Watch: Modernizing Farm Finances

Alex Thompson: The more time that we have to either work cattle, talk about cattle, think about cattle, the better our decisions are going to be. So it saves us—I mean, it should save us all time by making your bookkeeping easier, cleaner, faster. One of the things that I always say is like, if you were running a business, any other type of business, and making the decisions that we make on any given day, there’d be an accountant, there’d be an analyst, there’d be a couple lawyers. I mean, when you’re making big decisions for your business like ranchers make every day, you normally have this whole team. We obviously don’t have that for most people in ag, right? So Ambrook can kind of be that and give you those numbers that that team, if you were running a Fortune 500 company, gives you.

LiveAg: That’s a head off. We Live It, the Live Ag podcast. Quality cattle deserve premium prices. Consign to a Live Ag video auction and capitalize on today’s strong market demand. Our upcoming auctions are on your screen and available online at live-ag.com. Contact your local rep to get started. Now, here are your hosts, Ty Cordova and Casey Mabry.

LiveAg: Welcome back to the We Live It podcast. Here we are here in the studio with Casey Mabry and myself, Ty De Cordova. And we are joined by Alex Thompson from where in Colorado again?

Alex Thompson: Right now we’re in Norwood, Colorado.

LiveAg: Norwood, Colorado. She is—Ambrook is a new software—uh, software keeping track of your stuff. She’s going to explain all that to you in just a second.

LiveAg: He’s trying to get all techy.

LiveAg: I was really trying to get techy and I don’t get techy very good. But no, we’re joined with her. But we want to thank everybody for joining us today and also we thank you, Alex, for joining us. You want to give us a little bit of a background of where you grew up, where you’re from, the industry you grew up in, and kind of how you are where you’re at today?

Alex Thompson: Absolutely. So first off, thank you guys so much for having me. My story is a little odd. I actually grew up in Rhode Island.

LiveAg: First person I’ve ever met from Rhode Island.

Alex Thompson: Me too.

LiveAg: How do you even get there from here?

Alex Thompson: It’s real hard to find. Sometimes drive right by it.

LiveAg: Okay. Yeah.

Alex Thompson: But I grew up in Rhode Island, moved out to Colorado after college and met my husband who is a fifth generation rancher here in Norwood. Had background with horses and grew up showing horses but had never really been around cattle in my life and managed to fall in love with a cowboy. And got a crash course pretty quickly. Then just sort of realized that I really—like, I loved it. So I worked in real estate for a while. I worked in some property management, ran a horse boarding facility for a while, and then saw the opportunity at Ambrook and realized that it was sort of an opportunity for me to work with and help other producers. So I jumped on that pretty quickly. A little bit about what my husband and I are doing now. So we are, like I said, in Norwood, Colorado. We raise a little bit of a mix of commercial and then some registered Limousin and Lim-Flex cows. Our home place is at—I think we’re at about 7,600 feet.

LiveAg: Cold. [laughter]

Alex Thompson: And summer pasture—

LiveAg: No.

Alex Thompson: We run about 10,000. So that’s kind of, you know, the Limousin do really, really well up here, especially since black-hided cattle tend to sell where we are a little bit better. So the Limousin can handle A) black-hided and B) they can handle the altitude. So we do that. We raise some colts. We have some really great family in Texas that send us some really, really nice colts every year that we have a little bit of business doing. And then some dogs, but mostly just cows and horses and everything that comes with it.

LiveAg: Did you say 10—you do—y’all summer at 10,000 feet?

Alex Thompson: Yes, sir.

LiveAg: Wow.

LiveAg: Hey, that’s high. I couldn’t breathe up there. I [laughter] walked about two steps up.

Alex Thompson: Yeah, we’ve—yeah.

LiveAg: So, well, that’s cool. That’s that. So you didn’t grow up in the livestock industry, but you grew to love it, and now here you are. Whether you liked it or not, you fell in love with a rancher, and here we go. So that’s just kind of a typical—

LiveAg: She could be in worse places, though. She sounds like she’s living a vacation.

LiveAg: Yeah, she does. I mean, 10,000 feet, grazing cows, has dogs and horses. I mean, I don’t know what else you dream of.

LiveAg: Yeah. So whenever you imagine that, you’re thinking about green grass at 10,000 feet, not—

LiveAg: 10-foot snow drift. That’s all I think about is 10,000—

Alex Thompson: I would say, you know, the one thing I could do with this, a vacation somewhere on an island. [laughter]

LiveAg: Yeah, a beach. Yeah.

