Is "Open Source" Relevant to Farm and Food Business?

Why Corvus releases documents under a Creative Commons license

For a few months now, we have been marking the documents that we commonly hand with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.  The concept is simple, that we freely offer these documents and tools to anyone for any purpose, so long as they attribute the original authors and share any derived work in the same way.  It's based upon the principles of "open source" popularized by software, and the broader movement towards Open Knowledge.  Most importantly, the knowledge that we have gained over the (many!) years has often been shared generously and openly with us by our peers and mentors; we should do no less.

Our approach to work always begins with collaboration: Who else can bring or receive benefit in a given situation? What do the parties already know or possess? What an we ourselves learn from this? What have we discovered that will be useful to others in the same situation?

Further, we will benefit from sharing and making accessible the tools we commonly use: in software development there's a common expression (Linus's Law) "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."  Our sincere hope is that others will not only find these things useful, but help make them better - or at least point out our errors.

We choose a documents or tools (e.g., a spreadsheet template) to share in this manner based on the following criteria:

• it represents actionable information that we ourselves use
• it is knowledge we have gained through experience and tested in practice
• knowledge from other published or licensed sources is properly cited/attributed
• it could be useful to others
• it is not simply an advertisement

Now we are committing to making these documents easily accessible in a digital format, and in editable formats for download.  We're starting with three of our most-often used handout that outlines the framework we teach for Management and Decision-Making, and the documents that form the foundation for understanding and documenting an organizations Workflow, or Business Process.

If you don't need an editable document, and just want to browse or download the PDF versions, you can open this folder in your web browser, and select from the documents available.

The following are links to Google Docs versions which can be downloaded or copied, then edited (the documents at these links are not publicly editable, but please let us know if you find an error, or would like to suggest an edit).

A Business Management and Decision Framework, which describes the range of disciplines and tools necessary for all businesses of any size.

Workflow for Small Business, our brief guide to defining and documenting your business processes.  This could be used for mid-size business as well - it just happens to be the format we use to

An "Inventory of Responsibilities,"  the worksheet and instructions we use to begin the process of Workflow analysis and documentation.

In the coming months we'll be publishing a financial modelling tool and hopefully a short video introduction to Workflow and Business Process as described by the "Pool and Swimlane" metaphor.  Please reach out to us if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions on these documents!

Tilth Alliance Annual Conference November 10-12, Vancouver Washington

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11739378

Corvus Northwest will be presenting a workshop at this year's annual Tilth Alliance conference in Vancouver, WA.  If you are a farm or food business and would like an intensive, practical workshop on business management and planning, please consider attending the conference and our workshop on Sunday, November 12 at 10:45AM.  Here's the outline of the workshop:

When business grows they may be succeeding in the sense of increasing volume or gross income—but without good financial visibility and planning, scaling up and building capacity are fraught with problems and pitfalls. Process complexity, business velocity, organizational change, reduced margins, sales-production coordination, and cash-flow projections are just a few of the challenges that can be addressed with the proper tools and preparation. We will provide rules of thumb, a business planning checklist, introduce habits for good financial visibility, and guide hands-on work with a business modeling worksheet to test growth assumptions for a given sales program. Attendees will learn the elements and tools necessary to make effective, usable, and realistic business plans.

• Planning Essentials: clear, measurable goals and unambiguous non-negotiables
• Financial Literacy and Visibility: key concepts, P&L analysis, and cash projections
• Business Modeling: avoiding “Procrustean Plans” and hidden subsidy
• Capacity Planning: the dynamic link between Sales and Production
• Distribution & Production Scaling: indirect channel costs, investment & cash flow
• Product/Channel Mix: contribution margin, latent potential, and market penetration
• Building Sales Programs: core program identification, sales budgets, sales roles

Why Food?

“A couple of weeks ago we all paid our taxes. Whatever your politics, there are activities your tax money supports that I’m sure you find troublesome, if not deplorable. But you can’t do anything about those activities — you can’t withdraw your support — unless you’re prepared to go the jail. Food is different. You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day.”

— Michael Pollan

Vote with your fork!

