I Met A Billionaire. Here's What I Learned.

In January of 2019 I was enrolled in a college course that required me to interview an entrepreneur. At the time of the interview I asked my interviewee’s permission to share his answers with you in a future blog post, and he granted that request. This is the story of my experience meeting Iowa’s richest man, Harry Stine.

*Photo Credit of Rodney White/The Des Moines Register*

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Have you ever wished you had a little more money? That one day, you’d buy a scratch ticket on a whim and win $10,000 bucks? What about $100,000? A $1,000,000? What is the first thing you would do with the money?

For me, that’s an easy question to answer. I would build the most beautiful, perfect house. Set me on top of a hill on a family farm with high vaulted ceilings, granite countertops, and a huge finished basement and I’d be content with the rest of my life forever. Give me stainless steel appliances, a big soaking tub near a west window, and the largest wrap-around porch for all the dogs and cats and kids. I’ve killed my fair share of time trying to figure out what this dream would cost me. After putting my wants and needs into a variety of “What Does It Cost To Build A Home?” calculators, I can confidently say that it’s going to take a lot more than one lucky scratch ticket to finance my lifelong dream… Hey, it’s not my fault I’ve watched too much HGTV over the years!

The chances of me winning the lotto is slim to none (especially when I don’t gamble) and I will never marry for money (do not even get me started on this one), so how do normal, average people like me afford to build a house? The simple answer: they work for it. Not the most creative answer, but it is the truth! Some of the most hardworking people I know are entrepreneurs. They build something they are proud of from nothing and turn it into something. But how does someone work hard enough to find themselves with 10+ digits attached to their name?

I wanted to learn, so I asked.

In Spring of 2019, I enrolled in Econ 334 at Iowa State. The purpose of the course was to study, evaluate, and experience entrepreneurship in agriculture. One of the first assignments in the class was to find an entrepreneur and interview them, then write a paper on what we learned. It was a pretty simple assignment, and most people traded farmer brothers with each other to fulfill the ‘no interviewing your family’ requirement.

I’ve worked for a variety of entrepreneurs in my life and know many more so there were lots of people already in my network I could have chosen to interview, but y’all know me better than that. I’ve always gotta set the bar higher, exceed expectations, and do something out of the ordinary. So what did I do?

Google: Famous Iowa Ag Entrepreneur Rich

Seriously. That was my Google search. The results pulled up Harry Stine, a name I was familiar with. Mr. Stine (though he’s Harry to me, now) founded Stine Seed Company, the largest independently owned seed company in the world. A quick search on the internet will tell you he is the richest person in Iowa and is an elite guest on the Forbes 400 list. I can remember years where my family planted Stine soybeans on and off, and I was interested to learn more about how his business came to be.

Once I knew who I was going to reach out to, the real struggle was how to get in touch with him. It’s never expected that someone with a net worth of over $3 billion dollars has a direct phone line accessible to the public, so I prepared for a difficult journey to reach him. In fact, I was fully prepared to fail and move on to one of my backup plans. I looked all over the internet for leaked phone numbers and email addresses with no results. I figured my best chance would be to call the office in Dallas Center and make my case as to why I was worth a few minutes of Harry’s time.

I ended up calling the toll-free number on their website, which did not give me much confidence to begin with. It rang a few times, then picked up with a “Thank you for calling Stine Seed Company, please select from the following menu.” The answering machine read through a number of options and I kept waiting for a “leave a message” choice. However, I never had the option to leave a message. The last choice I was given was to ‘look up my party’ by last time.

“What the hell,” I thought. “It’s not like I can reach his phone anyways.”

Using old-fashioned T9, I typed in S-T-I-N-E, expecting nothing. It read through a few other Stine’s in the directory until it came across “For Harry Stine, please press X.”

NO. FREAKING. WAY.

I had just found the direct line to a billionaire. I quickly calmed myself down, though, realizing he probably had a secretary of his own who would manage his phone messages, anyways. Regardless, I left him a message with my request (which I re-recorded four times) and hoped for the best.

After a day or two, I figured all hope was lost and began exploring other options. That was until I received a call from a 515 number I didn’t recognize that I MISSED and went to voicemail (idiot).

“Hi Emily, this is Harry Stine returning your call…”

So after absolutely FREAKING OUT, I went to meet Harry Stine at his office on a -40 degree day in January. Through the conversations I shared with him (I ended up returning to visit him a second time even though it was not a part of the class), I learned a variety of lessons to success in business and life. Here’s what I took away:

Be humble, always. If you ever find yourself planning a trip to visit my friend Harry, I want to warn you that the office is not what you would expect at all. All my life, I had pictured Stine Seed Company being led from a beautiful glass building with lots of hip conference rooms and beautiful pieces of advertising everywhere. Instead, I was met with a dead end county road, a mid-size office building sided with steel, and decor that jumped right out of the 70’s (wood paneling, shag carpet and all). Not to shame the style, but it definitely was not the modern STEM-haven I was expecting.

Harry can also point to his house from his office. It’s just right across the road and a bit to the south. He walks home every day for lunch. In fact, he raved about his wife’s chicken salad sandwiches, one of his favorite midday meals. No fancy SUV or penthouse or private chef; just a man who walks to work from a farmhouse and eats a poor man's picnic staple for dinner.

