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IMPORTANT NOTE: THIS newsletter is published online on the “reincarnated” version of my Self-Development (SD) Nuggets blog. I continue to put finishing touches to the content. If you encounter ANY bad/dead links, and you can spare the time, email it to me via tayo at tksola dot com. Thanks in advance
No. 147: Some Startup CEOs Fail to Do the Easiest Self-Preparation Needed (How to Help Them)
Over a decade of delivering Best Practice Solutions to Farm Businesses, has revealed one interesting fact to me: Many who own farm businesses in Nigeria, do NOT have formal training in agriculture.
Yet, Despite Lacking Training in Agriculture, They Succeed!
Indeed, there is little to suggest those who studied agriculture do better that those who do not.
From the total illiterate who runs a thriving catfish farm (which even , provides training for aspiring others to start theirs), to the PhD holder who runs a commercial poultry layer farm combined with a feed mill (which provides milling services to other farm businesses).
This fact has significant implications.
Even Unschooled Persons, Given Enough Training, Can Run Successful Farming Ventures…
I still recall watching a video demonstration produced by a Lagos based aquaculture consultant, who graduated from the University of Lagos. In it, he shared a testimonial about one of the “graduates” of his monthly Catfish Farming Business Start-up workshops.
The illiterate Alhaji learnt how to competently inject female catfish to induce ovulation…to strip ripe eggs from the female fish…and to subsequently extract milt (semen) from male catfish, to use in fertilising the stripped eggs…which post hatching, he reared to table size!
In the past, most farm owners would not dare venture into fish farming without hiring a “graduate” of fisheries. This was because the latter were often the only ones who had the “competence” to carry out such delicate tasks.
They Can Do Even Better By Adopting Best Practice Operations...
I’ve noted that people who lack formal agribusiness training have been repeatedly able to start-up and run operations that succeed fairly well.
However, one consistent trend I’ve observed (and it’s been there for decades, as noted in Prof. J. A Oluyemi’s “Poultry Production in Warm Wet Climates”), in Nigeria, is that most farm owners (even including those with formal training) do not have well organised farm workplaces.
Most of their daily routine operations are carried out in a haphazard manner.
One can therefore imagine that if despite lacking formal training, and failing to operate based on established best practices, they can do so well, their potential for even higher profitability and long term success can only be greater!
With best practice operation, apart from ensuring more predictable long term performance, they would also develop reliable competence to prevent problems (e.g. disease outbreaks etc), and/or recover from them.
To start a Poultry layer farm, for instance, there are well laid out rules and regulations guiding selection of chicks, housing, transportation, feeding, down to slaughtering and/or sales.
In developed societies, a start-up farm typically needs to meet stringent requirements to get approval to commence operations. Periodic checks by regulatory authorities ensure continued adherence or conformance.
This is why most farm owners in developed countries diligently keep farm records covering all areas of their operations – including data to facilitate tracing virtually all inputs and outputs to/from their processes.
And it is also why many of them tend to achieve optimal output and profitability relative to capacity.
In Nigeria However, Formal Best Practice Standards Simply Do Not Exist!
Some people seem to wake up one morning with an itch in their pockets following some financial windfall of sorts.
After doing a little thinking, a person could decide to start a poultry layer farm based on what s/he’s been told about profits to be had. Within a matter of weeks s/he contacts a hatchery to order chicks.
Now, maybe an old friend once told him his family owned a poultry business.
Rather than have a formal consulting relationship with a competent professional in this field, s/he would choose to ask that friend questions about what to do and how.
This really does happen quite often!
If s/he decides to be a bit more painstaking, s/he could visit the friend’s farm and take pictures of the structures and animal.
Next, s/he calls in workers to build pens, and install cages etc e.g someone who knows someone who does such work gets people in, mostly informally. S/he gets to pay as little as possible, because most times it’s like they’re “helping” as friends etc
As a result, most times farm owners who start like this simply “wing it” i.e. they try to cut as many corners as possible, to get rear their chicks into laying birds, while spending as little as possible.
These people often focus ONLY or mainly, on the money to be made from eggs sales.
