S4 ● E89 Taking Busyness to the next level

Today's video is about growing the business and how we're going to shape ourselves in the next year. And I think it's a very important one. It's quite a long video, but I'm talking very openly about the business and where I'm at and where I'm heading to. And I think many viewers that watch our channel will find this very interesting if you stick with it, because I'm totally changing our whole business.

So I thought the best way to spend this session is I gonna tell you about how I plan to change our business. I feel like it's a nice way to wrap things up. I can tell you where this place going because this is the last day of an internship ever here. During this time that you've been here, I've been going through some very intense processing in time. Not clear if I will continue a relationship as a father, as a partner, whatever. Not clear if I would stay in Sweden. Not clear what's going on. And some of that's not totally clear, but I am clear how I want to move forward. And yeah, that's been like, you know, quite. It's quite intense to have that whole life going on in the background. That's not really anything to do with you lot. In my context. The thing that's been lacking always is time. Everything else has been perfect, and I wouldn't change any of it. Time is always what you will lack if you run your own business, for sure, or you wouldn't have a business, it would fail. And time is what you lack on a farm. But if you want to start a farming business, then you need to know how to move your fingers, how to plan well, how to get up at 6 o', clock whether you've got a bad back and a cold or not. If it ain't you, then who you know. So I know some of you have extracted the power out of that. What I see actually is that the people I wish to support are the people who are moving with that attitude and aptitude of extracting the juice out of whatever it is they're doing, whether it's taking a shit or washing up or cutting trees down or, you know, whatever it is. Because the people that I see that leave here and succeed are the people that are carrying that attitude every minute of every day, whatever they're doing. And that's the people I need to have here. And so next year's program will be very, very different. There will only be four intense. And so look, this is where we're at now, 2017 and part of the context I've shared with you is about my relationship with Johanna. Like, that's been. Time has been a big factor always because I'm just super busy. But I also come with the context of like, hey, you're starting up a farm business, you're going to be busy for some years until it stabilizes that you can take some time out. That would be true for anyone. So you've got to know what you're getting into. It's why I want you lot to be exposed to, hey, this is a half hour job, not a three day job with six people. Because if you can't get your head around that, you will fail, probably. And I don't mean that in any harsh way. I just mean that, like you're coming here to learn from someone with expertise, they say. And I've done my best to share with you the very critical bits of that. So I hope you can extract the power out of that. I choose to be busier than I need to be, but I have objectives that are much greater than this far and I'm successfully achieving them in the way I wish to. But I'm just on the edge of stabilizing our business, that I have a lot more time. And so the sticking point in my relationship with Johanna has always been people in our house, like people in our space. It's quite intense having a lot of people living in our back garden and all the things they bring, you know, amazing things and frustrating things and all of that. But all of that is intense, whether, whatever it is, you know, even if everyone is groovy and having a great time, it's still intense to have a bunch of people in your back garden every day. But it's intense to have people in our kitchen every day too, because it's, you know, we literally have no space at all. And so that's like a sticky point, the kitchen bit. And it's hard to have that managed well because you can't really teach someone how to, you know, it's like asking someone not to walk over a fence. You can say something 10 times and people will still do. But when you're managing the heart of this place, if someone is not hygiene aware, you can't really train them to do, do that. You know, it's like people that run kitchens well know instantly what needs to be done with cleaning and sorting and labeling and da, da, da. So it's always been interesting and never optimal, but not bad. It's always been great. This year, the food is great. We've enjoyed the food and it's, there's nothing bad about it, but it's not optimal. Like it's a lot of people resources going into that and there's bits around it that aren't done. So it needs optimization. I feel like our business is on the edge of getting very big. We have a lot of people signed up for an online training that will drive a massive amount of revenue that will put us in a very different position that I can take risk. So this is a big part of the, of what's making me accelerate this change. The things I'm going to tell