Alex Thompson: Exactly.

LiveAg: Yeah. Now, so, okay, now give us a little background on Ambrook. You know, you are doing a really good job on targeting ads, it looks like, because every time I open like my social media, I’m like, “What is Ambrook?” So I read through it and I see it. I’m like, it’s pretty neat. You started seeing it ever since Katie told me that we was going to do this with y’all. Every time I turn around, there’s a Facebook feed or Instagram feed or whatever and it’s Ambrook, Ambrook, Ambrook. So kind of dove into it a little bit and it looks like a souped-up version of QuickBooks to me that would really help a rancher and make it simple for a rancher and someone like simple-minded as I am to understand that. Does that make sense?

LiveAg: Yeah. I mean, you get into QuickBooks and you’re—part and you’re not in—you’re in our business.

LiveAg: It’s foreign. It’s foreign. Yeah. So yeah. So tell us about Ambrook.

LiveAg: Yeah.

Alex Thompson: Absolutely. So the first part of that question, we have some team members who are amazing with creatives that you’ve seen on Facebook and other places. They do a really, really great job and we’re sort of glad that we’re getting in front of the right people. But a little bit about Ambrook. So we have three really, really great founders who, sort of around the time of the pandemic, were looking into some things that like farmers and ranchers and American industry were really struggling with. And they were working honestly back then to help procure grants for farmers and ranchers. And sort of what they realized was, you know, we all run really balance sheet heavy businesses. And so you could go—you can go look at my bank account tomorrow and you’d say, “Oh goodness, like [laughter] that girl’s got nothing.” But, you know, everything we have is tied up in the equipment, the cows, the land, all of those fun things. So when you go and, you know, whether you’re trying to get funding or a loan or a grant or anything like that, producers were having a really, really tough time kind of showing that they could back it. So rather than, you know, try to fix the problem for each individual producer, they kind of started with what the real problem was, which is accounting and bookkeeping for agricultural businesses was not easy. And there wasn’t a program out there that was useful for it, right? QuickBooks isn’t designed to be balance sheet heavy. A lot of the other accounting softwares aren’t meant to be balance sheet heavy. So that’s where they kind of came up with the idea of Ambrook. One of the things that I always say is like, if you were running a business, any other type of business, and making the decisions that we make on any given day, there’d be an accountant, there’d be an analyst, there’d be a couple lawyers. I mean, when you’re making big decisions for your business like ranchers make every day, you normally have this whole team. We obviously don’t have that for most people in ag, right? So Ambrook can kind of be that and give you those numbers that that team, if you were running a Fortune 500 company, gives you. You can have that information in Ambrook so we can all make better decisions.

LiveAg: So pretty much it’ll simplify it. It could be like us having our own financial team and all it is is the input. We input it in your system, in this Ambrook system, and it does all the backside, the back office stuff for us.

Alex Thompson: Yep. It’s going to turn it into any like report that you might need, give you a look at—you can compare year-over-year. You can pull your balance sheet. You can pull your profit and loss. You can do a lot of—even your payments, you’re processing through Ambrook. So what it really simplifies—I mean, most importantly, it gives us more time to be focusing on what we should be focusing on, which is cattle, right? The more time that we have to either work cattle, talk about cattle, think about cattle, the better our decisions are going to be. So it saves us—I mean, it should save us all time by making your bookkeeping easier, cleaner, faster. And then on top of that, when you do need to go pull a report at the end of the year or you need to go get funding, it should be right there at your fingertips.

LiveAg: Yeah. So the terminology when we’re looking at it, I mean, you open it up and I mean, again, Ty and I’ve talked about this multiple times in different aspects of it. Most producers don’t have finance backgrounds. There’s obviously been some finance people that maybe gone into agriculture. But again, we’re really good at producing. We’re really good at managing our business and, you know, making sure that having all of these accounting things detailed and organized are good. And if it’s confusing and it’s cumbersome and it’s hard, you know, we’re probably not doing it. But you’re saying Ambrook has found us a way to make those things easier and the terminology fit farmers and ranchers more so than the other competing products out there from an accounting software standpoint.

Alex Thompson: Absolutely.

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LiveAg: Your background, how is that—what you do today? How does that help you relate to your customers and to your target customers? I mean, you live it every day. So now you can walk them through it because you’re doing—you’re on both sides of it.

