More to auctions than meets the eye

I love auctions and the professionals who put them on. I'd rather watch a good bull sale than the Super Bowl or a Jennifer Aniston movie any day. Now, to the casual observer an auction may look like a simple affair, but believe me, there's a lot more than meets the eye.

A good sale manager can be worth their weight in commission and can pay for themselves if all they do is make a great sale order. For example, many years ago there was a big bull sale in Montana, and the owner of the bulls was very innovative, and he came up with an idea he called “the bull roll.” If you bought a bull you could just keep buying bulls as they came in the ring for the same price. This would have worked well if the bulls were placed in descending order of quality. Ralph, a ring man friend of mine who also traded bulls on the side, bought the last bull in a pen for cheap money, and then he just kept right on rolling the bulls as they started selling on a new pen of bulls that were worth double and triple what he was paying. I think Ralph ended up with 40 bulls when he finally stopped “rolling” them.

A good sale manager is a good livestock judge who can place the animals in their right spot. There’s sort of an unwritten rule that if you have a great bull the AI studs are interested in, you start the sale with that bull. But I think the crowd needs to get limbered up a little and then you bring in the show stopper third or fourth in the sale.

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