you now are things I've been thinking about since we came here but haven't had the capacity to carry out. But this winter I possibly will have. So revenue from it gives me security. And it gives me like a long term vision. Like it makes my long term vision for this place come alive and it allows me to take risk. So I'm planning to take risks that most people wouldn't ever consider to do. I take quite a lot of risks anyway, but I'm very happy to take bigger risks. So this is next season. I'm trying to just let you know the whole context and some of you know, some of it anyway or whatever. So right now we have a chicken surplus and a big part of our economy is the chickens. You know, it drives a lot of money through the farm. So how much money does it drive through? It drives like a million crowns. That's £100,000. So it's a lot of revenue. But if you can't sell it, it's a lot of waste because it costs a lot to produce 60% profit. So 40% is cost that you've already fed. Now smoked chicken, what does smoked chicken sell for? We sell private. We sell 129 crowns a kilo with moms, with VAT. If people buy 500 chickens, we sell for 89 a kilo or whatever it is. We have a range of prices depending on the customer size, which we send out to restaurants and da da da. Smoked chicken adds 80 crowns a kilo. If you go like the ones we got smoked this season it cost 80 crowns a kilo to get them smoked. So we can sell 210 a kilo. Now it's a summer thing, So we're thinking we have a big freezer room in Karlstadt and it's a massive warehouse freezer that's empty. We're the only people using it. It's not that expensive to rent so we're putting Chickens and stockpiling them there. If we smoke them next spring, we already have the customers to buy all of them. We can sell the chicken smoked very easily. Now, just for context, we're at 4,000 birds a year. The chicken smokery place. There's an old man, he's 71, and he made the best smoked chicken we've ever had. I mean, I've never eaten anything that amazing. It was incredibly good. And he's 71. He's been doing it for years, but he only does 50 kilos at a time. He's up for teaching us everything. He says it's really easy and you make very good money smoking stuff for other people, so do it yourself. If we can add 80 crowns per bird, we don't need to do any more boilers. We just need to do smoke boilers so we can double. My aim next year is to have four profit sharing members and then one intern per profit sharer. And those interns are highly selected. If they haven't got that get up and attitude, they ain't going to make it here. But they're going to pay. I don't know, I haven't thought about the numbers. They're going to pay €200amonth for three months, and for the last three months they're going to get paid a thousand euros a month. But only if they stay the whole season. If they leave, they get nada and they've still paid. That gives us the security of the pain in the ass of people not making the right choice for themselves and rewards them for the work they do. But they're not sitting in the classroom ever. We're working in the field, hard, every day, like farmineers. So we wouldn't sit down and do trainings like this. We'd be making fences, talking about keyline design or whatever. We wouldn't be sitting in the class. We don't need this classroom. We don't need an intern wagon. So intern wagon. Is turning into a smokery this autumn. What do you need to make a smokery? Because then we keep our chickens. There's no pressure now to sell the chickens fast. We'll just sell them as they sell and we'll smoke them all in the spring, in April, straight for the summer market, for the restaurants who already have all said they want smoked chicken. Can you make smoked chicken? I didn't realize you could do it so cheaply. But the beauty of smoked chicken is it must sit in salty water, very precise amount of salt, which the old man's going to teach us. They've already visited him last year, but he's doing it in old refrigerators, like commercial beer fridges or whatever. And it must sit about 2 or 3 degrees C. So you can do that with a cool bot because the chickens are already fresh and chilled in the chiller or they're frozen. And so we don't need an expensive walk in chiller like the one in there is thousands of euros, right? Because it can take meat down to temperature. But a cool bot couldn't do that. But it can keep cold things cold. So that's like $300 plus a nice air conditioner. It's going to be like €1,000 and it might be another 1,000 to build our own smokery gear. So that's for the chiller. This is for the smoker, which could cost very little. You know, we could make it for nothing. But we're going to want to PVC the room now. We've got a certified facility. It's already got three phase in there. We don't need the intern wagon because we'll just use a loft next year. There's not many people here. And then we can make the. We want to double the eggs, which we can already sell. We want to double the market garden revenue and double the broilers, the revenue to pay these four profit sharers. And so these profit sharers will work for eight months a year and they will get four months paid leave. That's a six month season. That's