Drive your farm business and let go of your job

Posted by Brendon Walsh on 11 February 2016

Many sheep and beef farmers are extremely frustrated right now, complaining about meat companies, weather and other non-controllables. The chorus is not dying down anytime soon! In recent blogs I discussed how farm business owners need to be driving their own sheep and beef farm businesses, but what does that really mean?

To keep it simple, it means

1. Taking control of your responsibility to lead the business with purpose, to
2. Achieve what is most important.

This includes ensuring that any details supporting these 2 key directives are carried out / taken care of.

A transition from a true Employed or Self-Employed mindset is required to develop a Business Owner mindset i.e. become a "business owner" thinker and action taker. That is about thinking firstly from the bigger picture and the longer term. Secondly, you then plot the course and set focused goals that will get you there. Thirdly you formulate plans to achieve those goals and ensure the strategies and actions to get you there are carried out. Yes, strategies and actions will need changing occasionally to still achieve the goals under variable conditions, so flexibility, accurate knowledge and good systems are needed within that defined structure.

You see, the “job” of farming will still be carried out among that but it is a small part of the whole business owner mindset. It is best to let go of the job as your main focus if you really want to step your business results up to new levels.

Many new skills and abilities will need to be developed and new or improved systems are necessary. Being the business owner requires it! But that is the easy part because you can outsource those if you are not capable of creating them yourself or if you don’t want to. The challenging bit is making the mindset transition.

Phew! It can all sound exhausting and really hard! Why would any sheep and beef farmer want to go down that track? The answer? Because you have a strong purpose and you want to achieve what’s most important, simply because its most important! Anything else is less important.

Where can you go as a farmer to learn how to do all this?

Many systems out there will help you with specific technical aspects of farming (which is excellent), but few actually help you develop as a business owner who can direct the business forward, generate profit EVERY year and achieve what you really want. That’s why we created GrowFARM®.

You see, to become the sheep and beef farm Business Owner, you need to be prepared to let go of the job mentality and grow into the “owner” role. This takes a structured process over time in which there is scope to achieve success, make mistakes and be able to capitalise on both of those situations, as you go.

If you feel all this may be beyond you as sheep and beef farmer, I’m sorry to say that a quick and dirty mindset transplant will not achieve it anyway! A gradual process using a structure designed for growth and achievement is within anyone's reach who chooses to make the transition a successful one.

It all comes down to what you really want, how badly you went it, and what you will do to make it happen.

So, what will you be? A business owner with a farm business, or a farmer?

If you are curious about how the GrowFARM® System can help sheep and beef farmers generate the profits they really want, contact me here.