Alex Thompson: Definitely. I actually think—I mean, it’s my favorite part of my job is that I get to spend—you know, I was actually looking today. I think I spent six hours today on face-to-face calls with our customers, right? And I get to sit there and talk about their operations, help set Ambrook up to their operations. So that way, you know, they can hop in and it’s not a big cumbersome lift to do their bookkeeping. It should be easy. It should flow. So it’s really awesome for me to get to, you know, talk to other producers all day. I will also say I’ve learned a ton from producers that we have on the platform. I mean, it’s always sort of fun, right? Where we live out here, sort of in the middle of nowhere. So it’s always fun to get to talk to other producers in other parts of the country, see what they’re doing. And then hopefully I can bring a little bit of my expertise, A) with the product side and B) with how my husband and I have set our operation on Ambrook to help them get the most out of the platform.

LiveAg: So that’s something that’s huge in my mind right there. Like, so think about it in the world of AI, you know, and where we’re at. Like, so you can get on Ambrook and you’re going to be able to talk to Alex wherever we go to set it up.

LiveAg: Yeah. And the thing about it is it sounds like you can customize it to fit your program. It’s not a—not a cookie cutter. You can customize your dashboard. You can customize everything about it and she’ll walk you through it. Is that—am I hearing that right?

Alex Thompson: Absolutely. So we work really with—I like to say sort of American industry. So it’s not just ag and ag-adjacent, but majority ag and ag-adjacent. But there’s no two people who run their cows similar. There’s no two people who really run their operation the same, and we’re used to that. So, you know, come to us, tell us how you’re doing it, and we can absolutely fit it to anybody’s operation.

LiveAg: She can kind of be your Alexa, but it’s Alex. [laughter] You can ask Alexa, but you ask Alex, right?

LiveAg: Yeah. And then she’s got all your finance stuff. She’s got cows.

LiveAg: And she’s got cows.

LiveAg: And she’s a human. Yeah. And you can actually talk to her. So we’re not having to talk to—

LiveAg: He is going to be so excited because I have been Alexa in his phone since the day we met.

Alex Thompson: That’s funny.

LiveAg: Exactly. So, say—so, say—okay, so, hello Alexa. How do we—how can we—how can you help me today? So, but I love the human aspect to it and the customizing that you can customize it to fit anybody’s program.

LiveAg: Yeah. That way you’re not trying to take something else and try to make it fit this. It’s like it fits it. But—

LiveAg: All right. So, Alex, how—I mean, like—

LiveAg: You almost caught her, Alexa, didn’t you? [laughter]

LiveAg: So, Ty mentioned earlier that it’s been popping up all over our social media and stuff like that, as mine too. And you guys have done a good job of that. Besides that, like, if I wanted to, you know, trial, do you guys have a trial program that somebody can run, you know, side by side? I know that if somebody—in somebody’s spouse or whatever has spent the last 26 years managing it one way and it’s been a pain and this is a better way. How do they—how do you get some—what would you suggest somebody to do? A) first one is somebody that’s been doing this forever. So what’s the easiest way to get in touch with you guys, do it, and get started?

Alex Thompson: Yeah. So go to the website, which is ambrook.com. Everybody gets a 30-day free trial in Ambrook. That 30-day free trial includes a call with someone like me to help you get set up. I would say honestly, we’re in a really great spot right now. So if you’re up to date on your books on 2025 and you’re not panicking for tax season, start Ambrook now, try it now when it’s not 2026 yet, right? So you have this like month and a half that is not only like a free trial in Ambrook, but it’s also just a trial where you’re not moving your whole bookkeeping system over and there’s not super high stakes. So you can run them side by side, figure it out, figure out how you like your Ambrook set up. Get every single question that you have answered and then come January 1st, 2026, you’re off and running in your books. So if you haven’t done it before—

LiveAg: And you want to get—

Alex Thompson: Let’s say you’re in a bind and you’re waiting till the last minute.

LiveAg: Say you’re kind of like me and Casey and you’re just lost in our books—bookwork’s look like, you know what—and you need something to fix it. How does that look?

Alex Thompson: Do the same thing but reach out and hit the “schedule a call” button a little bit sooner. [laughter] Get on a call with one of us. So there’s a couple different options there. So the first thing is to get on a call again with somebody like me, who—and we can talk through your situation, talk through where you are. There’s a lot of tools in Ambrook that we can use to make automations, do bulk tagging, you know, really knock out big chunks of your bookkeeping all the way back to the beginning of the year relatively quickly. I know all those tricks. I’m happy to share them with everybody. We also have a couple different like options where we do have plans where you can have either like a specific person who’s sort of helping you catch up or catch up and plan for the future. So we’re really, you know, think of us as your sort of partners in bookkeeping. The one—I mean, one of the things that I always say is like, we are all very aware that—I mean, me especially—like, I have better things to be doing than bookkeeping. [snorts] We are very aware of that. So think of us as sort of like your partners in bookkeeping at Ambrook. You know, our goal is to make this easy, painless, quick, and like let producers spend more time doing what we actually need to be doing. So we do have a couple different plans where we can sort of jump in and help you. Or, you know, if you feel comfortable doing it yourself, you can just hop on. Again, like a call with me is included and I can walk you through some of the ways that we can knock some of it out pretty quickly.