one month planning and one month farm caretaker. Which means you might be here on your own in the depths of winter for one month. That means you need to know sales, accounting, all the animal chores. The animal chores are very easy in the winter. But all the egg packing, so everyone knows everything about the farm, which the people I've invited in already do anyway. And they're only invited in not because they necessarily have any skills. It's because they have showed up with that, some of them multiple years in a row and given it all and proved themselves multiple times that they are the people I would like to reward through going beyond employment. So it's a way of me creating time for myself because I now am not responsible for all the planning and management. I'm responsible for a quarter of it because I do all the pre season prep and all the sheets and I do all the seeds and orders and I seed all the vegetables and do a little bit. So now I don't even have to necessarily do any of that or I do a quarter of it. I can now get three, four months off farm. That gives our family quality of life, which is nice. So chicken surplus, what's that going to produce in revenue? It's going to give us 200 a kilo, times 4,000, times 2. That's 1.6 million. So €160,000 revenue at about 60%. 60% is a very high margin, but if it ain't above 40%, I would say don't bother doing it. Ag school might tell you to design a business that makes a loss, but that's just bad business. Whatever way you look at it, you don't make a loss or you go out of business. So now piggies and sheep don't get sold or the odd one gets sold. I keep Reuben and two sows. All the rest go into sausage and cuts and go into the freezer for next year. And so all of our food supply is there. And Johanna, who's not able to or wanting to do the accounting, she wants to focus on Ragnar more than the business. But she has also had this ongoing thing of not having like a set thing. It's more taking on the things that weren't getting done well, but it's not what she wants to do. So she wants to actually do the kitchen. She's made the best food on any course I've ever run and is very good at managing a kitchen. So she could come in then with a very clear role as a chef. So she cooks three meals five times a week, five days. Don't know how the weekends are done yet, but there's only eight people to cook for, so it's really easy. And all our preserves, all our meat, all our sausages, everything is already in the freezer for the whole year. So now she's getting a salary, maybe that's separate. So the profit sharers design the business to pay the salary of the chef or something like this. During the PDC, if I do like two PDCs or something that bit, I'm reserving the right to earn the money on. So I will write a charter of how the business must be. So I retain all ownership. This is my security. I retain ownership of business. I'm the only one that would have veto power regarding branding and communications. Not in the sense that no one else would do that. But like, people can't change the name of the farm and call it something else. And they can't, you know, their role is to take these enterprises, boilers. Like, they can't just decide to randomly not do boilers this year and do something else that would have to be a group decision. But the charter will say it must run in this way, certainly for the first years to see is this format working. Then ownership of the business can be discussed. But right now it can't. Boilers, layers, gardens, and it will be sheep. So these are four enterprises that must be managed equally by everyone, but not necessarily equally. So it would look like someone that's doing market garden and it looks like matters the person I've invited in to do the management and also sales. But the way I wanted to do this, the people that I've invited in are all into doing a bit of everything. It's what makes it fun. It's like no one wants to just do boilers full time every day. Every day, every day. But doing them for two months and then doing the layers for two months is nice. So it would look like three farm managers that spend two months on each of these with an internal and then spending most of your day in the market garden. So we would all do our animal chores and then go to the market garden, basically. And one person would do more of the selling, me and someone else would do all of the accounting, which frees up Johanna from the things she doesn't want to do. And it automatically gives us the insight into the decision making that we need. That's always been the sticking point because it's happened too far behind our quick pace on the ground. So now it gives us time, it gives us security, it improves efficiency. Everyone's happy, all the stress is taking out of our relationship, which means it feels interesting again. So this is the profit share, it's the enterprises. And so everyone has equal say and responsibility. We're all equal decision makers in the enterprises. But that's not to say we're starting all these random new enterprises. We're doing these enterprises maybe for three years. Whatever it's agreed upon, like for three years, let's just do this perfect this design the