” The most important question we can ask ourselves is where our goal posts need to be in five or 10 years.”
— Steve Denys
Steve Denys fires back his answers before the questions are out of our mouths. “How much time do you spend on planning?” we ask. “Four to five months a year,” Denys responds. “Half of that on the near term, one to two years out, half of it on a five-to 10-year horizon.”
Denys is vice-president of sales and marketing for Pride Seeds, one of Canada’s fastest-growing seed companies. Sometime within the next year, Denys predicts, Pride will race past Syngenta’s NK brand in the extremely competitive Canadian seed corn market.
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So we wonder, surely his in-box is so clogged every morning with the day-today details of running a business, there’s no way he gets time to think about planning for tomorrow, let alone next week or next year.
So we ask while we sit around the boardroom of Pride’s Canadian headquarters at Pain Court, just outside Chatham, Ont.,“How do you do that planning? Do you have a process?” Again, the answer comes in an eyeblink. “It’s three-stage, starting with the management team, then the sales team, then the individual sales territory.”
It’s clear that Denys has thought this through. So has his company, part of the growing AgReliant group that now has five North American brands with surging corn and soybean sales built around the world’s third largest corn and soybean breeding program, with ties to the biotech programs of all the genetics giants.
In fact, to Denys and his team, Pride culture is built on this belief that the discipline of planning creates the foundation for future growth.
Impressively, it’s the same feeling we get half a continent away at St. Brieux, Sask., home of Bourgault Industries, the seeding equipment manufacturer that now sells throughout North America as well as to Australia, Europe and Asia.
Why is planning so important to Bourgault? The answer from Rob Fagnou, customer communciation leader, is blunt. “We’ve gone through a contraction after moving too fast on expansion,” Fagnou concedes. “We learned a hard lesson and now we look five years out to plan a steady level of growth, capable of taking on new people and capacity.”
At Pride too, it was partly their commitment to disciplined planning that showed them they’d been missing out on a key market opportunity. “We weren’t fast enough at seizing on this idea of our being an independent company that isn’t owned by a chemical company,” says Pat Wakely, Pride’s marketing manager. “Really, our customers recognized that as a key point of differentiation before we did.”
It turns out that using their forward-looking planning programs to quickly identify present mistakes is a trait that’s shared by Pride and Bourgault, and other leading ag suppliers.
“Talking things out is key,” Fagnou says. “Draw information from outside sources.”
Then, use the plan to guide decision making. Not every opportunity is the right one, Fagnou says. There’s also such a thing as growing too big too fast.
No major decisions are made in isolation. “For us,” Fagnou says, “we discuss a new expansion or new development as it fits into our overall plan.”
In fact, it’s this belief that planning has to be a process, and that it must be much more than self-indulgent navel gazing, that ties Pride and Bourgault together.
“It has to be actionable,” Denys says. “We aren’t producing documents to sit on a shelf. The most important question we can ask ourselves is where our goalposts need to be in five or 10 years. If we get the answers right, we can make a lot of good things happen that won’t be possible otherwise.”
Both Pride and Bourgault are operating in a sea of change. Farmers are changing, getting larger, more sophisticated and more focused on their farms as businesses. As well, in both the seed and the machinery sectors their competitors are constantly changing, and they’re constantly launching new programs to hold onto their current customers and lure in more.
With so much structural and competitive change in an industry that can’t even predict the prices of its major crops one year out, let alone in 10 years, how can you commit to a long-term plan?
The answer, says Denys, is partly that like any ag business, Pride already knows the constants that are largely going to determine its success. It needs to supply products that deliver value and are differentiated in the minds of their customers based on their value. It needs to support and service those products, which means everything from mastering the logistics of getting the right seed to the right farm at the right time to providing credit that keeps up with the needs of larger farmers who are ordering more expensive seed. And it needs to work with the best partners, including dealers.
Each of those, says Denys, is an area where Pride can lay out long-term plans.
“It’s what I do as a farmer too,” says Denys, who grows corn and soybeans on his farm just miles from the Pride office. “As a farmer, I’m looking now at how big I need to be in 10 years to be economically sustainable and I’m looking at how I’m going to get there. I’m looking at how to manage my risks on interest rates, I’m looking at how I can add value.”
“Really, the planning exercise on the farm and here in the office is equally important.”
Like farmers, Pride also knows a lot about its future risks, Denys says. “As our customer base goes down because of farm consolidation, our risk goes up,” Denys points out. “The decision of each individual farmer becomes that much more critical.”
Increasingly, this will put pressure on the old seed dealership model. In many cases, seed dealers will be responsible for working with smaller customers, while Pride establishes an essentially direct line to bigger farmers, for whom the local dealership will primarily be a logistics point.
That means Pride must cultivate a relationship with dealers who share Pride’s values and the company’s approach to the market. From a planning perspective, Pride must put together programs that will create value for dealers while driving Pride’s own sales objectives. Plus, it must be measurable.
Then Pride must also ensure it goes to market with the right offer for larger farmers. Is it offering the right credit? Does it have a field team that larger farmers will want to work with as they put together seed strategies across their farms?
The Pride planning exercise starts with the management team — representing all major facets of company operations — doing intensive environmental surveys to track the company’s performance and to monitor not only its own strengths and weaknesses, but those of its competitors too. This part of the process involves intensive information gathering, both internally and from outside.
The management team sets strategies and develops targets, and takes them to the sales team for intensive discussion. Then, once the targets are refined, in-depth meetings start with individual sales reps, both to adapt the targets to each sales region and also to ensure a continuous flow of regional insights back up to management.
Details vary among sales districts in part because there’s a different mix of dealers, but also because major trends hit different areas at different rates. “I can show you some areas where the shakeout of farmers has already occurred, so the farmers we’ve got now are pretty much the farmers we’re going to have,” says Doug Alderman, Pride’s national sales manager. “Then I can take you to
