Managing Through
The COVID-19 crisis sweeping the world is on everyone’s mind. We at RMC are making adjustments in our work to help slow the spread. It is easy to get caught up in the negative thinking about how this is impacting markets or impacting our normal routines. However, let’s pause and consider how we as individuals […]
Read MoreBeauty in Simplicity
We tend to overcomplicate things. A simple business that does a few things well and at scale, is a thing of beauty! It is easy to get caught in the trap of doing lots of small things. After all, if someone is making money on the calves I sell, maybe I should background them myself? […]
Read MoreJust Start
We just wrapped up the Abilene Ranching for Profit School. It was an amazing week with 53 forward thinking ranchers who are challenging conventional wisdom and driving their businesses forward. I was joined by John Locke of Hungerford, TX who served as a co-instructor for the school. John has attended the Ranching for Profit School […]
Read MoreWhat Price Should I Use?
For the past 3 weeks we have been holding our Executive Link meetings from New England to Texas. We have about 110 businesses that are currently members of Executive Link (EL). These businesses meet as boards of directors three times a year to give and receive strategic advice on their business and be held accountable […]
Read MoreWhistling Again
We use key performance indicators to assess the health of a business. Some evaluate economic and financial health. Others measure labor productivity. Still others measure the health of the ecosystem. Last week I added a new key performance indicator for measuring business success to my list. I spent an evening with Craig and Connie French […]
Read MoreWhen Assets Become Liabilities
Look up the definition of asset in Webster and it’ll tell you an asset is “anything owned that has value.” But Webster has it wrong. If I put a down payment on a ranch, financing the balance, the full value of the land shows up in the asset column of my balance sheet, but 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 MoreA True Story About A Real Manager
About 15 years ago I met an absentee owner who was responsible for a family ranch that was losing money. It had lost between $200,000-$300,000 year after year for a long time. Over those years she’d made several threats to the two managers that if things didn’t turn around, the family would have to sell […]
Read MoreWhat Does Mom Want?
We use a process at RMC to help families and business teams create a shared vision and a plan to achieve it. We start by asking a very basic question: What do you want? Each participant answers individually by writing several short statements describing how they’d like things to be in three to five years. Once […]
Read MoreHome On The Range?
Many of us hope and fear that the next generation will want to be part of the family business. We hope because we feel validated that we must have done something right when our kids want to follow in our footsteps. Many of us see it as our role to create opportunities for our kids. […]
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