Drive south into Te Kuiti, past the King Country’s rolling green hills, and two things smack you in the eye. One is a sign boasting that the small, rural town is the country’s shearing capital. The other is a shop painted in-your-face bright orange that is home to Carol Fagan’s latest business venture — importer 3G Teak.

Fagan is better known locally for Racewell, the livestock handling equipment company she and husband Robin founded in 1994. The couple have farmed in the district for 30 years and the Fagan name is well known (Robin’s brother David is Te Kuiti’s champion shearer). During the 1980s Carol Fagan supplemented their depressed farm income by getting a job off their sheep stud farm. Without her help, Robin found manhandling the stock to record their vital statistics was a struggle. So the “mad inventor”, as his wife affectionately calls him, found a solution. With an old deep freeze compressor and a few bits of plywood, he constructed a prototype sheep handler. The sheep comes up the run and is clamped so it can’t move using pneumatics, allowing the farmer to handle it alone. The Fagans used the system (much modified by Robin) for two years before going commercial on their stock agent’s advice.

A quote by English economist Walter Bagehot features in Racewell’s sales brochure: “The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.” It rings a bell with Robin Fagan, who gets a kick out of producing innovations others deem impossible.
The Fagan’s farming experience gives them an inside running on their customers’ needs, and they’re always willing to experiment with other farmers’ ideas. Soon after Racewell’s inception Robin Fagan devised an air-operated handler for cattle following farmers’ requests. He even invented a rugby scrummaging practice machine after being approached by the coach of PioPio College’s First 15.

Racewell won a technology commendation at the 2003 New Zealand Export Awards for its infrared technology, which integrates with scales and readable ear tags made by other companies. With the flick of a switch the farmer can automatically draft animals up to nine ways using virtually any criteria — from their weight to breed or sire and dam.

Fagan’s entrepreneurial skills complement his wife’s managerial ability. Carol Fagan came into the business full-time in 1997 when it was in bad financial shape. “An entrepreneur assumes the money will follow his ideas,” she says. “I say cash is king and the money follows management.” She made the tough call to give up her own job and put their farm on the line to buy out their original partners, their stock agent Wayne Cressey and his wife, Lee. After a year of “consolidation”, the profitable business hasn’t looked back. It has 16 employees, enjoyed 50% revenue growth in 2001 and 2002 before flattening out last year, and has $4.2 million annual turnover.

The business administration degrees Carol Fagan did extramurally over the years helped in her marketing and finance role. But she never really intended staying in the back office for so long. She’s down to two days a week at Racewell after hiring an administration worker, and her energy and interest are absorbed in the new family business, 3G Teak. She doesn’t call it “Carol’s escape” for nothing.

Racewell is at the turning point faced by many small family-owned companies — whether to box on or step up to the next level and become more “corporate”. Carol Fagan is consulting with a business coach on whether to appoint a full-time managing director to take over her role. Exports could do with a concerted push, too — currently the company exports only 4% of output. Its infrared technology, now being patented in North America, is attracting huge interest from hog farmers there, and is under trial at a Canadian research centre. Back home, Racewell has sold the sheep system to only 6% of farms that fall within its target group. One thing is certain, whoever ends up running the company, corporate or not, needs to be comfortable wearing gumboots.