economy, how we need it to be, see how it goes. Then we can discuss, you know, become obvious what is a good way forward. So then we would each have one intern do that. And so we would need to design the pay of this and then all. So I retain the right here for my trainings, which could look any way, but this place is built upon my name, as it were. I need to protect my name and investment and time and energy, which is half my life, that to make it risk free by getting out of all debt. I feel relaxed enough to get out of to do this because it's like I don't have much risk. I can remove anyone at, you know, if it's not working, I can remove people they don't own anything in the business. I own all the tools that are here right now. But if we need new tools that must be planned into the economy of the year, you know, and if we have breakages that must be paid for by the economy that year. So the things that need to be designed and what I've done to empower people to step up their game is weekends open for your trainings so they can step into a sort of leadership role there. There's 26 times weekend trainings. I don't want to do weekend trainings ever because it's very profitable as a thing to do to make money. But it doesn't lead to any outcome in my experience. And I have quite clear objectives. I want to support people who are ready to go and commit their life to it. So I meet that by really refining who is here. I meet that by not sitting down talking to them, but by busting balls with them. They really get that like it's moving away from how the designers set up these things to how to manage them on a day to day minute level. And that's the stage the farm is at now. So it makes sense. And then those guys can design their own thing to build an economy excess of this. So they have freedom to do that. But they can't do a training during my PDC or whatever and they can't run an internship program. They can just use the weekend because it's teasing into this thing. It's like I need to keep it controlled that it's not nightmare to manage. So for like Matt to run a two day training where you can charge 3,000 crowns because you're at Ridgedale, you're eating good food, 30 people, 3,000 crowns, that's a nice little earner. So they can step into their game if they want to do that. But I can retain the safety to deal with my economy if something goes wrong here. So the idea is everyone's equally responsible, which means everyone rises and falls together. If we really mess up, we all lose out. No one gets paid. If we do really well, we all get paid well, but equally. And that's why this rotation is important, so that everyone feels responsible for the growth and well being of all the enterprises. Not I'm doing boilers, so I'm going to make boilers. You know, it just eliminates all that. And so I like it. It's a really nice opportunity for people who have proven themselves worth that opportunity and would have a difficult time starting up on their own, like because of the cost of land where they are or just the, you know, there's a lot established here that makes that very nice opportunity. And then I don't know how it looks down the line, maybe they could, you know, some people have a kid and disappear. And it's not a lifetime thing. The way I've presented it is. It's not just a one year thing. It's like, hey, let's think about three or five years, see how it goes. And that then means I don't have to train new people each year. Like the people that know this place really well, when they come back here, we don't even have to talk about it. It's. They already see that needs doing an off. And that's very easeful because. I want it to be running as efficiently as possible. And it could be running way more efficiently with just four people. Four people could run double the productions that are going on here right now. And so that's where I'd like to go is to like push how far we can push productivity. That's a big contextual thing. Push the limits. Because I feel like this farm is becoming very valuable as. A demonstration of the possibilities of small scale farms or whatever. If we can double productions here, we will have better economy and figures than any other farm on the planet I know of, actually. And that makes it very powerful. And that for me is much more. I feel like the farm is becoming too important to be affected by me or my relationship with Johanna or anyone that comes here. It needs to be more robust than that because it's too important to too many people. And so it's a way of me protecting the business, growing the business without actually making the farm bigger and without actually taking on all the work and risk myself because I'm getting more and more gray hairs. I was watching them fall down the thing today and I don't need to be working this hard. I've also run the opposite end of a business where I've run a much more lucrative business without having to do a lot. So it's like I'm up for grafting always. But I would like a little bit more reliability and mellowness to give this time. So the sheep might give something like €20,000 as an enterprise at net. So this is what's 60% of this. 96. Pigs I think I'll cut out. So we're going to cut the