was nowhere close to being productized. It was more of a proof of concept. Can this thing run? Craig drove the semi in the tractor, planting beans across the Midwest.

It was a very rainy spring, so on days he got rained out of planting, he was flying out to California to meet with VCs. Raising money from VCs isn't always easy, but Craig had a good track record to back him up.

Everyone saw 640 Labs, kind of an interesting little company that got swallowed up quickly by Monsanto. And I was a co-founder of that company, and I think that gave me a lot of credibility when getting in front of VCs. Lo and behold, I got a term sheet and I closed on a funding round. Craig had squeaked through that first season planting, but if he wanted to make Sabanto succeed, he needed a team.

So I went back to Chicago and I convinced five people to leave their perfectly paying job and join me in this quest to take autonomy into agriculture. Did you think after that first season, did you think, you know, I've got something here? Like it might've been hard work and it might've been, it might've been difficult, but I've got something or you weren't sure. I knew all the problems I ran into were solvable and I,

You know, I knew I couldn't do it myself. I mean, it was all off the shelf components. It was, you know, a big box sitting in the tractor, wires going all over. And the software there was, it was literally command line software. There's still a hell of a lot of development that needed to be done on it. Well, as someone who remembers the late 70s and early 80s, I learned to run software on command line. But I think today that doesn't meet the hurdle, does it? No, no.

So then you got some funding. How much did you raise? $2 million. Okay. So you get some funding. I assume then you start working on truly productizing this and making it sort of fit for purpose and building it out properly. Is that what came next? Yeah. It wasn't necessarily productizing, and it was more of take it to the next level. Get it to work reliably, right?

In early fall 2019, one of Craig's farmer friends reached out and said that he had 350 acres of land that needed to be seeded with a cover crop for the winter. Planted after the fall harvest, cover crops help revitalize the soil and prep it for spring planting again. I thought, well, this is perfect. They were finally able to get started in mid-November. Craig experimented with smaller horsepower tractors with his software to see if that helped reliability.

Horsepower equals work divided by time. What autonomy does is it increases time, and time is inversely proportional to horsepower. So you increase time, you decrease horsepower. They tested it out on smaller fields before they went to the 350-acre plot. We had an 80-acre field, and 6 a.m. in the morning, we're out there, let's get going on this. We should be able to get this done by 2, 3 o'clock, right?

We left the field at right around 2:00 a.m. and we had only covered about 10 acres.

This time we actually practiced before we got there and everything's working fine and we get to the field and nothing is working. The planter won't plant and the engineers are working feverishly trying to fix it and between the path planning, controlling the stamp thing, making sure it goes straight, making sure GPS is working. It was really bad and the six of us

Went back that night and I know everyone was absolutely frustrated. I remember going to bed at around two o'clock and waking up at four o'clock and thinking to myself, what the hell did I get myself into? We hear that phrase a lot. Nature, as we know, runs on its own schedule. Mid-November rolled around and it was time to plant 350 acres of cover crop, whether Craig and his team were ready to or not.

They took their tractors out to rural Illinois to the farm and set up their mobile lab in the tent by the side of the field. You know, 300 is a very large number when you're 10 foot wide and going five mile an hour. So we're doing five acres an hour. And if you think, oh, we'll just run it 24 hours and it will be done in three days.

The guys were laughing. They still laugh about just sitting in this little tent. In the late afternoon, about 4 or 5 o'clock, it just started snowing. And then by, oh, I'd say midnight, 1 o'clock, the wind kicked up and it started blizzarding.

If you can imagine just the blowing wind and then the six of us sitting in this little tent, tractor out there, still working, mind you, and there's someone sitting on the tractor. And we would take shifts on who had to sit out on the tractor. We had snowmobile suits and insulated coveralls and whatnot, but someone had to be the poor bastard who had to go out and sit on the tractor for the next hour or two because we didn't have absolute control of the tractor.

There was some functionality missing. If it goes over Little Hill, we would lose communications with it. And then the person would have to do it manually. Park the tractor over here, and then let's see if we can get a path plan made. And for one reason or another, we were off by two feet to the left. It was pure hell. And this wasn't just one day. This was over multiple days.

