Why your business needs a North Star

Newsletter #2.

I can see that my first letter last week had an open rate of 54.7%. I don’t know what a good rate is, but I’ll take it!

To those that read it– thank you! 🌷

This week I want to bring up something that might become the most important decision you’ll make all year.

That is: deciding what YOUR "North Star" is.

I don’t mean this in a cringe way.

To stick with my “roots” newsletter analogy: I mean this in the “know what you truly want to get, so you can pick the right seed, soil and routine to take care of it” kind of way.

I know most of the decisions that we make in business are out of routine, or because “that’s how we’ve always done them”.

But that simply won’t cut it if you want to grow something extraordinary.

An example:

Let’s say you’re a 3rd generation farmer with a 1,000-acre plot of land on which you grow a variety of crops. You have a few employees and care about the health of your land, but also about making money.

Deep down you know you want to build a massively successful business that will set your family up for life. You dream about owning lots of lands and buying other businesses to achieve this.

But you never set this as your "North Star".

So you keep doing what you’ve always done. You keep working the field, buying your inputs, tracking your margins and employee costs... and browsing the web for land for sale. But you never manage to free up time and work less.

Then when a good deal comes up:

• The timing doesn’t feel quite right

• You are in the busy period of the season

• You don’t have the cash available right now

10 years go by, and nothing has changed.

Sounds familiar?

Now, what if you decided to make this YOUR North Star? To make it your ONE goal to work towards?

• You wouldn’t try to reduce employee costs- you’d increase them so you can free up time for the higher return-on-investment type of work.

• You'd take time to speak with bankers about how you could finance a potential acquisition

• You might go deep into the weeds of your finances and plan what type of strategies would work.

• You could join communities or hire advisers to learn from

I am not saying you are not running your business well. I am saying that we should be much more conscious of our true goal, so we can take the right actions to achieve it.

This is important no matter what your ambition is

• What if you want to sell your business? You NEED to start planning 3-5 years in advance. How can you make the business less reliant on yourself? How you can stabilise your margins? Reduce debt and built up cash?

• What if you want to farm as a lifestyle and not worry about the ‘business’? Consider outsourcing these elements.

• What if you want to have more cash available? Dive into your financials to see where cash might be leaking. Set cost targets to watch weekly. Negotiate your contracts (payment terms and interest rates).

What if you dared to dream big?

I will end this again with a quote because I like how my Newsletter editing software shows them. This sums it up perfectly:

If you got to the end, I would love to hear if you already know what your "North Star" is and how you are working towards that!

Hope to see you next week! 🌷

Best,

Joey