Most corporate mission statements make a vague reference to community building that falls far short of Atwood-based SurePoint Ag Systems’ explicit mandate to “be a long-term economic engine for Rawlins County” in northwest Kansas.

That foundational commitment was made in part because the company’s three founders — Blaine Ginter and brothers Josh and Matt Wolters — grew up in Atwood and returned there after college.

“All of us are fifth-generation Rawlins County residents,” Matt says. “Our kids are the sixth generation. We chose to come back to the community, and we’re dedicated to that piece of the mission, which in turn is dedication to our employees. They’re members of the same community that we are.”

Ginter and Matt came up with the initial idea that became SurePoint while working together in sales at a different company. They had a vision of using technology to make fertilizer and pesticide applications more efficient. They brought Josh onto the team because of his engineering background.

One of the company’s core offerings is a fully automated mixing system that calculates the appropriate amount of fertilizer or pesticide based on a variety of inputs such as the number of acres being covered and the application rate per acre, among others. It’s like baking a recipe and adjusting the ingredients based on how many people you’ll feed. The system not only ensures the proper application of a given chemical, but also reduces the mixing time for each batch and provides a detailed log for recordkeeping.

“We started to see this opportunity for liquid application systems,” Matt says. “We finally said, ‘Let’s try it.’ We were full of enough confidence to think we could do it.”

They envisioned selling in a radius a few hundred miles from Atwood, but the company ended up growing even faster than the founders expected. Today, SurePoint and its sister company, SurePoint Electronics, are subsidiaries of John Deere, yet the company retains the same leadership team and employs more than 100 people, with about 80 percent of them living in or near Rawlins County. The company is building a new office and production facility that’s more than twice the footprint of its current facility. When it’s up and running, the new complex will more than double the production capacity.

GOOD TIMING

At first glance, the summer of 2007 wasn’t an ideal time to start a business, with the Great Recession looming
as the housing market collapsed and far-reaching effects on the global economy ensued.

 

“Based on the agricultural business cycle, those first five years were some of the most profitable, historically up until that point,” Matt says. “That provided us the opportunity to grow quite quickly in the early years and really build a strong foundation for the business.”

In 2011, SurePoint moved into its current facility then founded its electronics subsidiary a year later. The subsidiary helped the company continue to add product lines, like the automatic mixer and a system allowing farmers to apply fertilizer and pesticides directly through irrigation, which is similar to fertilizing a lawn through a sprinkler system.

RURAL CHALLENGES

From 1920 to 1930, Rawlins County grew nearly 10 percent to 7,362 people before beginning a decline that lasted until 2010, when the U.S. Census recorded a county population of 2,519. The county’s Wikipedia entry lists more ghost towns (11) than incorporated cities (three). In short, it was not a place where outsiders were lining up to open businesses.

In 2020, the county’s population grew for the first time in 90 years, thanks in part to SurePoint’s mission to be an economic engine that provided not only jobs, but a renewed sense of community.

It hasn’t always been easy. SurePoint’s growth has faced the same challenges other rural businesses encounter when looking to expand — recruiting workers, finding housing for them and ensuring their children have access to care.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Matt says. “You’re not going from 0 to 100 workers. These are things we’re constantly engaged in trying to incrementally help solve within the community.”

Child care has generated plenty of discussion, but most of the solutions for families are informal.

“We’ve definitely provided people lots of flexibility as they needed it, like working from home several days a week,” Matt says. “That’s been our approach to child care.”

SurePoint is part of what Matt describes as a “community-focused development” group that has built single-family homes in the county over the last decade.

The company’s recruiting, in part, was helped by Rawlins County’s decline because there was a pool of talent working elsewhere waiting for an opportunity to come back home.

“Some of the newer engineers are from neighboring communities, within 45 minutes or so,” Matt says. “As our workforce has grown, we’ve tapped into those neighboring communities in every direction.”

The company has expanded outside Rawlins County, too, with an engineering office in Ellinwood and a small office near Kansas State University’s Manhattan campus. “We’ve got four full-time employees in Manhattan, and we utilize that to facilitate an internship program as well,” Matt says.

A SHARED VISION

SurePoint’s most recent expansion is part of a larger plan that began taking shape in early 2021 when the Wolters and Ginter entered into acquisition discussions with John Deere. Those talks culminated about a year later when the two companies announced a joint venture with the global conglomerate purchasing 80 percent of SurePoint. John Deere bought the rest of SurePoint last year, but the company has remained largely independent by design.

“Their strategic vision was to continue to maintain an independent brand, an independent dealer channel, which means we get to do most of what we were doing before,” Matt says. “We have a lot of autonomy to kind of fill gaps and areas in the equipment space in a way a business the size of John Deere just isn’t nimble enough to fill.”

The partnership has helped fund an expansion that will double SurePoint’s production capacity, and its mission has also grown to become an economic engine for northwest Kansas. Preserving the company’s independence was as important as continuing SurePoint’s growth in Rawlins County. Matt says a team at John Deere looked at future objectives and facility needs before committing to build out the new facility.

“The local region is very, very important to us,” Matt says. “We were forthright with John Deere in saying, ‘This is a big piece of what the organization is, and we really want the commitment to do it here.’”

Entering the joint venture with John Deere meant answering some tough questions from employees, and it took a lot of trust on their part to make the transition work. Matt says the founders had some of the same concerns but were ultimately won over by a shared vision between the two companies where SurePoint offered access to dealers outside John Deere’s in-house network.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say there wasn’t a certain amount of hesitancy to go from an independent business where decision-making is quick to being an entity of a large corporate structure,” he says. “But we could either be a teammate or a competitor. It’s much better to be a teammate than trying to compete against the global leader. The team has done a really good job of buying into the opportunity.”

SECRET TO SUCCESS

SurePoint’s continued growth goes back to its beginning, Matt says. While he, his brother and Ginter had the vision to build a business focused on community as well as profits, it’s paid off because their community fully supports the business.
It turned out that some people left Rawlins County not because they didn’t like living there, but to pursue economic opportunities that didn’t exist there. When SurePoint offered a viable path to come back, several took it, improving both SurePoint and the community in the process.

“We’ve been very fortunate the right people have joined our organization at the right time,” he says. “Going back to the very early days of when we started — those first few employees were just absolutely critical. They’re all still here today and play very key roles.”

SurePoint is positioned to continue growing, which is both exciting and scary, Matt says. Questions loom that must be addressed: How much talent is available? When is the right time to add that talent?

“It’s kind of the chicken-and-the-egg type thing,” Matt says. “I spend a lot of my time thinking about those challenges. Thankfully we’ve got a lot of resources today to reach our objectives for where we need to be in the future.”