We're proud to share that AGM Products was recently featured in SD Voyager Magazine as part of their ongoing series spotlighting businesses and entrepreneurs making an impact. The article, titled "Exploring Life & Business with Bryan Lyttle of AGM Products," covers the origin story of AGM, the challenges of building a product company, and what drives us to keep improving.
This article was written and published by SD Voyager. We're sharing it here because it captures our story well — and because we're grateful for the recognition. You can read the original feature at SD Voyager – Exploring Life & Business with Bryan Lyttle of AGM Products.
From the Article
I got into off-road racing almost by accident. Around 2000, fresh out of technical school, I joined Martin Christensen's race team. What started as working on race cars eventually turned into helping manage a team of more than 50 people racing buggies throughout the U.S. and Mexico.
Over the years, the racing program continued to grow. We formed All German Motorsports in 2008 and eventually worked our way into Trophy Trucks and the highest levels of desert racing. Racing has a pretty effective way of exposing what works and what doesn't. When you're hundreds of miles into Baja, a tool that almost works is the same thing as a tool that doesn't work.
A lot of the products we needed simply didn't exist, or the versions that did exist weren't good enough for what we were asking them to do. So we started building things for ourselves. Then other racers would see what we were using and ask, "Where can I get one of those?" That was really the beginning of AGM Products.
For a long time, AGM was more of a side project than a business. By 2017, the racing program had wound down and Martin and I decided to focus our energy on AGM full time.
Since then, the company has grown quite a bit, but the basic idea really hasn't changed. We try to find real problems people have in the field and build a better solution for them. Today that might be someone changing a tire on a UTV in the middle of nowhere, a mechanic trying to make a difficult job easier, or someone who simply wants to know that when something goes wrong, they have the right equipment to deal with it.
That's probably the part of the story I'm most proud of. We get to take a lot of the lessons we learned the hard way through racing and turn them into products, information and support that hopefully make somebody else's day a little easier.
On the Challenges of Building a Business
Definitely not easy. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a smooth road when you're building a business.
One of the biggest challenges for us has been learning that making a great product and building a great company are two completely different things. We came from racing and fabrication, so our natural instinct was always, "There's a problem. Let's build something that fixes it." We were pretty comfortable with that part.
What took a lot longer to learn was everything that has to happen around the product — forecasting inventory, managing cash, dealing with long manufacturing lead times, building a team, creating repeatable processes and making sure the customer gets the same experience as the company grows.
We've made plenty of mistakes along the way. We've run out of products people wanted to buy. We've tied up too much cash in the wrong places. We've had production mistakes, shipping mistakes and products that needed another round of development before they were really ready. As painful as those things are, they usually force you to build a better system so you don't make the same mistake twice.
Growth itself has probably been one of the bigger challenges. When AGM was small, a few people could keep most of the business in their heads. That stops working as you grow. You have to learn to trust other people, communicate better and build processes that don't depend on one person knowing everything.
The part that keeps all of that in perspective for me is the customer on the other end. A stockout isn't just an inventory problem — it's somebody who wanted your product and couldn't get it. A shipping mistake isn't just an operational metric — it's somebody waiting on something they paid for. Thinking about it that way has changed how we approach a lot of the business.
We're still learning. I actually hope that never stops. Most of the improvements we make at AGM today come from something that didn't work as well as it should have yesterday.
About AGM Products
AGM Products designs and builds specialized lifting, recovery and service tools. We're probably best known for our off-road jacks, but we also build automotive tools and equipment for industries like fire/rescue, agriculture and other applications where people need to lift or stabilize something safely in less-than-ideal conditions.
I think what sets us apart is that we're pretty focused. We're not trying to make a thousand different products. We would rather get very good at solving a specific problem. Our jacks are a good example — we've spent years thinking about things most people probably never think about until they're stuck on the side of a trail: how a jack behaves on dirt, how you safely connect it to the vehicle, how much room it takes up, how quickly you can use it and whether you can repair it instead of throwing it away.
We also put a lot of effort into what happens after somebody buys from us. We make how-to videos, vehicle-specific lifting guides and product tutorials, and if somebody calls or emails AGM, there are actual people here who use this stuff and can help them. I'm probably as proud of that as I am of any individual product. I never want us to become a company that ships somebody a box and considers the job finished.
At the end of the day, we're trying to make products that remove one small piece of uncertainty. Whether somebody is 100 miles into the desert, working in their garage or just trying to get their family back on the road, I want them to feel like they bought something that was thoughtfully designed, that will do what we said it would do, and that there's a company behind it if they ever need help.
Find Us Online
This feature originally appeared in SD Voyager Magazine. Read the full article here: Exploring Life & Business with Bryan Lyttle of AGM Products. We're grateful to the SD Voyager team for taking the time to share our story.
