Two summers ago, 5 friends gathered to undertake a 2-day back country mountain hike. All the plans were finalized well ahead of time. Everyone invested in proper gear for such an adventure: backpack, drinking water storage, hiking boots, etc. The weather was perfect. The gear lived up to its expectations. No one got hurt. The […]
This is the 150th consecutive Tuesday that I have written and shared this weekly Op-Ed piece. Thank you for reading it each week. I am humbled by the number of subscriptions you have provided. Truth be told, I almost blew right by this milestone. There is another piece I had written that was ready to […]
On October 21, 2017, Seth Godin wrote the following: Decision making, after the fact Critics are eager to pick apart complex decisions made by others. Prime Ministers, CEOs, even football coaches are apparently serially incompetent. If they had only listened to folks who knew precisely what they should have done, they would have been far […]
Let me first get this off my chest. In this age of hyper-political-correctness, to hear of some schools that are “cancelling” Halloween because of the risk that some costumes might “offend” or “scare” someone is taking us down a path that we may not be able to come back from. I’m not a proponent of […]
Price vs. Cost *The following three lines are excerpted from Seth Godin’s Blog, October 16, 2017* Price is a simple number. How much money do I need to hand you to get this thing? Cost is what I had to give up to get this. Just about every time, cost matters more than price, and […]
Recently I met a confident cattleman who clearly displayed zero interest in what I do for clients and how they can benefit. He was very direct in describing his costs, and knew his break-even on his animals (right to the paperclips.) He received a compliment from me on being ahead of many of his competitors. […]
This is the time of year when soil probes all over the prairie are taking samples of the soil that provided the crop in the current year and will provide another crop next year. It’s an annual “check-in” to see what’s left. It was the same about a year ago. We check what nutrient levels remain […]
What do you want to accomplish between now and Oct 1, 2018? If I had asked many of you that question one year ago, you might have provided a response that would make you cringe using the lens of today. Last year, may farms were suffering from excess moisture, and long drawn out harvest. On […]
What do you care about? In a conversation with a fellow business advisor recently, the topic was about how much demand for our services there would be this fall considering the drought, rising interest rates, a rising Canadian dollar, and volatile crop prices. He said to me, “The work we do is important; people need […]
When you see a cow that is limping, you check her out to see what the ailment is. A prudent cowperson can quickly recognize foot-rot and will tend to the cow to make her well again. When you see yellowing bottom leaves and/or thin, spindly plants in the canola crop, you know it is lacking […]