I was concerned that some of the guys would not come back the next time because this is perhaps the craziest thing they've ever done. Oh, and by the way, all six of them were staying in the farmer's basement during all of this. Two of us got a bed and then the other four of us were sleeping on the floor.

The other thing to add insult to injury, the shower, the hot water didn't work on the shower. You know, we didn't want to let the farmer know because he's out doing field work and I don't want to bother him. So we didn't say anything about it, but we were taking cold showers and living in a basement and then trying to get this damn thing to work. In the end, the 350-acre field they thought would take three days, it took three weeks.

We felt defeated. There was a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I'm sure everyone in the company had reservations about, is this going to work? Is this going to get better? Like, why am I doing this? Did you think about giving up at the time? No, no, I don't quit. When did it come along far enough that you thought, okay, I've cracked this nut? In 2021, we were doing tillage just west of Chicago.

We ran it 48 hours nonstop. We let this thing loose in a, oh God, I think it was 480 acre field.

And this thing ran day in, day out, never stopped. And at the time I looked at this and I'm like, I started to see light at the end of the tunnel. We had path planning working. We were monitoring all aspects of the tractor. We were holding the line within a good one inch, two inches. And it was just a matter of keeping fuel in it. Craig had finally figured it out. And since 2021, Sabanto has continued to grow.

Their autonomous product is called Steward, and it supports 19 different tractor models as of today. We have 40 employees right now, split between Iowa and Chicago. And we have a good 30 to 40 customers right now. Farming operations all scattered throughout the U.S. We have quite a lot in Florida and Georgia, starting to do a lot in Texas right now, from California to New York, Texas to Wisconsin.

Oh, wow. So really, truly nationwide. Do you retrofit someone's tractor? Did you send someone out to install this on the tractor they already have? Or do you just send them a kit and they do it themselves? How does this actually work? So we have dealers throughout the U.S. and normally they do the installation themselves.

And we obviously help with the installation. So we get to a farming operation and we do a demo at this point in time. We actually haul a tractor onto their premises and let them use it for two weeks. And once they get hooked, whatever tractor that they have, what we do is we install the autonomy system on that tractor. And then they can remotely control and monitor that tractor, perform field operations.

I did a little bit of research before this interview and I learned all about

The technology investments that the big guys are making, the deers of the world are making in terms of autonomous tractors, you know, these big combines that can do all this stuff that can laser the weeds and whatever. But I also learned all about the right to repair battles that are going on between farmers and manufacturers. So I'm curious, does your solution play into that at all? You know, the ability to sort of keep your tractor, repair it and do what you want and then have some of these autonomous features just layered on it at a lower cost?

I'm all for the right to repair. I'll be honest with you, if someone could fix something remotely without me getting involved, I'm all for that. And we give them the tools in order to do that. Okay. But it is an interesting alternative. You know, you can go to one of the big manufacturers and buy this giant, very expensive smart tractor or smart seeder or smart whatever, or you can take the equipment that you already have and give you a call and make it smart. Your next generation tractors are already sitting in your machine shed.

I just love that idea so much. The next generation tractor is the one you already own. I think a lot of people stumble onto great ideas that seem so totally out of the blue, but make perfect sense once you look at combining some tools that no one's considered. As a result, Craig's business has grown considerably. And as part of that growth, he's moving into a new segment of our bank.

For our listeners, I lead small business here at Chase, and Brian Lamb, my friend and partner, is the Northeast segment head for the middle market. We work closely together to take care of those businesses who are growing to the next level. And so I wanted to bring Brian in to give people a sense for what that means. So, Brian, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for being here. Ben, it's good to see you. Good to be here, and thanks for having me. It's exciting to see...

companies progress in their growth trajectory. And there's some common themes and patterns I maybe can touch on.

First, you hear the term middle market. What does that mean? Generally, it means first that you have reached a certain size and complexity. Size could be driven by revenue. Maybe you've got, you know, go from 10 million to 20 million. That's one example. Also complexity. Complexity could be defined as, you know, the geographies that you cover. Maybe it used to be a city and a county and now it's states or maybe even countries that

The other part of the complexity is your capital structure. Maybe historically you had a small line of credit or a credit card, or you were able to actually build that business with friends and family capital. But now you're moving to different types of capital and different types of financial needs. If I think about the transition and maybe one of the...

