El Dorado Springs

Our customer had bought a stockyard in west Missouri. Established 1978, and run down by the time they took it on. They weren't buying it as an investment; they described it as something they wanted to bring back for the community around them.

Reopening a stockyard means USDA paperwork, a bond, a scale, a ring, staff, and a system to run it all. They had a date in mind: 8 August.

By the time we got on a call, they'd already priced two or three local systems and told us plainly they weren't going to spend an hour with a company they'd never heard of unless the numbers stacked up.

Their first question was how long the contract was. Month to month, no tie-in.

But contracts weren't what was worrying them. Sale day was: a full ring, a yard of consignors, staff who'd never seen the system, and nobody to ask. So we said we'd come out and set it up in person, and that we'd be there on the day.

Alongside the conversations with the customer, we'd been doing our own research, talking to sale barns and people that work in them about how their sales actually run. The same pattern kept coming back, and it isn't a difference in vocabulary.

An Irish or British mart sells a lot. Animals arrive, get a lot number, go through the ring, get sold.

In the US, a seller pulls up and gets a slip: a number on top, their name written on by hand. One copy goes behind the counter, one in a bag on the pen gate. The cattle are then drawn into the ring in batches, two or five or ten at a time, whatever suits the pen and the trade. Each batch is weighed, priced and sold, and each one is a draft. The slip isn't finished until the last one has gone across the block. And when a buyer turns one back mid-ring, the weight comes off, the draft drops from ten head to nine, the average recalculates, and that animal goes through again later.

Hearing it from enough barns made it clear this wasn't a quirk of one operation. It's how the market works, and a lot-shaped system can't hold it. We'd been handling versions of the same problem with workarounds for years, including at Hexham, whose sheep sales run much the same way.

So rather than add another workaround, we introduced a new concept underneath the system: the consignment. Goods received to sell on someone's behalf, before a lot number exists. Drafts are drawn from it, with declared, drawn and remaining head tracked throughout.

We tested it on Hexham's sheep sales in July, before it ever ran an American cattle sale in August.

He was on site by nine. The purpose of the trip was simple: listen to how they wanted to run their sale, and shape Studio around that, not the other way around.

Some of the day was engineering. One of us stood in the weigh house on the phone while the team back in Ireland dialled into the scale PC, and by lunchtime we'd written and shipped a connection to their weigh head, tested on the actual scale.

The rest was looking at their paperwork and learning that there is no docket number. That the seller's number is written on top by hand. That nobody in Missouri says booking in; they say check-in.

He also met the people who'd be running it. The clerk, the ring staff, the office.

What came home was a build list:

• Custodial and general accounts, properly separated
• A clerking screen set up three ways: hoofed, misc, caged animals
• A penning system that works from a phone in the yard
• Driver's licence upload, so a new customer is added and verified on the spot
• More flexibility in how a unit of sale is defined
• Species-level reporting
• Check printing, set up and validated with their bank
• Weighbridge integration tested on their scale, and the clerk's flow around it reworked

Before we left we opened a shared channel and put the customer in it, alongside the engineers. For four weeks it ran as a conversation. They'd open a demo sale, try to sell a rabbit, hit something that made no sense, and photograph the screen.

The bigger changes that came out of it:

Two weeks out they ran a full practice auction: sheep, goats, a couple of cattle, birds and rabbits, and, because the Saturday sale takes household goods too, a post auger, a brush hog attachment and an antique tea set.

Watching from Ireland, we asked them to put something on the scale so we could check the weighbridge feed.

Their note that evening:

Margaret and Maeve had flown out on the Thursday.

It was a first sale, and it behaved like one. A printer needed installing. The address lookup struggled with rural Missouri addresses. There was a ledger to reset late at night. Having two people in the building meant those were things to sort out rather than things to survive.

Then, just before seven in the evening, the first lot went through.

By the end of the day: 127 lots sold, 287 head, $44,932.23 through the ring.

Saturday ran faster than Friday.

429 lots. 1,447 animals and items. Prices from $2.75 to $22.50. On a system nobody in the building had used a month earlier.

By the end of the day the barn's own staff were running it, including one who'll tell you she hates computers. The words that came back were smart, simple and easy.

From the auctioneer, who works a lot of barns:

In talks with one of the team members keen to help train other barns on Studio.

They're running a debrief and coming back to us with what they need next. There's a month between sales, which is a long time not to use a system, so some of that will be about making the second sale easier than the first.

The barn opened on the date they picked in June.