Breaking News from The Farm--We are DOUBLING DOWN!
With adversity comes opportunity, so why not double down?

It is with great pleasure that I announce the merger of

Loppnow & Associates

with The Farm!

Who is Loppnow? Well, they are a storied rep firm serving the Pacific Northwest including the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana. In business for over 25 years, they have built and maintained the finest line card over time in their territory. Our merger brings a significant increase in our ability to serve you, our customer. First, by leveraging our technology, you will see improved access to secure documents and product information. Your personal rep will be easier than ever to reach with our unified communications platform.

Most importantly, your rep firm, THE FARM Technical Sales & Marketing, will be more important to the manufacturers than ever before. We sincerely hope we have established a reputation for truly being your advocate. We have been scolded by our factories many times for being too "customer-centric." A sales manager once made me read my title to him from my business card. "It says 'MANUFACTURERS REP'. Remember who pays you!" this gentleman told me. We no longer represent his brand.....

That being said, there will be some changes afoot in our look and feel as we strive to become the finest Professional Audio and Video firm around.

So, here are the changes to expect in the very very near future...like in a few days.

1) We are retiring a bunch of unused email addresses. Our TROUTFARM.CC addresses as well as our THEFARM-TSM addresses will no longer work. I was stupid when I came up with an address with a dash or a hyphen in it. It was too hard to type, read over the phone and was just plain lame. So, they are GONE effective soon. As far as the TroutFarm name, that is still our corporate name, but not our identity. We will now only receive emails to @TheFarmAV.com

2) Our website will look very different. Although we will truly become one company, we have no immediate plans to retire the Loppnow name in the Northwest. Jim Loppnow has a reputation for ethics and honor that is worth a lot to us -- not unlike that of my mentor, Brian Trankle. Our new site will be fusion of the firms. You will still have access to the price lists and secure documents like before.

3) We are going to publish and beg you to use our Direct Dial telephone numbers. We will keep the 800 number for sure....but with our fancy system, even when you dial me direct, or any of our ten people direct (wow....10 people!), you can always hit zero to ring the whole team! We have a long standing commitment to never leave you hanging. When you really need someone, we will always have someone there to talk to. A real person, that really cares, that is on YOUR SIDE!

4) There may be a couple of tiny tweaks to the line-card. All of our brands are on board and excited about this new larger firm, but focus will be key moving forward. Not everyone moves as fast as we do.

5) I am sure all of you have seen Local Pro AV by now www.join.localproav.com I am not a fan of waiting around. LPAV has made sales. As it continues to grow, you will see exponential results. Right now, sign up is free. When we get enough stuff up on this site to get the search results all of you want all of the time, it won't be free anymore. Please just click OK. With our new bandwidth, we will have more time and more people to help you get your stuff up on the net and SELLING to parts unknown! It is free with ZERO COMMITMENT FROM YOU to sign up. Sign up now and you won't have to pay to play!

6) We are moving. We have outgrown our current location. So, your rep is likely going to run out of business cards in the coming weeks before the move. Don't be too hard on him.

7) We are ditching our old servers. Yes, just to make it as exciting as possible, we are tossing our old computer system! We may have an email hiccup here or there in the coming days, but we are moving to a cloud computing model. Right now we literally employ 2 web designers, one hardware tech, one VOIP specialist and one database specialist. That is FOUR COMPUTER GUYS! It got crazy. We have 11 computers and 4 computer dudes actually doing stuff for an office of 5 people. Totally silly, but back in the day, it was the only way we could get it done. Now, we are going to leverage our SMALL size to be nimble and move onto the cloud. Fewer computers, more horsepower.

So, to summarize, we are doubling in size, getting an all new computer system, moving, and expanding to 5 more states....all in the next couple of weeks. No big deal.

Please welcome to YOUR team of The Farm representatives Jim Loppnow, Bob Connelly, Sue Loppnow, and Brendon Brown! They may be in another state, but the lines are the same as well as the values!

I don't know if you can see it in the print here, but I am pretty dang excited. From all of us at the Farm, we sincerely thank you for putting us in the position to make this happen. We know that you have so much gear available to you...every purchase order you place with our factories is meaningful. Without your continued success, we are nothing.


John Hood

Principal.
The Farm