The time, effort and money to be invested in getting the right quality of chicks and creating the right housing environment, coupled with proper balanced feeding, to ensure long term egg laying performance, is something they have little patience for.
Many Such Farm CEOs Fail to Do the Easiest Self-Preparation Needed i.e. Reading Up!
You see, one good thing about farm businesses is that, with luck (e.g poultry and fish farming) is that they can quickly yield useful returns that make lapses on the part of the owner NOT matter much.
They thus fail to realize how costly the “corner cutting” risks they blindly took could have been.
That is, until one day, when disaster strikes!
And then in trying to get help, they connect with a support specialist (like me). And I never stop being amazed to discover just how little they know about the farm businesses they run!
Yet books abound, as do websites, where one can learn virtually all one needs to know about starting up and successfully running farm businesses of all kinds.
Any smart farm business owner will arm him/herself with sound knowledge of the theory and practice of the enterprise s/he chooses.
Without this, s/he would be shooting in the dark.
Considering the substantial financial investment that starting some enterprises requires, this will seldom be a wise thing to do.
Yet many still do it till today – because they see others seemingly getting away with it.
On Example: A few weeks ago, I read through a Nairaland.com discussion thread. Certain individuals announced the launch of small scale commercial poultry farm operations.
Over a period of weeks spanning about 6 months, they shared details of the progress (or lack of it) that they were making.
However, the requests for help made, and responses to questions by others, given by the start-up farm CEOs, revealed that they’d begun in some cases without doing the most basic things.
In one case, a CEO posted an update explaining how the chicks received weeks earlier had to be moved out of the new broiler brooding pens, because the flooring was badly done.
It was so bad that sections had cracked open, over time resulting in infection, which led to complications – and deaths.
When asked about – among other things – vaccination regimes administered to the new birds, the CEO had basically no clue!
It was most disheartening to see that people adopted such a haphazard approach to embarking upon ventures so well practised by many for decades!
I Have However Discovered That Not All Such CEOs Were Being Lazy or Careless…
Like I’ve noted in past articles, most of my Farm CEO clients are actually persons who hold day jobs, and run their businesses on the side, employing trusted hands they can find.
As a result, time can sometimes be hard for them to efficiently manage. So they get overwhelmed. Especially in the peculiar Nigerian climate.
This probably explains why some have had to request my help in finding reliable persons to employ as farm managers etc.
While reflecting on this challenge, it occurred to me that it’s not easy to find a quick-start-guide that persons – especially those untrained in agriculture – can quickly and easily consult.
The few available are bulky publications with greater detail than most of these kinds of farm owners really need.
Such farm CEOs contact me more often these days.
When they buy my Ration Formulator app, rather than read through the detailed PDF guide I include with the app, some prefer to repeatedly call me at their own expense to have me verbally guide them in learning to use the app!
When this kept happening, I created one page annotated JPEG diagrams based on user interfaces from my app, which I began sending to each buyer.
I soon discovered – not surprisingly – that distilling the essential elements into such smarter formats made it easier for them to learn.
There was LESS to read, and more visuals to relate with.
If you know how the human brain works, you know people learn better when presented with graphic materials.
And That Brings Me to My “Take-Away” Message for This Week…
Don’t insist clients accept the way you present solutions you offer.
Instead, use feedback they give you – directly and/or indirectly – to develop better ways to help them make successful use of your products/services.
That will endear you to them in ways you cannot imagine. And that can only mean greater success, for you, for the long term.
In my case, rather than stop at questioning farm CEOs for NOT following best practices, I choose to THINK up ways to help those willing, to overcome this challenge.
I learnt to do this from the earlier mentioned experience with farm CEO users of my Excel-VB driven Ration Formulator software.
When they kept coming to me instead of studying the elaborate PDF I’d sent them, I used their questions to create “smarter” one page JPEG versions of my user guide. And that has worked quite well!
Final Words: The Above Explains Why I’ve Begun Writing a “Quick Start Guide for Poultry Farm Business”
One version will cater to owners of Broiler Farms, and another to CEOs of Layer Farm operations.
If you’d like to be notified when it becomes available, click here to let me know.
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