Agri-Comm Alarms

Photo by Kris Kathmann

Journalists believe everyone has a story worth publishing, maybe more than one.

But Mankato’s Charlie True, face-to-face with a journalist, seemed to mentally recoil from that notion, wondering aloud if he “was worth a story in Connect Business Magazine.”

However, True definitely falls in the category of multiple stories. There are enough plots and sub-plots in his life to fill a lively biography, if only he’d sit still long enough to record them. But he never sits long, never even sits short.

Just when you think he’s ready to settle into the details of a tale, he’s on his feet searching in a file for a letter to make a point or for a document to clarify a corporate detail. Then he’s gone to fetch a particular control box, sensor, gauge or gadget to demonstrate how it works. This constant motion, these frequent detours, unravel the threads of his various tales, but it can’t be helped. He’s a man of remarkable energy, with a wry sense of humor, a way with words and a proclivity for straight talk.

For the record, True founded, owns and operates Agri-Comm Alarms, and Pulse Security, Inc., companies which install and service alarm systems all over southern Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and South Dakota. The alarm business might make the longest chapter in a book about True, a chapter that could be titled “How to Succeed Despite False Starts.”

Other possible chapters:
“My Five Years of Desperate Unemployment”; “The Horses I’ve Shod”; “If Nothing Works, I’ll Do It Myself.”; “Getting My Letters Corrected by Editors, TV Producers and Rush Limbaugh.”; “Twin Battles: Vietnam and Agent Orange.”; “Who Needs Predatory Pricing?”

Most of True’s alarm systems are installed in poultry and swine buildings, alerting producers when temperatures rise or fall toward life-threatening levels. Some are very sophisticated systems for businesses, homes or farms with motion detectors and surveillance cameras.

He wrings a certain satisfaction from his vocation. “For one thing, it’s electronic, which is fun to me. The second thing I like is that a lot of my customers didn’t have alarm systems that worked until they got one from me,” he said.
In 1983, toward the end of what he calls “My Five Years of Desperate Unemployment,” True spotted a help-wanted ad for an electronic alarm system salesman. He’d tried nearly everything else from carpentry to hauling grain to selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and when he saw the ad, “I knew this was it!” He’d learned electronics in the Marine Corps, knew he could sell, and knew he could both install and maintain such equipment.

So much for high hopes. “It wasn’t any good. I didn’t sell anything. I beat the bushes. I drove around the countryside, handing out brochures and flyers, showing people how the alarms worked,” True recalled. One day a neighbor who owned a nursing home asked if True could fix the home’s fire alarm system, which continually generated false alarms. Following a trouble-shooting manual, True ferreted out the malfunctioning culprit. That impressed his neighbor, but outraged his company’s other salesman who claimed he’d been on the verge of selling the nursing home a new system.
“The guy said I blew his $13,000 sale, that it wasn’t even my territory and that salesmen aren’t allowed to repair systems,” True said. When True’s boss sided with the other salesman, True turned in his product manuals and announced he was “going on strike until you guys decide salesmen can do repairs.” The one-man strike left him “knocking around for another job again.”

Convinced that he’d discovered the right career with the wrong employer, True acquired electronic alarm equipment from a distributor, formed Agri Alarms and Communications and went back into the country. The equipment proved to be temperamental and unreliable. “I felt like I had to develop something better,” he said. He devised an eight-zone alarm which could monitor eight areas in a single building or eight buildings. He also took in a partner who’d developed a system on his own. Together they bought out his first employer, but the partnership lasted less than a year. “We didn’t see eye-to-eye. We were grossing $12,000 a month, but he kept telling me we were losing money every month,” he said.

