We live about 30 miles outside of Joplin, Mo. in a very rural area.
I wanted to teach my children the attributes of life that were real. We moved back here from Las Vegas, and we have 100 acres. When we first moved here, we raised alpacas.
Alpaca farming has become just a hobby because the expendable cash went away with the economy. We still have the alpacas – 28 of them. We also have three horses, five chickens, five dogs and two cats.
Now we run a Mac Tools business, and the business consumes 95 percent of our time. The whole family is involved.
My daughter, Brook, is home-schooled and my son, Zack, is a senior in high school.
My wife, Kelly, runs her route five days a week. We’ve grown since the beginning of this year. Another distributor very close to us went out and was retiring, so we absorbed his route. Now, we have basically two routes.
Brook runs a lot of the route with my wife. While Kelly is in and out of shops, Brook does her schoolwork.
My wife basically collects from customers, and she delivers products to customers if there’s anything that comes in. They stop for lunch and review the work Brook has done. Kelly corrects it, and they work on it between shops. She’s a typical sixth grader. She’s 11 years old, and she’s absolutely the light of my life.
When my inventory comes in for Mac, Brook checks in all the inventory, and she makes sure all of that is correct. Then she puts that on my desk so that when I get home at night, I can enter that order number in and I know that it’s all there.
My son is a senior this year in high school. He assembles all of my carts and anything else that needs assembly. He does a lot of the deliveries on the bigger stuff.
A lot of the shipments that come in, he’ll go meet the truck. If my toolboxes come in or something like that, he’ll go up to Joplin and get my toolboxes unloaded. He knows how to inventory. He also makes sure that my truck is washed every weekend, and the inside is completely swept out and cleaned up. He wears Mac-branded stuff anywhere he goes.
I keep him focused in his schoolwork. He plays basketball. He’s a good boy. I’m really quite proud of him.
We also have the home to take care of. My daughter, on the days that she stays home, she tends to the farm and she takes care of all the animals. She’s got three horse of her own. My son pretty much takes care of the farm when he’s not in school. He takes care of all the mowing and all the fence mending. He’s a busy kid.
Rusty Deman is a Mac Tools distributor based in Joplin, Mo. He has run his route since September 2012.
