To run your farm business, you’ll engage employees, who will also document records e.g. feed used, eggs produced, stock counts etc. But a farm hand – or even the farm manager! – could (deliberately…or accidentally) make a potentially costly documentation error.
S/he could, for instance, forget to replenish the stock of vaccines to be used for a new batch of chicks.
Or s/he could pilfer them, while indicating in the stocks sheet they are still there.
You may not however, notice such wrong documentation. Until your day old chicks arrive on site, and you’re informed the vaccines rack in storage is empty!
To make matters worse, this incident could occur at a time when you lack funds to quickly buy a replacement.
Or you could have the money, but if happened on a Sunday, the vet shop, may not be open!
What I’m saying, in essence, is that even when you have the money, machines, animals, and other resources in place, THE PEOPLE you work with need to have the right orientation, and attitude, for you to succeed.
The key to success is making sure everything within your direct control and influence, works the way you want them to.
That includes who you work with, and for how long you work with them.
It’s a big subject that cannot be treated in one article.
However, here are 3 key points I’d recommend that every farm owner keep in mind:
1. Avoid Sentiments In Recruiting Employees
The workplace culture that is required for success, does not develop overnight.
You need to nurture and cultivate it.
So, you must bring people into your business, who are ready to commit to working diligently, and with integrity, with you.
Avoid taking on anyone to work in sensitive areas, based on any sentiments whatsoever – not even your closest relatives!
Do away with sentiments – or you’ll most likely regret it.
Look for people with the skills, knowledge, experience and work related attitude you want.
Background checks, smart questions, and practical tests on site can yield useful insights to go on.
If you’re not sure how to go about it, consider getting help e.g. a extension specialist, or experienced farm business owners, with relevant know how etc.
NB: I’d stay away from recruitment agencies, when it comes to staffing a farm in this part of the world: My personal preference based on years of observation :-))
2. Setup a Farm Workplace Organized According to Best Practice Process Management Standards
Very rarely will you find employees functioning optimally without supervision or guidance, to make things work out as expected.
Setting ground rules and guidelines for carrying out work that is required is often the best way to go, if you want good results.
Telarge multinational corporations do this. And they work hard to keep their system effective.
Standards enforcing organizations have certifications they award (e.g. ISO 14,000), to organizational workplaces that meet certain minimal requirements.
Companies that earn such certifications often consistently turn out output to the right standards.
If you want your farm to produce similar results (e.g. reliable output/quality each time), then set up best practice organization of your workplace.
Work Instructions and other tools in a BOPMS™, can help you achieve the above.
They are components of what I call a BOPMS™ for profitable farm business management.
3. Establish and Entrench Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as Farm Quality Control Instruments
Your farm is a business.
To succeed, it must make a profit.
But there’s a problem I’ve referred to in many of my past articles: Too many people get carried away by the fact that buyers are trooping to their farms.
And so they don’t check if the sales happening are yielding them enough profits to GROW their business.
Yet, without profit-based growth, a business will not prosper.
I’ve seen some farm owners selling their products without really having a firm grasp of what it actually cost to produce them.
Catfish, poultry, and pig farmers can be especially guilty of this habit out here.
They fail to do the important preliminary thinking…To accurately establish systems for tracking – on a daily basis – how much they spend, what they buy, what they use, what they produce, as well as what they earn in sales, while running their farm enterprises.
Yet all they need do is setup a reliable daily record keeping and report generation system, that works with paper based records, which are posted into a PC based Enterprise Information System.
Once that is in place, the farm CEO only needs to ensure his/her employees are taught to use the system correctly.
Don’t get me wrong. I know a lot of farms keep paper records, especially in notebooks.
However, very rarely is any informed thinking used to decide what to record, and what format to adopt in recording it!
As a result, many farm owners end up with disjointed (sometimes duplicated) paper or Excel based records, recorded in a haphazard manner.
And most times such records will be missing crucial data needed for important farm planning/decision making.
Final Words: A BOPMS™ Will Make Running Your Farm Business Easier & More Profitable
Using experiences I gained as a Best Practice Process Management champion in a large manufacturing multinational, I’m helping results focused farm owners develop their own unique solutions to this problem.
Entrenching best practices in every department of a farm business, is FUNDAMENTAL to the long term success of that enterprise.
Beyond setting up farm structures, and purchasing animals and their feeds, a farm owner who wants long term success, with profits, must adopt best practices in all facets of his/her operations.
And this will include recruiting the right people, and training them to function optimally in a best practice farm workplace, that enables them do their work EFFICIENTLY on a consistent basis.
Some farm owners I know express fears about taking the risk of staying away for even one day!
Since when did owning a business translate to losing one’s freedom, I wonder?
By adopting a BOPMS™, you would feel confident staying away from visiting your farm, without worrying that things would go haywire.
When you have:
- Farm personnel with the right skills, training, and work related attitude…as well as….
- A farm business work environment that provides employees needed systems, tools and resources to deliver the desired output…
…then there’s a good chance that YOU, as the farm owner, can safely be away from the farm, without worrying that you’ll return to find chaos.
This is because you’d still be able to remotely verify the state of affairs, using KPIs that an Enterprise Information System (EIS) component of your BOPMS™ would generate within seconds.
The KPIs are best practice process management tools that you would use to determine the accuracy of the information you’re given by your employees.
And those giving it to you, would know that!
In other words, you’d end up with a team of employees guided to do what you’ve asked them to do – with diligence.
Even when you’re away, they would keep working in alignment with you, to produce the desired output.