Since the partner had trademarked the company’s name, True shortened it to Agri-Comm and made a fresh start in 1984. He concentrated on his three strengths: innovation, sales and service. “I took equipment that’s on the market for anybody to use, changed it around a little bit, customized it and made it work,” he said. “I designed those systems so in most cases, the customers can trouble-shoot themselves.” He solidified his reputation as a different kind of alarm salesman. “There wasn’t anybody servicing this equipment out in the country. Somebody would buzz through and sell a farmer a burglar alarm or a hog barn alarm, or a business alarm, and they’d never see the guy again.”

In those days, True did his market research with binoculars. He scoured the back roads in a van, looking for confinement buildings. “I’d drive to a hilltop, climb on top of the van with a set of binoculars, and look for the big, long roofs of hog or poultry buildings.” When he spotted one, he’d drive into the farmer’s yard and start selling.

“You can’t do that now. You’ve got to have an appointment,” True said, because the buildings are quarantined for disease prevention, with signs posted advising salesmen to make appointments.

In 1989, True incorporated Pulse Security, Inc., to reach the residential and commercial market. “I realized I wasn’t selling a lot of burglar alarms because all of Agri-Comm’s advertising was directed to farms and confinement buildings. People didn’t associate me with commercial or residential alarms. But I couldn’t just live on hog barns.”
However, even today, when sales of the two companies are combined, 76 percent of True’s customers are farms or agribusinesses. Commercial installations amount to 10 percent and residential 9 percent, with the remainder fractionalized among schools, hospitals, government buildings and other institutions. “Our main focus is still Agri-Comm,” he said.
True operates from the lower level of his rural Mankato home, which sits on five acres carved from the 110-acre farm where he grew up with six brothers and a sister. One room is crowded with office machines, a busy telephone system and several computers, their active screens glowing. The computers are linked to many of the alarm systems, enabling True to diagnose or modify them without leaving home. A confinement barn, 72 miles away, had been troubled by false alarms from one of its zones recently, so True used his computer to shut down that zone until Layne Johnson, “my No. 1 technician, could get out there and see what was going on.” Johnson grew up on a farm near St. James, graduated from Jackson Vo-Tech and worked for two other alarm companies before joining True in 1994. “We both can relate to farmers because we both grew up on farms,” True said.

These days Johnson does most of the legwork while True stays close to the phones and computers. “I can’t go in hog barns anymore because I have a disabled immune system. I have to stay away from disease or big crowds of people because I get sick real fast,” True said. “In 1998, I was hospitalized twice for pneumonia.”

Bone cancer is at the root of True’s health problems and the root of that cancer may be his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. “Vietnam vets get these kinds of diseases at a greater rate than the general population,” True said. He had a bone marrow transplant in 1992 at a Veterans Administration Hospital in Seattle, and his condition has remained somewhat stable for the past three years. “I take lots of pills every day and one shot every day and I’ve done it for eight years,” he said.

True enlisted in the Marines in 1965 to avoid the draft and landed in Vietnam the day after Christmas in 1967. He remembers arriving over Da Nang at 3 a.m., with the pilot announcing that “the temperature is 87, the humidity is 100 percent and ground fire is light.” True said he “didn’t know what to expect. They were shooting rockets at us, but they couldn’t hit anything unless they got lucky. It was scary. I just kind of white-knuckled it.”

Trained as a radio relay technician, True belonged to a logistic support group providing repairs, food and ammunition to infantry units. “I was there when they were spraying Agent Orange (a defoliant chemical). Even though I was a technician, I still pulled patrols with MP companies, carrying a rifle instead of a tool kit,” True said. He spent “one year, eight months and nine days in Vietnam,” then was discharged Sept. 4, 1969.

He returned to Mankato in 1970 and started working as a tree-trimmer, but only briefly. “I quit. It just didn’t work out. I wasn’t into taking orders after taking orders (in the Marines) for four years.” He married his wife, Lois, in 1971 and learned carpentry with her parents’ homebuilding company. “I couldn’t find a job as a technician, except for $2.50 an hour,” he said. He went from building houses to bigger projects – the Mankato Mall, the Mankato flood wall and a bridge in New Ulm.

