In a recent Sale Report, I said, “We used our unique Cowboy Auction to sell 113 Solar Bulls in one hour and ten minutes.” A couple of PCC™ subscribers wanted to know what a Cowboy Auction is. Since many of our subscribers are not bull customers, that’s a valid question.
We have been selling bulls since 1991. In the beginning, we used a conventional auctioneer. That is the traditional way to sell bulls. We had a very good auctioneer who understood the uniqueness of our program. The primary problem with auctioneers, however, is that they are very difficult to understand for those who spend very little time in sale barns. Many customers were not sure about what the auctioneer was asking for.
Another problem is that some auctioneers and ring men take bids from the rafters. We have all seen that happen. More than once, I have stopped a sale and asked who was bidding against me. There was no one. They just had to reach a certain price before they could sell the animal. If that is the case, they should start at that price and go up from there. The auctioneer we used started every bull by asking for a ridiculously high bid – like $10,000. When that did not work, he would ask for ridiculously low bid – like $1000 and go up from there. What a total waste of time!
Around 40% of our bulls currently sell to customers who use our Sight-Unseen (SUS) bidding program. Most of these bids are now handled by one man on a computer. In the early days, we did not have a computer program for our SUS bids. We gave those bids to individuals sitting in the seats. If you had a SUS bid for $5000, you knew you could not go over that amount. However, if there happened to be three people trying to bid $5000 at the same time, one would get the $5000 bid, the next would get a $5500 bid and the third would get a $6000 bid. Boom, boom, boom! This was not good for business.
I finally concluded that a good auctioneer makes the seller money – but that is often at the expense of the customer. There had to be a better way. Although our Cowboy Auction seems slow and laidback, we are able to sell bulls twice as fast as any auctioneer. We have been using our unique Cowboy Auction since our first fall bull sale in 2002. I was the first Cowboy Auctioneer. Below is how we describe our Cowboy Auction in our sale catalogs.
Although our unique cowboy auction has an auction format, it has no fast-talking auctioneer and no loud, in-your-face bid takers. Everyone who has attended one of our Cowboy Auctions has appreciated and enjoyed it. The only ones who say they don’t really like our Cowboy Auctions are auctioneers.
Every bull has a base price posted in this catalog. When it is time to sell a particular bull, we will ask those who are interested in that bull at the base price to raise their buyer number. If there is only one number in the air, the bull will be sold to that number at the base price. If there is more than one number in the air, we will increase the price in increments of $250 or $500, at the auctioneer’s discretion, until only one number remains. This provides a very simple, low-pressure way to purchase bulls. You will always know what the bid is and you will always know who is bidding against you.
The only problem with our Cowboy Auction is there can be a tie bid when the last two buyer numbers drop out at the same time. When that happens we will give the bid to the bidder with the lowest buyer number. The other bidder will then be required to increase his bid by $50 or $100 (up to the next $100 increment) to stay in the auction. If he increases the bid, then the bidder with the lowest buyer number can raise the bid another $100, and so on. We can usually break a tie in five seconds.