If Cash is King, is Working Capital the Queen? – How working capital is the difference between success and failure when it comes to primary producer operations – PART 1

  Growing up, I can always remember the early days of working paycheque to paycheque. Always thinking that next month I would be able to put some money aside (or more likely what night at the bar I could spend it at). It’s almost ironic…

Buying Time – How a growth mentality can reduce work and create more time to spend on the things that matter most

  A partner of mine once explained to me – “As farmers, we are really good at finding more work, but we are really poor at finding people.”   The context of our discussion was around maintaining a growth mentality and…

Different, Not Less

Different, Not Less – How having two children with autism changed my journey in primary producer agriculture.   “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert…

Executive Coaching for Farmers Is A Knowledge Transfer Tool

If you treat your farm like a way of life, it can be a bad business—but if you treat your farm like a business, it can be a great way of life. That’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned on my family farm, and I’ve made…

You Been Farming Long? – Succession and Transition is About Business, Not Family

You Been Farming Long? – Succession and Transition is About Business, Not Family   I remember growing up, every farmhouse in Saskatchewan had the picture on the wall of the two young boys in overalls that exclaimed, “you been…

Mind Your Farm Business — Ep. 76: The power of peer groups

Peer to peer learning is incredibly useful in any business, and agriculture is no different. Put simply, peer groups allow for the collective sharing of great ideas. Perhaps just as valuable, they also allow for the collective learning of hard…

Relevance and Reliability – Why the qualitative aspects of benchmarking are just as important as the quantitative.

During my time as a public accountant, I believed that benchmarking was going to be the driving force in consulting moving forward.    How could it not be?    The ability to compare hundreds of thousands of producers…

Lean on Me – How Coaching and Peer Groups Help Primary Producers Break Through Ceilings

You don’t have to do it alone. A simple lesson that many entrepreneurs don’t learn quickly enough to move their business forward. When it comes to primary producer agriculture, we have long bought into the theory of “rugged individualism”.…

Growing the Future – Farmer Coach

Farmer Coach is an executive agriculture training program that brings primary producer entrepreneurs together into a group setting to learn and share collaboratively on topics and behavior that drive agriculture forward. Kristjan Hebert,…

Management service offers producers a farmer coach

Company says few programs are available to help producers manage their farm businesses in a systematic and logical way In the game of blackjack, better players rely on a cheat card that tells them what to do. If, for example, the player…

Young Farmers and the Need for Finance Acumen

What Happens Above the Dirt may be More Important Than What Happens Below? Young Farmers and the Need for Finance Acumen     I often laugh when looking back over the last two decades of agriculture. Through my teenage years…