When interest rates began spiraling toward double digits in the teens in 1978, and unemployment pulsed upward, True embarked on his era of “desperate unemployment. Those were the days when you couldn’t sell a house or buy a job,” he said. “When you’re fat, 40 and have four kids, nobody wants you.” True worked short stints as a ground radio technician, repeater technician, grain trucker, vacuum salesman, carpenter and construction laborer. He even became a “farrier,” learning to shoe horses when he and Lois began offering trail rides through neighboring pastures and woods. “We’d give rides from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., but I’d get up at 6 a.m. and start shoeing horses,” he said.

There’s a horse barn with a medium-size indoor riding arena on their five acres, where they keep her horses and board horses for friends. The horse barn and sheds are protected by Agri-Comm systems, of course, including fire and burglary devices monitored around the clock by a local alarm service. True’s new TM 8 systems are being test-run on a wall in the barn shop. They measure temperatures in eight zones while also monitoring power from five AC points.

The technology was developed by an Australian but True gained the U.S. rights to it by helping him perfect the equipment. Ironically, True said he’d designed a remarkably similar concept in 1985, but failed to find a manufacturer to build it. Rather than use mechanical gauges, the TM 8 measures temperature with “thermistors,” which resemble sonar probes. “They’re hermetically sealed in epoxy to protect them against gas from the manure pit, which is toxic enough to eat wires,” True said. “They’re the coming thing, they last longer and they’re easier to use.”

True can’t spend much time relishing such edges in technology, however, because there are always new challenges. For him, the most serious current threat is the entry of gas and electric utilities into the alarm business. Ironically, True has been considering selling his companies for health reasons and a couple of years ago, discussed it with a rural co-op. In the process, he disclosed details of his operation and now feels the co-op “took what they learned from me, copied it, and went into business” with a group of other rural electric cooperatives. “I built my business with hard work, but they built theirs with 2 percent money (government-subsidized loans) and they don’t pay taxes,” he said. “I’m kind of ticked. They’re doing the same thing I’m doing, but they’re doing it for less because of their size. Their profits go to “capital credits” which are refunded to co-op members, who pay the taxes. It’s really unfair. It’s predatory pricing. I’ve talked to the Minnesota Attorney General’s office about it, but they can’t do anything.”

If the situation continues, it might inspire True to resume writing letters-to-the-editor, a practice for which he’s become well-known. “I don’t write that much any more. I don’t really care for the notoriety and it takes a long time to write a letter,” True said. His generally concerned politics.

One favorite was prompted when Blue Earth County offered to pay him $1,200 for an acre of land they needed for a road project. True summarizes it this way: “The letter said the money in your wallet isn’t yours, it has the government’s name on it, they’re allowing you to use it and they can take it back whenever they want. It said the property we live on isn’t ours, they can take it when they want and pay you what they deem appropriate.”

True didn’t deem $1,200 appropriate, so he challenged the county in an appeal, eventually receiving considerably more because appraisers agreed he could have sold the land for a lot.

Although most of True’s letters were destined for newspaper columns, he once wrote to “Face the Nation,” a CBS-TV program, on a health issue, and to radio talk show celebrity Rush Limbaugh after Limbaugh’s constant complaints about lacking a university education. A Face the Nation producer and Limbaugh both corrected his spelling and grammar and sent the letters back, he said. Face the Nation aired his letter, but identified him as “Claude” True.
True is opposed to gun control. He’s convinced that if government succeeds at “taking our guns away, our other freedoms will go right down the line…freedom of speech, freedom of the press.”

Whether True sells his businesses remains to be seen. He continues to innovate, enjoys a sterling reputation for service and has a strong right hand in Layne Johnson. It would be a hard parting. “I’ve been dealing with people to sell it, but I don’t know if I can actually sell it,” he said. “It’s like a little kid you’ve brought up. I built it from nothing, from a cardboard box in the front seat of a 1978 Ford pickup.”

©2000 Connect Business Magazine