How do families deal with excited kids who have had to wait for you to get in after milking to open their presents? Several families have to answer the question “Did you see Santa?” I’ve asked friends how they answer that question. They answer “No, he must have come before I went out to milk because the gifts were round the tree when I left.” Or, “I heard some bells and the cows seemed spooked; it might have been Santa.” Or, “I think I heard the neigh of Rudolph as I was milking the second row.”
The end of the year is a time for review and while the financial year end is six months away, somehow January 1 – the turning of the year – is a great time to reflect on how well the decisions you took during the year have gone and to plan next year.
Some businesses have professional monitoring and benchmarking systems that measure their business performance against annual plans, but others use a less formal review to improve performance each year.
A general review question is, “How could I improve?” but that is not specific enough to extract smaller business improvements – the one-percenters we need to make this year more efficient than last.
Within the broad question above are three smaller ones: a) what did I do that I shouldn’t have done?; b) what didn’t I do that I should have done?; c) what did I do that I could have done slightly better – often in this group are those small one-percenters? This review process is easier if you know what you were aiming for out of 2013 this time last year, i.e. at the end of 2012. Did you make a plan? Did you write it down? If you did it will be easier to review how you’ve travelled these last 12 months.
Another friend, a Kiwi, says to me that at one level ‘dairy’ is very simple: keep the milk producing units (the cows) fit, healthy and breeding annually, put food in at one end, get staff to remove milk from the other and make sure the cost of the inputs is less than the income from the outputs.
That may appear to outsiders to be the main game but those ‘Legendairy’ posters paid for by our levy describe the hundreds of skills of an average dairy farmer. For my Kiwi mate though, he broadly reviews his business against cows, feed, staff and money.
You might want to review whether you produced and fed the optimal amount of feed off your land. Did you add to that a profitable amount of bought-in feed: supplements, fodder and agistment? Did you keep the shed in tip-top nick so your milk stayed in the top band all year? The questions go on and on.
All this work you do, and the review, are ultimately meant to achieve your family goals at the core of your business: a healthy satisfying life, well-rounded happy kids who can make their way in the world, and enough to live on and save to build wealth.
A farming family I know who came into dairy nine years ago – with management skills from another industry and farming skills from a beef and sheep property – started out with $250,000 for their new dairy farming venture. They are now worth $A2.5m. They are hungry for new skills and knowledge and their annual new year resolution is “every night try to go to bed less stupid than when we woke up.”
What will be your new year resolution for 2014?
• Mike Weise is a dairy extension and business development consultant in Victoria.
