Management Profile

“Well good morning!”, three cups of coffee later and still not even 8 o’clock yet, my dad was not impressed with my enthusiasm when I called him up asking if I could interview him over the phone for a class assignment. “Uh, mornin’”, was about all I could get out of him for a few minutes as he got up for the day. My dad, Shawn Burtenshaw, was the first to come to mind when our class was assigned to interview a manager and create a management profile on them and their business that they operate. “What better person can I bother with questions than dad”, I thought at the beginning of this assignment.

 From Idaho, to Utah, Nevada, Montana and Wyoming my dad is very diverse in cowboy country, because, well, that’s what he is. He was raised on, and operates, a cattle company and operation that has supported our family of seven since the day he was married and I was born, me, being the oldest of five children. Shawn was born into the industry, coming out of Idaho his grandpa and dad ran cattle operations that are very well known in the state today. He worked on these operations throughout high school and college, collecting as much knowledge as I can imagine a person can gain, from the Burtenshaw Cattle Company, his grandpa’s business. He didn’t settle there though.

Shawn managed several ranches while I was still growing up and while he was still growing a family with my mom, Larae. After graduating college, he had managed several smaller places in Idaho, then moved to Jackpot, Nevada where he managed one of the largest cattle and ranching operations in the state. He ran over 1,000 head of cattle ad managed around 30 cowboys who worked for the place. But, managing someone else’s place never satisfied him.

So, in 2006 Shawn packed up his Nevada home and his family and headed for the great state of Wyoming to begin his own business adventure in the cattle industry. After several years of working on ranches for other ranchers in the community and starting his own small heard of cattle, he had finally found a place of his own in Arvada, Wyoming and his business took off in the name of The CX Cattle Company.

Now, Shawn managed his operation differently than other ranches ran theirs in our community, he was managing and running a ranch of over 12,000 acres of good Wyoming grass range which is what boomed his business. In 2009 Texas experienced a drought worse than they ever had, and Shawn took full advantage of this while Wyoming was experiencing summer rain storms that had given the ranch so much green grass that his cattle couldn’t range on it themselves. He didn’t want all that good feed going to waste and began calling and meeting ranchers who had cattle in Texas during this time. Then his business was on a high roll. Cattle trucks began coming up to Wyoming from Texas with full loads of starving cattle, and Shawn had ran these Texas ranchers cattle on his place since he had the grass and water to supply them. He was being paid per head of cattle daily while they were fed on his place until they sold in the fall, or until Texas started getting rain again the following year and they were shipped back. But this was just the beginning for him. He started making deals with feed lots all over the country and had it set up to take about 500 head of yearling steers each year and they were fed and finished on his ranch until they sold in the fall. He kept this going for 5 years of having loads of cattle being brought to his operation each year to be raised and fed on greed grass and top quality feeding supplements and feeding plans that he had created himself.