Profitable Farmer

In complement to our last two episodes that focus on on-farm culture and team, in this episode, I explore a question we receive often:             When is the right time and how do we best establish an Advisory Board?   There is an important set of business practices and disciplines that need to be in place and effective prior to establishing a Board. It is important that as business owners we retain ownership and full responsibility for key elements of our businesses’ strategic plan, performance analysis, budgets and operational plans. It is important we have reasonable expectations of Board Members and do not expect them to do the ‘hard work’ on these important elements of business leadership for us. It is also important to be very careful who we invite onto our Board, and what we should reasonably expect from them.   Let’s be real for a moment, farm business ownership is a very complex assignment. We are exposed to the vagaries of the season and the markets. We run complex businesses in isolated settings