As I was building C’est Naturell farms in Oregon a successful business owner told me these four tips. Now that our farm has made major changes in order to survive I understand them. I thought I understood them years ago when he first told me but now with the experience of building a farm that has failed as a profitable business I see these four things in a completely different way.
#1. Know what your role is.
I wrote the business plan and detailed everyone’s role. I thought I had this one down. I was the owner who made the final decisions. I was the leader to teach everybody how to do the jobs. I helped with construction of the pig barn, greenhouses, dairy barn and fences. I was in the middle of everything all the time. We were producing food, harvesting, and delivering. The only thing I never did was make a delivery to customers. I was working with a limited budget so I couldn’t purchase the equipment I needed to grow the crops the way the big vegetable farms do and doing it by hand was too labor intensive making our product too expensive. So I had to develop homemade machines to fit our needs which turned out to be excellent. Our production turned out to be really efficient and the quality was perfect.
These things needed to be done so I was doing them but the other people needed me to be a leader for them. They told me this and I tried but we were so busy with the work we were committed to that there was not time for the level of leadership they needed. They also got tired of the thinking and planning and wanted to work so I let them work but that didn’t make the business a success.
My role should have been leadership
#2. Know other peoples role
This was also in the business plan. I had the job descriptions down, and who was to do them when. They worked hard and we had a great group of people who put everything into the farm.
Their role could have been more if I would have known my role. They tried to give of their time and talents but I did not know how to incorporate it into my business. To me it seemed like they were going in their own direction.
What I see now that I did not see then was that their role could have been much more fulfilling to the business if I would have known how to utilize their contribution.
#3. Have measurable benchmarks.
We would sell 150 farm memberships and give them their weekly portion of the harvest.
We never reached this benchmark but it was the magic number for success. Our plan was to keep marketing until we reached it but the farm crumbled before we got there. We spent the “up front money” people gave us on purchasing the supplies to grow their food then when the time came to start deliveries we hadn’t raised enough to get a reliable delivery vehicle. The old one had major safety issues and we feared for the life of the delivery person. The garden wasn’t producing like it should have so the food supplies were short and we had some dishonest customers who didn’t pay their bills and we were never paid a large amount of money we expected. Another big problem was that people thought they would be getting everything on their list every week of the year. But they only got what they put on the list when it was ripe and ready for harvest. These combined into the biggest embarrassment of my life! I thought at the time it was my fault because I had done something wrong. So when people complained. I felt that they were justified but I didn’t know how to fix it or help them. We stopped deliveries mainly for the safety factor. We told people to come to the farm to pick up. This was very rewarding for me because I now had the chance to meet the customers who were enjoying the food I was growing. We continued to market for a couple of months and we were again in a growth trend when the owners of the farm I was renting decided they wanted their privacy and didn’t want the people coming to the farm. This saga continues but the point is in this business the measurable benchmarks were not simple and required a lot of diligent attention. I was not aware of the needs this required. It seemed simple at first: grow food, sell memberships, deliver the food, enjoy life being a farmer.
Knowing what I know now about measurable benchmarks and all the things there are to keep track of I hope that things would have turned out much different.
#4. Understand your daily tasks.
I had many daily tasks that needed attention that were pressed to the “back burner”(mostly marketing) because of construction emergencies, or sick livestock, or the malfunction of irrigation systems and a host of other things. These were real problems that needed addressed and handled but they took me from my real job. I never did get the business organized because I had so many interruptions from the production side of things.
I really don’t have a good conclusion to this telling you what mistakes to avoid, and showing a neat clean path to success. I share it here with the hope that you can glean through some of my experiences and do a better job than I have done with your business planning.
The really great side of this is that these four details are important and they help us in the creation and maintenance of a successful operation. In the greenhouses I employ these four principles all the time to great success. We know exactly when to plant, transplant, harvest, who is going to do it and everybody knows how so if somebody cant make it to work it gets done on time.
