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How To Farm Your Way To Business Success
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The How-To Business Book
11/20/2000
By: Mitchell Young
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When I suggest to small business people that the way to success is to become a farmer, they look quizzical and say something like “fertilizer” (or, more specifically, horse fertilizer).
But where is the model to grow your business? Is it swimming with the sharks? Coming down off the porch to growl with the big dogs? Going into the field with more hunters?
I don't think so. I don't believe that embracing these macho homilies is the way to build a business.
At the heart of small-business struggle is an organizational structure and style of business that caps our growth. Manufacturers, retailers, newspapers, ad agencies, distributors, you name it - the model “works” for most any company.
Indeed, more than market niche or financing or even capabilities, it's that structure and style that best determine the company's growth prospects.
From the outside it appears to be a single owner, or husband-and-wife team, or perhaps partners, surrounded by a small group of committed workers. But it's really something quite different. The group's energy flows, it grows, it stalls, sometimes it even falls - but it usually gets up and grows again. Through it all, the “company” moves along.
These close-knit groups follow their leaders: at times reluctantly, often challenging, usually loyally - and sometimes right over the cliff. In the best cases a team does emerge, able to pounce on opportunity and strong enough to keep the competition off its turf.
Sound familiar? It's the wolf pack (“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack”) and the organizational model of most small companies.
One company owner relayed the story of what he inherited from his father. Along with the business' inventory, receivables, facilities and even personnel, he gained his father's legacy - a solid regional market share in typewriters.
The 12-person firm had thrived through the 1950s, '60s, '70s and into the '80s under the leadership of his father. Just as my friend got his shot to lead the pack, things started to get pretty tough. The “younger” brought new life to the group and it began to innovate, making the transition into computers, software and even services successfully.
And as the 1990s ended, the firm hit the 50-year mark with a new “alpha” firmly in charge of a profitable and a stable firm of about 10 to 12 able office and sales warriors. So why was he disappointed?
In wolf-pack companies the team roams, hunts and, more often then not, does get its prey. However, few wolf packs grow beyond their role of instinctive hunters. But they can - if they're willing to become farmers.
Why is farming the way to grow your business? As we enter the genomic age, it's clear that it is the technology of farmers that has gotten us here. For tens of thousands of years, groups of valiant hunter-warriors roamed the worldscape; but they were succeeded by the farmers and their commitment to developing a process of food creation. In a few thousand years, they developed everything we have today.
Today the farmer may not be the favored symbol of growth, opportunity or technology. If anything, we've placed the failed hunter in that role.
Wolf packs do succeed, but their purpose is limited: the success of “alpha.” Growing your company requires seeing and moving beyond that.
Moving beyond the wolf pack means committing your company to technology, process, technique and innovation.
Some familiar technologies every farmer uses can be put to work in your business.
1. Get a Tractor: Except for the Amish, there is little pride by having oxen pulling the plow. Yet many small-business owners relish and adopt an anti-technology bias for themselves and their companies. In another words, “Just grab it by the hindquarters and bring it down.”
2. Barn-raisings: Considering how much business owners like to help each other (non-competitors, of course). It's amazing that most of us do to such a poor job of networking. Too many see it as selling - not learning, not building, and not finding new resources and solutions. Do you want to build a barn fast? Get a lot of help.
3. Diversify Your Crop Base: The balance between doing too many things and too few things is a tricky challenge for a small business. However, farming teaches us that the weather and the pests change year-to-year and we must be able to offer complementary products. The printer that does mailing, the doughnut baker that bakes bagels, the restaurant that caters parties and meetings - even the used-car dealer that offers detailing.
4. Grow Hybrids: Invention and innovation is the ultimate weapon of the small business. Customer service is no more than being nice (and that is not enough) if it is not backed up by change. Take your measured risks gladly.
5. Open a Farm Stand: This little innovation of local farmers teaches quite a bit. To compete with our own agri(big)business competition, we have to bring our businesses closer to the customer and grab more of the profit from the sale.
And lastly remember what every farmer knows:
Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and fertilize!
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