The story gets repeated time and again. A farm family invests time and money in a professional farm advisor to help them sort out a transition plan and how to implement it. Finally, almost incredibly, after a series of family meetings that started out nervous but eventually get surprisingly productive, everybody gets on board with the plan. Everybody knows their role; everybody pulls in the same direction.
It feels great, so, when the advisor packs up after the last meeting and stops at the door with a final reminder to keep the dialogue going, the right words get said. “Of course we will … you bet.”
More and more often, though, those future meetings get postponed, or they never even get called. Within a year, there are signs the family is sliding back into the old uncommunicative rut, with all that implies both for the farm and for the family. Eventually, they may even be back on the phone, calling the advisor for help again.
Read Also
Why do farmers hate paying taxes?
It didn’t take long in my accounting career to learn that farmers don’t like paying income tax. No one does…
The advisor, for their part, will have a good idea of the answer to the next question before they even ask it. “What kind of progress have you made talking at your family meetings?”
When the phone rings
The frustrating part, says Ontario farm advisor Len Davies, who gets his share of these phone calls, is that most times, everyone involved in managing the farm agrees that business meetings are important and they know they should be doing them.
But they don’t follow through.
“It’s something they were never in the habit of doing,” Davies says. “In a lot of cases they are in the habit of working in the business instead of working on the business.”
In today’s more sophisticated, multi-generational agriculture, open communication is vital to the success of any plan, whether it’s a business, strategic or succession plan for the farm. But there’s more to it than that, too.
In fact, Davies tells his clients, if the farm isn’t evolving in this direction, you have to wonder if it knows where it’s going.
Four better
Spurr Brothers Farms, just in from the Fundy coast in central Nova Scotia, holds seven different types of meeting. Davies would tell you it doesn’t really matter where it is, or what kind of farm it is, but in this case, Spurr Brothers is a busy fruit and vegetable operation that includes a packing house, a farm market, and a new cider brewing facility.
It’s a family that sees a strong communications strategy as vital, says CEO Lisa Jenereaux, who farms with her dad Bill, brothers John and William, and cousin Katie on the farm started by their great-great grandfather in 1875. For Spurr Brothers, meetings mean having everybody on the same page. And having everybody on the same page means they all know what the objectives are for the year and how they will get there, all based on a plan that they kick-start in the off-season every year.
“The first thing we do is lay out the communication strategy,” says Jenereaux. “We sit down and agree upon the type of meetings we need to have, who needs to be at those meetings and how long they should be.”
Davies says there are three basic types of meetings that a farm business must have to stay on track: short, informal daily meetings that deal with the immediate production needs; a longer management meeting maybe once a week or twice a month that looks at what needs to get done over the next few weeks; and a half-day strategic meeting held three or four times a year where everyone reviews the goals they have set for the next five or 10 years and makes sure they are on track to achieve them.
The Spurrs have built out their meeting approach, but they are similarly focused on how different meetings have different purposes and should be done differently.
For meetings held frequently, like their daily check-in, the goal is to keep them to 30 minutes to an hour. “They can be by text or in person,” Jenereaux says. “They’re just to make sure everybody knows what they’re responsible for by checking in with each other.”
The biweekly farm meetings are for preparing for what’s coming up in the next two weeks. As well, in the springtime, biweekly workshop meetings are held to get the equipment lined up and ready for the season.
In addition, the family also have monthly meetings specifically for the farm market as well as a bimonthly general farm update that all family members who are actively involved in the farm attend.
“Because we don’t have everybody at every meeting, the farm update makes sure we didn’t miss anything and keeps everybody updated,” Jenereaux says. “It’s short, just half an hour.”
Most recently the farm has implemented vision meetings three times a year. These focus on the strategy for where the business is going and they ensure everyone is informed and in agreement with the bigger picture.
Plus there are shareholders meetings twice a year to present the financial information.
It may seem like a lot of meetings, but Jenereaux says having this many, and keeping them efficient, makes managing all the farm’s multiple enterprises more efficient. At each meeting, they are able to only deal with the issues at hand and not go off topic.
Spurr Brothers Farms has been doing meetings a long time, and also worked with Davies to help refine the structure of their communication, business and governance plans, so Country Guide asked both for their insights on how to set up effective meetings.
1. Have an agenda and a time limit
An agenda is something no important meeting should be without, says Davies because it’s easy to have a beef about something, but not always as easy to actually bring it up in a meeting. An agenda ensures any issues are going to be dealt with and no-one is broadsided by them.
“Once someone takes a position it’s hard to change, so by asking everyone what they want to talk about, putting it in an agenda, and getting it out before the meeting, people know what’s going to be talked about,” he says. “It gives time to see where people are coming from so, we don’t get a standoff at the meeting.”
“It’s important to have a time frame for the meeting,” Jenereaux agrees. “You need somebody (a chair) at the meeting to keep people on track of the agenda because it’s so easy, especially with family, to go off on tangents. Other items that come up get moved to different meetings with more appropriate time slots for that discussion. That helps keep us on track … we’re not perfect at it, but everyone’s busy so we’ve got to be mindful of the time that we’re spending.”
2. Have a chair and a champion
The meeting chair is a vital role. It doesn’t matter who does it but they need to be organized, respected and reasonably strong-willed. In Davies’ experience it’s often Mom who takes on that role.
