40 / SEEDWORLD.COM SEPTEMBER 2026 PEOPLE-POWERED LEADERSHIP Independent Seed Companies Don't Have a Scale Problem. They Have a Decision Problem. GO TO JUST ABOUT any seed event in the country and you’ll come away with two completely different impressions, depending on who you talk to. Some people will tell you it’s a hard time to be inde pendent, and they’re not wrong. Consolidation keeps rolling. Competition is tough. Margins are thin, technol ogy keeps getting more expensive, and the big compa nies get a little bigger every year. Then you’ll talk to somebody else at the same event who’s having the best stretch they’ve had in a decade. They’re buying up competitors, moving into new mar kets, hiring good people, and putting real money into technology. Business is good. Both of those are honest accounts of the same industry, and that’s the part I find interesting. What I’ve noticed is that the companies doing well and the ones struggling aren’t sorted the way you’d expect. It isn’t about the crop, or the region, or even how big they are. I’ve seen small companies run circles around much larger ones, and I’ve seen well-funded independents get stuck when they had every reason to be winning. The thing that actually seems to separate them is leadership. When an owner decides, even without saying it out loud, that the job is to survive, it shows up in every thing. They stop investing. They treat every risk as something to avoid instead of something to manage. Slowly the company shifts into protecting what it already has, and after a while that becomes the whole plan. But I sit down with plenty of owners in that same market who don’t operate anything like that. They’re asking better questions. How do we make ourselves genuinely hard to replace? What do we need to be good at five years from now that we aren’t good at today? Who should we hire before we feel ready to? Where can we do something for a customer that the big guys can’t or won’t? They’re dealing with the exact same pressures. They’ve just decided to answer them differently. I’m not waving off the hard stuff. The economics are real, the competition is real, and consolidation is real. But none of that decides how a company turns out. BY SHAWN BROOK Seed World Group President The people running it do. For the last few years, almost every call I get comes down to one of two things. Some owners call because they want help finding a way to sell. Others call because they want help finding a way to grow. I don’t think either one is the wrong call. Selling something you spent 30 years building can be exactly the right move, and so can deciding to grow it. Where I see people get into trouble is when they never really choose. They drift toward one outcome because they never sat down and picked the other one on purpose. If you decide you’re building for growth, your deci sions start to line up behind that. If you decide you’re getting ready to sell, same thing. The problem is the companies stuck in between, talking like they want to grow while making decisions that come straight out of fear. It’s an exhausting way to run a business, and your customers can usually tell. So here’s what I’d ask you to do, if you lead an independent seed company. Forget about the market pressure for a minute. Forget about consolidation and forget about what the big companies are up to. Just answer one question for me. What are the three “ingredients” an independent seed company needs most to thrive over the next five years? Not survive. THRIVE. I’m not looking for a strategy deck. I want the hand ful of basics that, in your experience and knowledge, separate the companies that keep building from the ones that are quietly getting ready to walk away. I don’t think the future of the independent seed company is already decided. I think it’s getting built right now, one decision at a time, and I’d honestly like to know how you’re thinking about yours. SW Scan the code and send me your three. I’ll read every one.
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