One or two of the things I see companies that do it well, and by the way, I got to pause and applaud what Craig and Sabanto have done. They've done a fantastic job of scaling and growing. What I see is a challenge, though. I would tell you is when companies don't anticipate some of those needs that may happen when they get much bigger. I'll give you a couple of examples.

One, their working capital needs change dramatically, right? When you own a small business, there's the phrase, hey, making payroll, where it's not always a figure of speech. Sure. You know, but managing your working capital in the cash collection cycle can become very complex as you get much bigger. And we see a lot of companies struggle there. The second thing, believe it or not, is talent.

Right. You know, Ben, you and I always talk about the talent that you may have started with when you were a small company may need to look different. The folks that are really helping you run and scale the business talent becomes a really big consideration. And then partners.

Who are the partners? Who are the advisors? Your accountant, your lawyer, your bank, the institutions that ultimately help you make sound decisions for growth. You have to think about those as well as you scale and grow. Yeah. The other thing I often talk about is a combination of complexity and scale, particularly with respect to your staff. I always say there are two big inflection points when you are growing a staff. When you have

Up to 50 people or so, you can really know all of them. And you know which ones are good and which ones are less good and which ones have which quirks. And there's an inflection. Once you go beyond 50, you can't know all of them. It's tough. Yeah, real tough. Up to about 200, you can still know who all of them are.

You don't know them. Right. You probably only know about 50, but you know who the 200 are. That's right. And then once you hit 200, you see people and you don't know if they work for you or not. And that's a really different mindset around your business. I agree. Because you really are relying on your leaders to know those employees and to cascade your message. And so I always tell people that you need to think about those two inflection points, 50 and 200. Like, when do I stop knowing everyone personally? And when do I stop knowing who everyone is? I love it, Ben, because-

I think those are really interesting goalposts to think about. And it goes back to something you and I always talk about, which is culture. When you built the company, when you started it and you began to grow, there was a culture, there were values, there were principles that you as the leader, as the founder believed in. Well, you don't want to lose those.

as you grow. And so you can make all of these other really smart business decisions, but to your point, as you start having hundreds of employees, one of the things that you most importantly want to focus on and protect is the very culture that helped you be successful from the beginning. When you grow, slow down and just realize

What got you to that point, you may have to do some things differently to continue to scale and grow. Have you ever seen in these growing companies a founder and CEO actually bring in and hire a CEO and say, I'm going to do the things that I like doing and I'm good at, but I'm going to have a professional run the actual. Do you see that? Ben, I would tell you I see it more often than not, actually.

Really? When a company has reached a certain inflection point, they've grown, maybe they have international services and products now, maybe they've expanded into different product lines, which requires different expertise. To your point,

They are a much bigger people business now. They've got a thousand employees instead of 100. I have seen investors and founders bring in a new CEO that is a better fit, I guess I would say is the word. It doesn't mean that that founder, CEO, investor doesn't add tremendous value. And they still own the business. And in almost every scenario, they still own the business.

but they have found someone that's a good fit for where that company is in the life cycle of their growth. And I got to tell you, when I've seen that happen, I've seen that company thrive and grow. One of the things that I often hear clients talk about as they transition up to the middle market is, I need to build infrastructure. I'm running this thing on a shoestring. I'm running this thing informally. I've got to build infrastructure to scale this thing. What does that actually mean? Yeah, no, it's important. Infrastructure...

could mean things like investing in technology to improve automation, right? Maybe before manual processes because of the size and scale of your business really made sense financially, you know, strategy-wise. But as you get much bigger and you become more complex, having digital capabilities for your teams and your clients will matter, right?

automating processes to streamline how you do business and remain, if you will, efficient, become important.