“I find in over half the cases it’s usually the mothers because the mothers have more concern about the family getting along than the dads who are business-driven,” he says. “I find mothers a lot of times do the best job. But whoever the chairperson is, they should always open and close the meeting on a positive note.
“When they open the meeting, they should talk about the good things that have happened since the last time they met. When they close the meeting, they could ask what everyone appreciated most about this meeting. All of a sudden, there are four or five people in the room saying it was a good meeting; otherwise they go away focused on the problems.”
Davies generally recommends two separate roles, and that the person chairing the meeting — especially when it comes to a longer-term strategic or vision meeting —should not be the same person as the meeting “champion.”
So what does the meeting champion do?
The champion could be a family member or an employee and they are responsible for arranging the meeting date and time. They are also responsible for checking in with everyone before the meeting to ensure everyone attends, and it’s also their job to circulate the agenda ahead of time and take minutes at the meeting.
3. Decide who needs to attend
Also key is to make sure that the people who need to be there — but only the people who need to be there — are at each meeting.
It’s something that Jenereaux says Spurr Brothers learned by trial and error over
the years.
“That changes depending on your business, who’s on the farm at the time and what people are doing, but again, especially with a family farm, everybody thinks that they need to be included in every meeting and that can bog down your meetings,” she says.
“You need the people that are making the decisions at those meetings and that’s part of the reason why we have general farm updates to keep the people who are not at every meeting in the loop.”
4. Define roles and responsibilities
When Spurr Brothers Farms wanted to determine who needed to attend which meetings, a big help came from going through the exercise of establishing roles and responsibilities for everyone, something they did with Davies’ help.
“It’s a list of who is responsible for what, down to every single line item,” Jenereaux says. “It creates accountability for decisions, and we don’t have a lot of disagreements because everybody knows who is responsible for a particular item.”
But once those responsibilities are defined, it’s also important to allow each person the breathing room to make day-to-day decisions, she adds.
“We all like to micromanage everybody else’s jobs a lot of times and what we’re trying to do is give everybody their space to make decisions, or you don’t learn,” Jenereaux says. “They are going to make mistakes, but they’re also accountable for that, so if they make a wrong decision, we can talk about that in a meeting.”
5. Use a governance plan
Another important tool for avoiding disagreements is to develop a governance plan that deals more with the personal aspects of the business.
“For example,” says Davies, “everybody understands they get two weeks holidays a year and you don’t take them in May and June. Everybody understands anyone can use the farm pickup truck.
“It’s about how we use the corporate assets, how we’re going to interact with each other,” Davies says. “If you don’t have a governance plan, you don’t talk about it, you complain to your spouse, and the spouse gets angry at the other person.”
But, Davies adds, “It’s a living document so you should review it once or twice a year and keep it up to date.”
6. Create a common strategy
Of course, the larger decisions that have a longer impact, and that often involve spending serious money, can be a bit more contentious and that’s why the vision (i.e. the “strategic”) meetings are so important.
“We just did an exercise where we had everybody come to the table and say where do you want to be in two, five and 10 years,” Jenereaux says. “Everyone shared what they thought the farm was going to look like and what their role is in that. It helps everybody to see if we are all on the same page or not, because if you are, generally speaking, you’re going to come to some agreement about decisions.
“If you’re not on the same page, it’s going to end up being majority wins, and that’s not how I like to see us make decisions because it creates conflict. The question we always ask is, will that (decision) get us closer to our goal or is it going to pull us further from our goal.”
7. Define a structure for communications
“Without the structure in place, things get chaotic and then people can start to get unsettled or discontented because they don’t know what’s going on,” Jenereaux says. “They are assuming things about decisions being made that may not necessarily be true because they don’t have the background knowledge. For a family business, these are people you work with but they’re also the people that you spend holidays with and do special things with, so it’s even more important that you keep that line of communication open with them.”
8. Make meetings a safe place
Meetings, especially with family members, also need to be a safe space where people feel comfortable sharing what’s on their minds.
“You don’t want what you discuss to leave the room, the meetings are confidential, everybody knows that, and so people know that they can express things that they’re not happy about without negative repercussions,” Jenereaux says. “Everybody needs to say what’s on their mind and get that out and in the open, but we also need to do that in a respectful way.”
9. Make sure each meeting has a purpose
“When you leave the meeting there should be action items and timelines on what you’re doing; otherwise what did you accomplish besides just having coffee time and chatting?” Jenereaux says. “You need to have outcomes for every meeting.”
Davies suggests drawing up an activity plan which can be a simple spreadsheet that shows who should be doing what and acts as a reminder, especially for the things that are not day-to-day.
10. Take it slow, don’t give up
If the Spurr family might make it sound easy, Jenereaux is the first to admit that it’s hard to do meetings and even harder to do them well.
“It’s takes discipline to make it work, so don’t give up,” Jenereaux says. “Sometimes, you are going to fail. We fail all the time, we’re not the role model for meetings. We are great in the wintertime and early spring, and then in late spring, summer and fall we are going off the rails a lot of times. We’ll miss meetings, and that’s going to happen, and instead of beating ourselves up that we didn’t do everything that we said that we were going to do, we regroup when we have time and just try again the next year to do a little better than we did before.”