forest this winter and that will give us €20,000. Which will take the pressure off having not sold the chicken. Now, if I launch this online course, it will take the pressure off everything. But I don't want it to be looked at like that. I want it to be looked as a separate thing. It must be managed internally, not needing me to drip supply it. So that's going to like, sort or lisp it. It will sort. The cash flow is what I mean. We're going to double layers. So over the winter, the jobs to do here are two times Eggmobile. That's going to cost me about €2,500 and take me like 10 days or something. I need to build the wagon into a smoker. And Matt says the only limiting factor on veg is the size of the chiller and transporting goods. So when I go to the uk, I'm going to pick up a livestock trailer for two grand. This is two grand. I'm going to then get a refrigerated trailer, a small one, and stick it in the livestock trailer. I might spend two grand on that too, but small enough one that fits in a quite big livestock trailer. It's going to cost me a thousand euros to do the trip and I might stay in really nice places, so I might add 500 onto that. Just, you know, I might stay in a really fancy hotel just because. Quiz a cat. No, I'll probably go and see friends and stuff and spend a bit of money on food and traveling, petrol, etc. Yeah. And then another Coolbot system. So maybe that where we have all the fridges and freezers, that whole thing becomes a Coolbot. Children for the market garden. Really check the Coolbot thing. It's a very cheap way to build your own fridge, not for chilling stuff down, but for keeping stuff cool for beer making vegetables. Da, da da da da da. So that's for the veg garden. So suddenly then, we've got two eggmobiles. That's 1.2 million at 60%. What's that? 72,000. Market gardens. I reckon we could get that up to. Well, we can keep it at 60. Right now, the microgreens are going really well. It's €250 a week and we can do that all winter. That's like a nice bit of pocket money just for a few trays of microgreens, isn't it? And it's easy to do in the winter on those shelves. So I didn't realize it was going okay. I thought they were just still playing around. So just on that alone, that's quite a lot of revenue. Quite a lot of profit. Now that will pay these profit shares. So we have 18248 to pay a chef a six month wage. It's not a 12 month wage. So six months chefing they will need to hire one person in for the PDC maybe and then that's split four ways. That would be alright. That's a decent salary for eight months. Fun work because all the people that are invited find the work very fun and by not having lots of people about it will be very smooth. Now on top of that we have incomes from, you know, I have incomes from books and education and they can create income from education too. So it could open up any direction. But then I will use that income to fund things that aren't those enterprises. So if I want to replace fruit trees next year, I'll pay for the fruit trees out of the PDC money or whatever. And you know, if I wanted like I will still want to develop the farm in ways that aren't decisions they would want to take because of the economy. So I can fund all of those things but all the costs of these businesses must be maintained by those four people. I will just be one of those four people or whatever it is. It might be three of us and the chef might be four and the chef don't know exactly. But that's the pattern of it. And that gives me extra like I will have a lot of surplus income. I don't really spend any money so it's more income than I need anyway. But if I do trainings it will give me even more income and if the online training thing is successful that will be quite a lot of income. So then that money will be used for smart investments into the empire. This is stage three of the Vamland overhaul. Now I would start to then kick start other things. Something that's always excited me is funding the people I believe in. Like how to take crowdsourcing to another level that is just funding stuff that's awesome and not expecting anything back just based on the pattern that nature will give something back for that. That's always interested me like next level. Kickstarting.com? 20 grand startups that are well planned out and they just get funded. You know, it's just like I can tell who I would want to support pretty quickly and anyone with a smart plan ready to go. It's like bong, you can make it happen and there would be surplus to make that happen. Which is very nice. I don't want to grow the business. Like I don't want it to keep growing. Most businesses have that as their aim. Right. But if I can keep people that I can rely on and still meet my educational targets, which will become more and more online, because I think it will be much more powerful to work with someone through their process in their place and I can get my wage out of it, then I don't. There's no point growing at that point. If one of these people has a baby and buggers off, someone else can. You know, I have a lot of contacts that someone else can be brought in. And some people a year. Will always get to come as interns. But I like this model