Wednesday, December 10th, 2025
Writing to you from Uruguay
A few days late on this one…but I wanted to get it out today.
Things have been busy, but not necessarily productive and here’s a few reasons for that, which I’ll get to soon…
Last week I was still running the normal Facebook ads for the agricultural drone business that seemed to be generating a fair amount of leads for a while. Yet, there was a minuscule level of interest last week as compared to the weeks before.
Typically I’d receive one or two messages from people who seemed genuinely interested in the seeding services and 12 or so messages asking for additional information. This last week those numbers shot down to around 5 messages in total.
And one of those messages came from a guy who seemed like he didn’t understand that he had accidentally sent me a message…
Something had changed.
As soon as I thought about it, I realized that the seeding season is largely over. The days are getting too hot to sow seeds anyway, but we’ve clearly made the quick turn into the “in between” phase of seeding seasons. Meaning that there isn’t too much more that I can do within the Entrepreneur Cycle of The Preparation over the last 18 days that I’m here in Uruguay.
I’m pretty lucky for being able to generate one organic lead that led to a sale before the window for seeding closed…
It could have been two sales by now because one man contacted me asking for help in spreading granular fertilizer over his field, but just before it was going to happen he had to go in for emergency surgery. No bueno.
What to do with the extra time?
It’s safe to say that the main pursuit of this cycle is over. There really isn’t much more I can do in terms of seeding/fertilizing with the DJI T40 drone. So, we can take that off the board now, but there is one more thing I’m going to try to offer in hopes that I can make one more sale before heading to Asia after Christmas.
Now, it won’t lead to any substantial amount of money no matter what, but I’m thinking of putting out a social media ad specifically offering to do multispectral mapping/analysis of ranches/farms in the area.
One of the other drones we bought this last summer was the DJI Mavic 3M, which you can use to map properties with the thousands of overhead pictures it takes each flight. The drone has multispectral imaging cameras on it as well that analyze grass/crop density and give you as good of an estimate on grass quality as you can get without doing a soil test.
Here’s a quick video of the drone taking off:
The maps you can create with the multispectral images are fantastic for farmers/ranchers to see exactly where there is low grass density and poor soil quality.
Of course, it doesn’t tell you with 100% certainty what your soil is lacking (phosphorus, nitrogen, or potassium for example) but it can vastly improve your ability to make decisions in terms of how to improve your land.
I think I’ll try to market the mapping services as something to help people get ahead of the game for the next year.
We shall see…
But, along with writing up a new FB ad I’ll be reading the few books I’ve yet to complete for this Cycle. I’m going to finish reading The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, The 1-Page Marketing Plan, Influence, and Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. If you don’t know, The Preparation book has required reading for each of the 16 Cycles, along with required academic courses as well.
I’ve finished the academic courses, so I only need to finish those four books in 18 days to check all the boxes for this Cycle.
Preparing
This past week has also been about preparing for next year. That meant getting in contact the Muay Thai school in Thailand to make sure everything was still good to go, thinking about which Cycles I’ll be doing after the Fighter Cycle, and preparing to go to Japan a few weeks before Thailand.
I started drafting a list of goals for this upcoming year as well.
Proposing
One of the reasons this update was so late is because I proposed to my girlfriend at the beginning of this week. It may seem surprising, and that’s probably just because I don’t talk about it because there’s no real reason to, but I’ve been thinking about it for quite some time.
She said no…
Just kidding. But, that was a major event this past week so I figured I’d mention it despite the fact that it has nothing to do with The Preparation.
Anyway, as the year is coming to an end very soon, things are winding down around here just as they probably are for you. The next few weeks are going to be focused on ending the year well, reflecting on the past year, and preparing for the year to come.
I hope you’re well. Speak to you soon.
-Maxim Benjamin Smith
Congratulations Maxim! Joining you and your dad has been one of the blessings of the year.
wow! Congratulations to you both! -- well done. I'm just in Malaysia for a few months (need to escape the UK winter) :)