Another example of infrastructure might be cybersecurity, just protecting the value and the assets that you've created. I see this all the time at JPMorgan Chase. And one of the things I try to get folks to think about is even though cyber and fraud, those may be things that you're aware of, are you doing enough in your infrastructure to harden the assets? And maybe one other infrastructure point I would raise as you think about your scale and your growth.

is the quality of your financial statements and your ability to produce timely, reliable reporting, both operational reporting and financial reporting

It will help you make better decisions. It will better inform your partners and advisors that you work with on a regular basis. And principally, I call it helping you look around the corner, right? You may see things in those operational and financial reports that help inform what your next best decision might be. I tell you what, it's exciting to see those leaders that can make that sustainable transition, right? And there are a couple of key

I guess elements I see or dimensions I see in those types of leaders. One, they just always are resisting complacency. The idea that you have reached a certain plateau and that you can cruise or that you think you've done enough that your competitive advantage will stand the test of time. Second is diversification.

So the products and services or the geography or the client base that you built over the years, I would encourage folks to be restless about continuing to diversify their business, right? Maybe there's new products and services. Maybe you've historically grown through acquisition and you're going to do a better job through organic.

Look at your share of wallet, right? Even though you've got a great client base, could you deepen that share of wallet? Could you take a bigger percentage of their spend and they do business with you? Your margins. There's always an opportunity to look at margin improvement. Even as you grow, can you grow profitably in a very efficient way? And maybe the last thing I see leaders do is kind of a deep focus on productivity, right?

right? They've gotten to a really big size and scale. They've continued to grow. And now what could they do for every incremental dollar they invest? How productive is that individual? Is that investment? And is it driving the returns that a business owner would expect? And so

When I think about those leaders that kind of bend the curve, those are some of the key elements I see them demonstrate. It seems like what reads through all that, though, is continued hunger. That's right. It's really special to see the small businesses thrive and grow and move into the middle market and beyond. And so that is, at the end of the day, one of the most important elements of this country is a chance for us to do business and see companies grow.

And finally, Sachin, I want to bring you back in here. Is Craig's story unusual in that he's been successful in an area that the big companies have been going after? Or do you see that frequently? Craig's story definitely isn't unique, I'd say, in terms of entrepreneurs creating more efficient ways to do things in an older industry such as agriculture. There's definitely a lot of entrepreneurship and young companies that are making waves in the industry where generally you see big players for the most part.

Craig touched on something that I think is important, which is in a world that is increasingly tech-driven, where you're in a part of the country that doesn't necessarily have the depth of tech talent that a Chicago or a Silicon Valley or a New York City has, how does the region and how do the entrepreneurs in the region face into that? What does that feel like on the ground?

He's definitely right about that. The talent locally, especially with universities and things like that, even though Iowa State and Iowa are great, they have great tech programs, great computer science programs. I think family history and the culture of the state really breeds a lot of people that are still lean in the agricultural side of things.

But when it comes to the tech side of things, we realize that there may not be such a big talent pool here in the Midwest or in Des Moines or in Iowa specifically. So people will pull from Chicago or bigger markets where there are more intense tech pools and kind of marry those two different industries on how to communicate the tech side of things with what your project on the ground is going to be. What do you think are the advantages here?

to owning and starting a business in a place like Iowa? I can speak to Des Moines specifically. The entrepreneurial community here is really vibrant and it's really thriving. And there's so many cool local resources that you can tie into to get either well-networked or find funding. And being from a smaller town and a smaller demographic and a geographical area, you definitely get to know each other a little bit better.

better. So the ability to connect with people that you're trying to get in contact with, it's a shorter connection. Generally, it's also even a personal connection where you can find someone that knows someone personally that you can get in contact with. So it's becoming a little bit more of a cultural hub for smaller agricultural companies and smaller startups. I hope that continues, that that trend would be really cool to see flourish over here.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables. And thank you to Craig Rupp, Sachin Sehgal, and Brian Lamb for speaking with us today. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. And if you know someone who may like the series, please tell them about it. Next episode, we'll hear from an entrepreneur who started a company with the full backing of her previous employer.

Not just emotional support either. They guaranteed her clients and contracts if she started her own company. We'll be speaking with Quenetta McNeil, CEO of House of Logistics out of Birmingham, Alabama. I'm Ben Walter, and this is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.