now. What do you think about that? Me and Nicholas. And it needs to be us because we need that information to make decisions. And it's always been a frustration that it's not up to date at the speed we need it. So I keep my security and a big part of my security is I don't have lots of debt, because if, like right now, the revenue of the farm pays off debt and gets reinvested into stuff we like to do. But it would be a bit sticky if people are drawing revenue and having to pay off the farm, because that's not their. They don't own it. So it works really nicely if I paid it off or I pay it off with my share or whatever. So it keeps it a bit separate. It's like everything here is mine already. So if you break it, you need to pay me back for that. And if we need new things, we need to design that in. So I might pay for this thing because it's to deal with the chicken for this year, but it's also an investment for everything. But it's also low cost. That doesn't make so much difference. But if we're building new egg mobiles, they must be taken into the cost of this. See what I mean? Like, new developments need to be paid for. They would be paid for over five years, maybe. So it would be. It wouldn't be very expensive. It would be, you know, I suspect we could do it for two grand. I might even set a budget of two and a half and build the first one again as a light one. So then we have four light eggmobiles because it's too heavy, isn't it? And then we might use Kent's land because we can access it from his side, but he doesn't want us driving up and down this field. But if we're bringing it once every two months, I don't think he'll have Any problem with that? So then we can really follow the chickens behind the cows and the sheep. It'll be. There won't be cows. So my plan is to get rid of cows. Get rid of sheep, totally. It would be. We'd have to invest in a sheep flock. Well, somewhere. So that would be a cost. But that could be a cost. I take and we share the outcome of that, as it were. So that's what I'm thinking right now. This has all come about in the last month and you have your prophet Cherik, the three you've been talking about, you've invited people. Yeah, one is. Two are in. Regardless of whether this happens or not, they're just coming anyway. And that's the spirit. You know, they would come as volunteers anyway. So I think that's an important thing to reflect on. How you show up in life leads to interesting things, I think I wouldn't give that opportunity to anyone but exceptional people who have proved exceptionalness over a long period, you know, it's quite a serious decision to make. I'm basically giving away a bunch of my economy to people who are willing to not be paid to do that anyway. So it's a big deal because it's quite a lot of money. But I'm up for it because I don't want employees. I feel like, Yeah, I don't want employees because then they're not fully responsible either. I want people to fully take on the responsibilities that I can offload and not actually have to check what they've done. If they fuck up, we all fuck up, you know, and this is very nice because this is one of the problems in my position here is that I still have to double check. And when things go wrong and I didn't double check, it cost me loads of money now. It doesn't cost me loads of money. It costs all of us a bit of money, you know what I mean? So it takes that risk off me and it takes a load of work off me. And it honors the people doing that in a way that they can design their future. It's like, you know, if we need more money, then we get more chickens. It's up to you. We make that decision together, you know, So I like it. It feels like super sexy plan, actually, and not so much like it, you know, doubling the broilers is not really like, this is not double the work because it's the same amount of chickens as this year just smoked. I mean, that's a bunch of work too, but you can freeze it and you can process them when you want. So it really, you know, it could be we do it a year behind or, you know, after the winter. Each year, sheep is going to be even easier. There's not going to be any milking, it's just going to be moving sheep and then putting them in a trailer. So that's going to be way less time. Eggmobile's going to be double the time, but that's easy. Veg garden's going to be no bigger, it's going to be just more optimized. It's not going to be much more work. It's just going to be potting on stuff. I mean, it's not that big a deal. So it's kind of like, for 20% more work, I reckon we can, like, overall, we can double everything, which is then we're like, in a place that excites me again of like, how far can you push these things in intensity rather than trying to grow your farm, make it bigger, make more. You know, this is exciting for me. So that re stimulates my, like, let's just see how far we go with this because that will be ridiculous numbers. That's mostly going to be happening on. Yeah, that could all happen on three hectares, except for the sheep. They need a bit more space, minus the sheep. All of that could happen on our fields. So that's quite insane when you think about it.

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