 Work Hard. Have Fun. Make Money.The Tractor Supply Story by Nelson Eddy chronicles how a small replacement parts catalog company became the No. 1 farm and ranch store chain in the nation.Buy the book at your local Tractor Supply store or online at http://www.myTSCstore.com These book excerpts give a glimpse
into Tractor Supply’s beginnings:
The idea
Charles Schmidt was never afraid of hard work. He embraced it. The Great Depression may have made starting a new business during the ’30s a risky venture, but his work ethic and his fiercely independent spirit got him the job that ultimately introduced him to the idea for Tractor Supply.
Schmidt’s work ethic earned him the respect of … Ben Ettlestone and Leonard Leterman. The two businessmen were partners in a wholesale automobile supply company whose names pragmatically combined their last to names — Leterstone.
...Leterstone sold wholesale automotive parts to car owners who were looking for cheap, reliable parts. The company also had a business that sold replacement parts for farm tractors, called Tractor Replacement Parts Company. So the idea for a company outside the tractor and farm equipment industry selling replacement parts wasn’t a new one. But then, the genius of retailing has always been adapting what works and making it better. Schmidt knew a good idea when he saw one and he would make it better. He would focus his business entirely on the tractor replacement parts market.
The original Blue Book
It didn’t look like much, that very first Tractor Supply catalog. Just twenty-four pages of thin newsprint. One color. Simple line drawings to give the customer some general sense of the stuff the company was selling but leaving more up to the imagination than the artwork could really communicate. Any question of quality was handed with the blunt assurance — “Satisfaction or Your Money Back.” With so little space, that very first catalog didn’t offer much variety. It focused mainly on the essentials, on the parts a customer would most likely need to keep his tractor going. Nothing exotic. Bearings and gaskets.
This was the tail end of the Great Depression and squeezing another season out of a tractor was critical, as was fixing a tractor that went down in the middle of planting or harvest.
The 1938 Tractor Supply catalog is a far cry from today’s massive Blue Book with tens of thousands of items, with everything from paddle boats for ponds to solar-panel-powered gate openers. What the customer
found inside that first catalog was important, but even more important
to the success of the company was the degree of thinking that
was poured into it.
“Before we were even in business, somebody had to prepare the catalog,” said Bill Cleary (Charles Schmidt’s childhood friend and later Tractor Supply co-worker). “There was the first taste of real genius! A young man (Charles Schmidt) … with absolutely no direct experience in ever setting up what turned out to be a twenty-four-page catalog, and very, very little honest-to-God experience in (the field) he was entering. Did it all from scratch.”
The challenge was to pack as much into every page as possible, to keep down the number of pages and the cost of mailing but still have enough there for the customer to buy in order to justify the cost of the catalog in the first place. Schmidt slaved over the catalog at the dining room table in his little Chicago apartment. He worked line-by-line, cutting a word here, a word there, so he could include another product. It was all about economy. Not a word wasted. Not even on the name of the company.
“Our first name was Tractor Owners Supply Company,” said Bill Cleary. “That was too cumbersome, so we changed it to Tractor Supply Company.”
Aren’t we glad it’s not TOSC?
Schmidt also worked painstakingly to set up suppliers for everything that he’d include in the catalog.
“I can’t begin to convey to anybody, in my honest opinion, the total genius it took for somebody to think all of this up and be able to do it out of his own head, with his own hands, with his own fingers, with his own typing, measuring every little inch of that catalog to crowd as much stuff as we could into twenty-four pages,” said Bill Cleary. “He had that all figured out so well that even if the catalog paper … wasn’t cut to the last splinter, the catalog might be overweight, then you were going to have to pay for two instead of one. All of this, to me, living through it and seeing what I saw, is the sheer genius of one human being.
“It still amazes me.”
...With that first catalog, Schmidt managed to wedge in 2,000 items, according to Cleary. And mail the whole thing for a penny.
...Apparently, a good number of those first catalogs found their way into the hands of tractor owners in need of tractor supplies. The company sold $50,000 worth, all of it by mail. This was at a time when the minimum hourly wage was a quarter. In today’s dollars, the company’s first year’s sales would amount to more than $640,000. In its very first year, Tractor Supply had done incredibly well. | |  | | | | | |