LiveAg: So can you tie your bank accounts to this system? Do you have APIs that we can link that up? See, you didn’t know I knew that, did you? [laughter]

LiveAg: See, I got this.

LiveAg: That right there.

LiveAg: That was impressive, wasn’t it?

LiveAg: So do y’all have an API to hook up different banking structures to your Ambrook deal?

Alex Thompson: Yep.

LiveAg: Because that would have been very, very helpful for me today. I was needing to send a wire and I text my banker to send a wire this morning or yesterday and I get a phone call a while ago and the wire has been sent. So that could have been handy for me today.

Alex Thompson: So we do have a payment system in Ambrook and it’s called Ambrook Wallet. You can do kind of both ways. You can send payments. So specifically like a wire, we can send from Ambrook Wallet. And you can—it’s super easy to do that. You can actually just like send a picture, either email or scan a picture of a bill, and then send the payment out.

LiveAg: But now I got to call and talk to some service department to send a wire instead of getting on Ambrook and pushing a button.

Alex Thompson: Yep.

LiveAg: Yeah, I need to try this.

Alex Thompson: You can do it all from your phone, your computer, whatever works best for you. I do a lot of my bookkeeping sitting in a side-by-side.

LiveAg: Yeah.

Alex Thompson: Typically when my husband and the dogs are off somewhere.

LiveAg: Yeah, normally when I’m sitting in the side-by-side by myself and my husband and the dogs are off somewhere and I’m supposed to be standing—

LiveAg: Like, I’ve been tempted to sign up for this. I mean, honestly, because I’ve seen it popping up on my Facebook, but I’m like, uh, I’m like actually probably—

LiveAg: I’m probably not going to be the one that signs up for it, but my wife is going to get a crash course when I get home tonight about—

LiveAg: Call—

LiveAg: And I’m going to be like, uh, phone Alexa and she’ll walk you through everything. So—

LiveAg: Now this is neat. I have been intrigued really. Y’all have done—I don’t know who does your marketing or whatever, but y’all need to pat them on the back because they’ve been on their game for the last 30 days. So that’s just—

LiveAg: Well, they know they’re in your brain and they know that you’re—

LiveAg: You’re behind the ball.

LiveAg: Yeah. They know me that they know I need it.

LiveAg: Yeah.

LiveAg: So, but what else kind of—we need to touch on there? Did we miss anything on the special features of it or is there—

LiveAg: Sounds like it’s a lot more simple than what we’re talking about.

Alex Thompson: It’s way simple. It sounds like ambrook.com. Is that right? Is—and they can—can they email you direct or can they find you directly on that site or they just ask for—

Alex Thompson: Just shoot an email to alex@ambrook.com is the easiest way to get in touch with me. Or there’s sort of a bunch of different places on the website where you’ll get reached out to. We’re a really, really small team. So even if it’s not necessarily me, one of the other girls or people that’ll reach out to you is like, you’re in good hands. It’s definitely one of the things that we are super proud of is we are all US-based. So you will be speaking to somebody here.

LiveAg: So, so I don’t have to learn how to speak another language to get this done is what you’re—

LiveAg: Going to be talking to somebody that’s got cows. That’s which is cool.

LiveAg: Yeah.

Alex Thompson: Exactly.

LiveAg: Now, she’s from Rhode Island.

LiveAg: Yeah. And that’s kind of—

LiveAg: I don’t know. Is that local?

LiveAg: That’s not local.

Alex Thompson: That’s—yeah. I didn’t know it was—yeah.

LiveAg: Yeah. That’s far.

LiveAg: It’s up there in that—up there in—

LiveAg: Up that—yeah. In that thing.

LiveAg: The arm.

LiveAg: So what did you do? And I mean, we’re going to get off topic for a second, but it intrigued me. You said you grew up riding horses in Rhode Island. What did you do? Were you—was it a hunter jumper? Was it—is that what it was?