Here’s the deal: people who become billionaires don’t get that way by spending every nickel and dime they have on the mundane things in life. Is the orange shag in his office the most updated and beautiful interior design? No. Could he afford to have a private chef make him a three course meal for lunch each day? Probably. But who really needs an Escalade or escargot? Instead of boasting about his annual income, he took extra time to boast about his grandchildren. Harry is the kind of person who is content with what he has, and doesn’t need a badge of honor to brag and boast about his success. Instead, he trades in that opportunity for cockiness with self-confidence- “The more self-confident you are, the easier it is to say ‘I’m wrong’.”

I asked him about what some of the interesting parts of being successful were. He rummaged around on his desk and whipped out a Christmas card. Casually, he held it up.

“This is from Bill Gates.” My jaw hit the floor. Do you know anyone of the Christmas card mailing list of Bill Gates? I was still in a state of shock when he went on to say something to the effect of “It’s not like it’s really from him, he probably didn’t even sign his own name.” Then, he tossed the card back into the pile like it was a holiday card from the weird cousins your family doesn’t talk to anymore. Tossing a greeting from Bill Gates to the curb is the ultimate humble flex.

Use your skills, learn new ones, and embrace what makes you different. I asked Harry what the most important skills an entrepreneur could possess were. In my mind, I expected to hear about how important it is to understand microeconomics or the need to be able to sell snow to an eskimo. That’s not what I learned. Instead, he told me the most important skill to have is being able to recognize and use your own strengths.

Harry emphasized that it’s important to focus on your own abilities, the good ones and the bad ones. He mentioned that sometimes, “we see people who are very skilled but aren’t ambitious enough to recognize their ability.” In contrast, there are also people, “who think they have more skills than they do and it makes a mess.” Being dyslexic and mildly autistic, Harry finds the silver lining in his disorders and use them to his advantage. “Having autism allows me to see things differently… [you just have to] work with your strengths and forget about the [weaknesses].”

Harry also touched on the importance of having a wide array of skills. This comes from a diverse range of exposure and learning experiences. He mentioned that he took every class imaginable in college, from tax accounting to astrology. “You don’t need expertise, you just have to have knowledge.” Having this knowledge prevents you from being the one relying on someone else telling you 'this is the thing you need to do'.”

How often do we overlook what we are good at as ‘not being good enough’ or cite our downfalls as reasons to our failure? Understanding how we try is just as important to understanding how we fail. Learning your own set of strengths and weaknesses serves as the key to unlocking your full potential.

Know when to let go. When we think of very successful people, it’s often difficult to imagine an idea or plan they concoct going poorly. Harry cautioned young entrepreneurs to, “know when to let go.” What does he mean? In business, that you shouldn’t try to hang on to a failed concept to make it work when you know it won’t. He mentioned that, “most things we do [at Stine Seed Co.] fail, but we only risk a small amount of time and money on these things so it’s easy to let them go.”

He told a story from his childhood that emphasized this lesson. When he was a boy, they had chickens on their farm that would run the yard. Sometimes, they had a farm cat that would begin to catch the chickens. Harry liked that cat, but yet his dad would shoot it. Why? Even though it was a nice cat, he was never going to break his habit of catching chickens. Though Harry could spend a lot of time and energy making the cat tame, it would still ravage the profitability and success of their chicken enterprise, and it was important that they recognized it.

Cats are nice to have around, but know when it’s time to leave them behind. Had Harry focused on other parts of his business that he cared about but were failing, he may not have brought the company to the success it has found today. When something in your life is costing you more time and energy than it was worth, know when to let it go. Just take it out and shoot it.

Treat individuals as individuals. I probably was not the most important person on Harry’s agenda on January 30th, 2019. I get it. But you never would have known it by the way he treated me. From the moment I walked in the door, he greeted me personally and gave me a quick tour before settling into his office for the interview. I expected him to rush through the questions to shoo me out quickly, as I’m sure he had more pressing work to get to. To my surprise, he took nearly two hours visiting with me, sharing stories and quotes, interviewing with me as though I was a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. He did not treat me as a student or a child, but rather as a new friend who wanted to hear his story. Harry also took time to ask me about my interests. He wanted to know where I grew up, what types of work I liked, and what I wanted to do for a career.

In the movies, we see the powerful presidents and CEOs of companies treating their subordinates like slaves and looking down on those who can’t afford Apple Airpods. I was not treated as a nuisance by a billionaire; I was treated as one individual by another.

We all need to play. In the hours I spent with Harry, I learned he is a “tell it like it is kind” of person (See the Bill Gates story above). The biggest lesson he has learned is simply to enjoy what you are doing. Loving the work you do is important to success, or as he put it: “If you don’t enjoy when you are doing your life will be miserable and the probability of success is not very high.” He did not seem stressed. His phone was not going off every 10 seconds with a new message or email. He just seemed happy, which I think is something we should strive for more than the money he makes. From the camaraderie with his long-time front desk worker Jim (who is quirky and cheerful enough to deserve a post of his own) to the goofy and off-the-wall stories he told me of his children when they were young, Harry loved his job and in turn loved his life.

His final thoughts on the topic? “I don’t work, I just play.”

I think we all deserve to play a little every day.