Essentialism
Each fall and winter our Executive Link meetings start with a continuing education program. We usually reach for something outside the ranching world that our members would not otherwise be exposed to. Often this is a book from business management circles. This fall our book is Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. […]
Read MoreThe Next Generation of Passionate Ranchers
Last week, in partnership with Wally Olson and the Plank Stewardship Initiative, we hosted the first ever Young Adult Ranching for Profit Workshop. We had 48 youth from 17 states in Sheridan, Wyoming for an incredible four days! The energy, enthusiasm, and passion these young people have for ranching and agriculture was contagious. Several times […]
Read MoreIs Tagging Calves a Good Idea?
We need to constantly challenge the management practices we do on the ranch, to make sure they still make sense. As business management guru Edwards Demming (who lived in Powell, WY) said, “It is not necessary to change, survival is not mandatory.” Since calving season is in full swing across most of cow country, I […]
Read MoreSocial Distancing Rancher Style
As the coronavirus pandemic continues, all of us in America are changing many of our habits and routines to try and slow the spread. While social distancing is the norm for many in the ranching profession, we are most certainly adjusting our routines in the coming weeks and perhaps months. In my house, the major […]
Read MoreAttracting & Retaining Quality Employees
“You just can’t find anyone willing to work anymore.” I hear this quite often from ranches struggling to find and retain quality employees. When we look deeper into the situation it is often no surprise, as we expect our ranch employees to give long hours in sometimes difficult conditions with mediocre compensation. In the Ranching […]
Read MoreThe Value of a Day
What value does your business need to produce every day? Are you focusing on the right things to achieve this? At the Ranching for Profit School we teach participants how to structure the economic information of their business into a format that is meaningful for making effective business decisions. Over the past few months I’ve […]
Read MoreThe 3 Measures of Success in Business
In nearly 40 years of helping ranchers improve their land, their businesses and their lives, I’ve found that there are three things we need to measure to determine the success of a ranch business, or any business for that matter. They are: Profit, Effort, and Fun. Let’s take a quick look at each of these. […]
Read MoreManaging For What You Want
In Cash Flow Quadrant, Robert Kiyosaki explains that there are four ways to make money. You can be an employee (E), working for someone else for a salary. Alternatively, you can be self-employed (S), a business owner (B) or an investor (I). If you compare the E and S quadrants to the B and I […]
Read MoreGetting It Right or Getting It Fast
A young rancher attended his first Executive Link meeting a few weeks after completing a Ranching for Profit School. He showed his EL board the long to-do list he created at the end of the school and worried that there wasn’t enough time to get everything done that he needed to do. “I’m constantly putting […]
Read MoreHaving a Ranch AND a Life
A friend included me in an email chain informing us of a farmer he knew who recently took his life. I don’t pretend to begin to know this man’s pain or anything about his situation. But the story struck me as beyond sad. Responses in the email chain spoke of the stress of farming, peer […]
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