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Thursday, September 3, 2009

Are Farm Succession and Strategic Planning the Same Thing?

In my opinion, yes. Farm succession planning encompasses all those things you do to insure that the farm will live on successfully in the next generation - whether that is next year or twenty years from now. Strategic planning is a blueprint to follow - the measured steps you take along the way, plans which when they unfold will allow the pieces of the long term puzzle to fall into place effectively.

So if the farm owner wants the farm to succeed beyond his or her lifetime and knows that good things rarely happen by accident, why do they always seem to drag their feet when confronted with farm succession? Maybe the word 'confronted' has something to do with it?

Over the years farmers told me that they were too busy to plan for the distant future, we all want to think these things are in the far distance - because they were consumed with what needed doing right them.

Let's face it, we're all busy - but there always seems to be time to do the things we want to do. Have you ever noticed how many times you were too busy to paint the milk parlor but could find the time for other things, like the State Fair or the Homecoming football game?

If you had a group of peers, an unofficial board of advocates, who were holding you accountable for doing what's important to your short and long term success - wouldn't you find time to get started with your strategic and succession planning?

We all know that" once begun is half done" is true whether it's clearing a field, changing your oil, or anything else you don't want to do right them.

The beauty of doing strategic and succession planning with the input of your peers is that the very process creates its own rewards.

Once begun you start to get clarity around the number one issue - the reason most of you put this off, thinking about and articulating what's important to you and your family as you move down the road toward your exit from the farm.

The result is to help you do a better job, because now that you have created the picture of what's important you will begin to move toward it.

You will begin to consider seriously where you are right now and measuring the distance and the direction you'll need to go to get where you want to be.

As you more clearly see where you want to end up, you strategic planning efforts will help you and your family, along with the insights of your peers chart a path to get there.

This planning process focuses your management team's energy, ensures you all are working toward the same goals and enables you to adjust the farm's direction in response to the ever changing environment.

When you have determined where you want to be 3, 5, 20, or more years from now, and have your peer group - your free strategic planning team holding your feet to the fire of your commitment, you will set real goals and then develop a plan to achieve them.

Strategic planning, when done in conjunction with succession planning, focuses your energies and those of everyone around you in a common targeted direction. And by clarifying what actions you need to take to get where you want to be, lots of other things become unimportant and can be discarded out of hand.

Every action we take leads us toward or away from our goals. Nothing is neutral - so doing only those things that are goal achieving and forgetting about those that are simply tension relieving will make your life simpler.

Strategic planning helps you first focus on fundamental decisions and actions that will take you toward success as you define it. While you may want to read some books about it, long term strategic planning is a do-it-yourself process. The last thing any of us need is some sort of strategic planning expert hanging around telling us how to do things.

The ideal process, based on my observations over three decades is one consisting of a group of peers, people in your industry who live a long way away from you, who will meet with you regularly over the phone to help you identify what's important, clarify your and your families expectations and help you with the fundamental decisions you must make today, tomorrow, and tomorrow after that.

Their creativity around what's possible will be based on their experiences, successful and otherwise, and on those of their peers - people just like you that you will never meet. Their fresh insights may cause you to reverse past decisions because they are not trying to protect the previous, perhaps outdated, advice.

You will be able to move forward with confidence.


Wayne_Messick

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