By James Macharia
Selling a tractor takes a handshake. Keeping a customer profitable, season after season, takes a company willing to still show up long after the sale is closed; and that's the part almost no competitor is built to sustain.
Handing someone a tractor is the easy part. Anyone can do that. What happens in the months and years after? That's the part almost nobody wants to build, because it's slower, harder to showcase, and doesn't show up neatly in a sales report.
I think about this distinction constantly, because it's the one most of our industry still gets backwards. When you look at financial institutions offering asset finance, the pattern is familiar: they hand over the equipment, and the next call you get is someone reminding you to make a payment. That's the whole relationship. We built something different on purpose. Handing over a tractor isn't the finish line for us. Rather, it's step one of many. Before a tractor owner ever takes possession, we make sure they fully understand what's expected of them and what their responsibilities are. After that, they're assigned an account manager, they get support with maintenance, and because we lean heavily on data, we keep them updated on where demand actually is, often through a booking agent assigned specifically to them. Owning a tractor doesn't just end at ownership. The real work is walking that journey with someone.
It has never been easy, and I don't think it ever gets easier. We're pioneers in what we do, which sounds like a compliment until you realize what it actually means day to day: there's no script to follow, no established pattern to lean on. Every challenge that comes up, we're the ones who have to resolve it and turn it into a solution, because there's no reference point to check against. Agriculture adds its own layer on top of that. This year we had abnormal rainfall across East Africa, especially in Kenya; nothing we could have planned for. We had to figure out not just how to keep the business running, but how to make sure our tractor owners were taken care of at the same time, instead of just pressuring them to keep working through conditions that made working difficult. Fuel has hit us the same way. With prices climbing partly from the ongoing conflict tied to Iran. Fuel became the single largest expense our tractor owners face, and farmers were not in a position to pay higher mechanization fees to cover it. We proactively had to work on the best way to support our tractor owners. That's not a problem you solve by pushing harder. That's a problem you solve by understanding what's actually happening in the economy and building a response around it.
There's a lot of competition in this space now, and I don't think that's a bad thing. What I do think is that most of it will not last. It's genuinely easy to copy a model; the pricing, the app, the general shape of the business. What's much harder to copy is the team behind it, and the discipline to build something sustainable instead of something that just looks good for a quarter. So many companies trying to do what we do have already gone under, because they were focused on capturing revenue quickly rather than building something that survives contact with reality. We're approaching our fifth year of pay-as-you-go, and most startups don't survive their first or second. We've built one of the strongest portfolios in agricultural finance; award-winning, in fact, recognized by partners for portfolio health, impact, and our ability to keep mechanization services affordable while still running a viable business. That combination is harder than it sounds. Interest rates elsewhere in this space are, frankly, punishing. We've chosen to stay affordable on purpose, because the entire premise only works if the people who need this most can actually access it.
None of that happens without good people paying close attention to good data. I rely on data constantly to understand what's happening in our business, but data only tells you the ‘’what’’. It's the people interpreting it who tell you the ‘’why’’, and who decide what to do about it. That's the part of this business I don't think anyone can successfully imitate, no matter how closely they copy the model on paper.
So what do our customers actually want, once the tractor is already in their hands? Reliability, first. Not a tractor, not even a loan, really. They look forward to a dependable way to grow their business and improve their livelihood. They want to know that when they call us, they will be accorded all the necessary support to ensure that they provide dependable service to all their farmers. But beyond that, they want a partner who shares insight, not just a lender collecting payments. After a year of working with a tractor, owners want us to sit down with them and tell them what we've noticed; where demand patterns are shifting, where their peers are finding work that they aren't. We're the ones with the visibility across regions. Withholding that, or only showing up when someone's underperforming, misses the point entirely. Real support means proactively helping someone see what they can't see from inside their own operation.
That's also why I think our industry keeps measuring success by the wrong number. Most companies still lead with units financed, because that number is immediate and satisfying; you can point to a quarter and say it was a good one. I understand the instinct; we have bills to pay too, and revenue matters. But chasing a single exceptional quarter is a different goal entirely from building something that still works five years from now. The metric I actually care about is whether our tractor owners are profitable, because when they are, everyone around them benefits. When tractor owners succeed, the farmers they serve receive timely mechanization services, our financiers gain confidence and we are able to scale responsibly. I'd rather build a model that isn't maximally profitable in its first year but keeps working, year after year, for the entrepreneurs and farmers depending on it, than optimize for a headline number that collapses the moment conditions change.
Anyone can sell a tractor. But, what separates the companies that last from the ones that don't is what they're willing to keep doing after that sale is done; the training, the support, the insight-sharing, the decision to absorb a hard season rather than pass the cost straight down to the people who can least afford it. That's not a script anyone hands you. You build it, one difficult year at a time, and you keep building it because the people on the other end of it are counting on you to.
Anyone can actually sell a tractor. Very few are willing to stay pioneers long after the sale.