Category: Making a Change

RFP Successes

ranching for profit school

The Ranching for Profit School is sometimes called the “MBA of Ranching” or referred to as “better than college.” The RFP School has an amazing curriculum that can have enormous impacts on the alumni and their ranches, but I don’t like those comparisons. Here’s why: you will hear and interpret things differently in each stage […]

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Too Many Options

convenience store

We’ve always heard that having options is a good thing. Having options gives us the freedom to choose what is best for us. However, having too many options can feel chaotic and be crippling. When we have so many options, we actually tend to choose nothing. We look at the minor gain to our businesses as not worth […]

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Some Ideas Should Fail

cattle grassland

How many of the new ideas that you implement work? I hope not 100%. If 100% of the new ideas you implement in your business work then you are probably being too cautious. There is a healthy portion of new ideas that should fail.   I spent a year riding pens in a feedlot. I really […]

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Finding What You Look For

close up cattle

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses” is an Abraham Lincoln quote that I think about nearly everyday. To me it’s all about life’s perceptions and choosing your mindset. We get to choose our attitude. I have noticed this in multiple situations, and more and more as […]

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Business is a Noble Endeavor

sheep sunrise

Last week I along with Jordan Steele and a few RFP alumni attended the EntreLeadership Summit put on by the Ramsey organization in Nashville, Tennessee. It was an amazing week hearing from world-class thought leaders and business trailblazers. Dave Ramsey gave a presentation called The Nobility of Business. His point was that so many condemn […]

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Lagging vs Leading Indicators

indicators

“When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior” (James Clear, Atomic Habits). At the Ranching for Profit School, we talk about how paradigms, actions, and results are related to ranching. These concepts look hard at why the business does what the business does.  First let’s talk about money. A very common financial […]

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Is Opportunity Interest, Real Interest?

opportunity interest

An opportunity cost is the lost benefit of choosing a different option. The opportunity cost of going to college is losing out on four years of wages; the true cost is tuition plus lost wages.  At the Ranching for Profit School, we include opportunity interest as a cost on owned livestock herds, because there is […]

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Dangers of Free Time

mountain hike

Free time is dangerous to those who have been raised to believe that one must always be physically busy in the ranch.   A business in our Executive Link (EL) program recently eliminated a major enterprise that wasn’t working economically and hadn’t been for some time. They were able to make this brave decision, with the […]

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Think Outside the Office

office daze

In the Ranching for Profit School we challenge you to separate your life from your business. Too many ranchers identify as their work and never develop a sense of who they are outside of the ranch. Not only does the business suffer as a result, so does the rancher’s family.  There are many ways to […]

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Feedback Loops to Aid Decision Making

loops

If you were to come upon a car wreck, which turns out to be your neighbor with terminal cancer, would you worry about their next chemo appointment? Probably not, your first concern would more likely be CPR or stopping the bleeding. This is about the extent to which we generally discussed the feedback loop at […]

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