Alex Thompson: Yep. I was super, super lucky that I grew up—my mom rode her whole life and managed a show barn. So I just kind of fell right into it and was really, really lucky to ride with some really great trainers up and down the east coast and spent most of high school traveling to horse shows and doing all those fun things. So—

LiveAg: Where did you go to college?

Alex Thompson: Another really small school in a really small state. I went to Salve Regina University, which is in Rhode Island. It’s a super small Catholic college—or well, university—in Rhode Island.

LiveAg: Huh? Never heard of that.

LiveAg: What’d you say it was called?

Alex Thompson: Salve Regina.

LiveAg: Can you spell it? Okay. [laughter]

LiveAg: I probably—get Regina.

LiveAg: Regina. You get Regina, right? Okay.

LiveAg: Well, we want to thank you, Alex, for being on with us today. It’s been awesome to visit with you. I know me and Casey get a little silly sometimes, but the product that you’re offering, it really looks like it’s intriguing to me. And I’m not BSing about going home tonight and having my wife look into it because we do use QuickBooks right now, but sometimes it’s not handy. And then with these banks changing up like they are, I mean, it’s just so hard to get anything done with a person nowadays. It would be really handy to have a system like this that you can trust in that would tie to your bank account that you could send payments out and receive payments through and keep track of it as you do it. I mean, that’s one thing that I really lack in is keeping track of all of our inventory and what cattle we got scattered around everywhere and my banker—I’m my banker’s nightmare. He hates to see me call, I think. But—

Alex Thompson: I think you’re not alone in that. So if there’s something that makes life easier for all these guys—

LiveAg: Yeah. And then if you can—if you can make this—like this—as we talk to these different financial institutions on this show to educate other people about financial stuff, a system like this is what they’d love—what they’d love to see. If you show up to get a loan, you show up to get a—if you want to get a revolving line of credit to start your cattle business or whatever, if you show up with something like this and show them your records, they’re going to be like, “Oh, this guy—this gal—knows what they’re doing. They’re on top of their stuff.” And so we would really highly recommend doing something sorted like this that it’s an awesome product. So—

Alex Thompson: I will say I think the biggest benefit that it’s been for my husband and I is being younger. Him, granted, his family’s been in this for five generations, right? And there’s a lot of really important knowledge there and a lot of really important things that have been passed down. But we’re also sort of in a day, I think, in ranching where there’s more product, more help, more resources than we’ve ever had. And sometimes, you know, we’re sitting there, we’re like, “You know what, that seems like a really good idea,” or “That’s something that we really want to try.” And in the past, we really didn’t have a good way to measure that and to see if that like experiment was actually useful. Right? We went to the sale barn and we had tried a different vaccination protocol. We went to the sale and we were like, “Well, we think it worked,” or “We don’t think it worked.” The really great thing, my favorite thing about using Ambrook is the fact that I can now compare, hold on to the knowledge that is coming from, you know, Talon’s grandfather and his parents, which is super valuable, and mix that and compare that with real numbers and these sort of experiments that we’re trying as younger producers and sort of trying to make our hole here and kind of get a foothold. It’s been really helpful to have Ambrook and look and say like, “Hey, that worked,” or, “Hey, you want to—that was a really cool idea that we were both really excited about, but that one didn’t actually pay off at the end of the year.”

LiveAg: Yeah, it can be data-driven instead of emotional-driven. And anything—anytime you want to measure those metrics, you want it to be data-driven, not emotional-driven. So—

LiveAg: That’s pretty cool link there.

LiveAg: She lives it.

LiveAg: She does live it every day.

Alex Thompson: Yep.

LiveAg: Yeah.

LiveAg: At 10,000 feet. And she’s cold.

LiveAg: Yeah. I imagine it’s cold right now.

LiveAg: Yeah.

Alex Thompson: We actually—it is still summer here, unfortunately.

LiveAg: Maybe we need to go up there. I got cold down here the other day. Lord have mercy.

LiveAg: Oh, hell.

LiveAg: All right, Alex, we enjoyed it. Thank you for being on. Ambrook.com is the website or alex@ambrook.com for email address. If y’all have any questions more about Ambrook, just reach out to her. But if you have any questions for us, it’s live-ag.com or you can send those to Katie@live-ag.com. If you want to join one of the shows or ask us questions, Casey loves to answer questions. He don’t like to talk about his body appearance, but he loves to answer questions. So if y’all leave the way he looks out of it, that would be great. But reach out to us at live-ag.com. Once again, we appreciate y’all watching us. Hit subscribe and like and all of that. And Alex, thank you so much for being with us. God bless and we live it.