Michael Pollan wrote this column in 2006, and the message is even more urgent today.  The personal action he advocates — voting with your fork — is even more necessary and relevant:  it may be the best action left to us as individuals through which we can can collectively and positively impact the health of our society and our planet.

We started Corvus NW to provide consultancy services specifically for the food chain in our local foodshed.  Why food?  Why farms?  Why local?

As we (and many others) have said, food is the primary fact of human culture. The rituals of sharing food are embedded in the psyche of herbivore and carnivore. From Anthropophagy to Theophagy humans prescribe and proscribe the proper approach to the table.

At the same time, food is profoundly mundane and quotidian: it is common to all human experience, it is unequivocally necessary.  While the experience of food can reach the sublime, a neutral paste comprised of nutrients necessary for life will suffice (even if it won't delight). 

Simply put: you gotta eat.

In politics and small business, there's a pervasive (and correct) sense that the largest corporate entities dictate the rules of the field on which the individual and the entrepreneur play.  "Too big to fail" entities accommodate a degree of regulation—and command levels of subsidy—which casually envelope the profit margins of family farmers, producers and entrepreneurs.  How can a Local David engage the Global Goliaths?

They shouldn't.  It's not enough to sling the small stones of consumer choice and votes in the larger political domain (though those are necessary and useful tools); we should endeavor to make the Goliaths irrelevant. The first baby-step towards severing the umbilical of "Big Ag" and top-down food policy is: eat local.

The most enduring, powerful act of self-agency and community activism in which you can engage is to eat locally, to the extent your wallet and local opportunities permit (a discussion of the disparity between wallets and opportunities to make those choices is a subject for another time).  

If even 50% of a given population sourced one meal a day — or even one meal week — from entirely local offerings, there would be a dramatic impact in local economics, knowledge, and culture. We'd have a better sense of what it means to be truly independent, and perhaps a deeper understanding of how precarious that independence would be, if abruptly deprived of (to adapt a phrase from Dwight Eisenhower)  the "Industrial Agriculture Complex."

If natural or economic disasters strip away the niceties of consumer choice and artificially cheap food, we're left with what we grow or find locally.  The degree to which we successfully feed ourselves and our families in such circumstances is the measure not only of our (to use an increasingly popular phrase) "food independence," but of our independence and agency as humans and citizens of our local community.  

Thus, millions of Davids, turning their collective back on the corporate and governmental Goliaths: that's the leverage we still possess as consumers and entrepreneurs.  I'm overstating the simplicity of that act but not its urgency: it takes time to unbind the ties of dependency upon top-down systems which have been built over the years.

However: mere independence is no guarantee of survival or sustainability over the long term: interdependence is what creates a resilient community of people that are stronger than any individual, and richer than any government or municipality.  When the doctor and the farmer and the mechanic all know each other and can exchange goods and services of real value, that's a step towards making the whims of Goliath markets irrelevant.

We should recognize with any discussion of local food that farms are first: while the doctor and the mechanic are necessary to supporting the quality and patterns of our life as we know it, the farmer is the one who sustains the lives of every member of the community. This is why we have decided to focus on farmers and small food producers: you gotta eat.

How to Work with a Consultant, Part Three: (Not?) The Most Boring Advice Ever Given

There are three topics I always cover with new small-business clients:

1. What do you want? (coupled with the 'why')
2. Non-negotiables: what are your limits?
3. Financial familiarity and frequency

I covered the first two in earlier posts, and here's the third.  You may be thinking that financial talk is likely to be tedious.  It may not initially seem exciting or fun.

To pique your interest: Leonardo da Vinci makes a peripheral appearance later, and a little-known secret of forensic accountants. There's also an analogy to driving at night.

The work outlined in this advice seem tedious initially, and will require an investment of time and attention.  As your business starts to take off, it'll become the single most exciting and liberating thing you can do as a business owner and entrepreneur: you'll be able to see where you're going. 

Get to know your numbers.  At a minimum, review ALL your expenses and income once a week (an inconvenient but obvious corollary is the need to actually enter the data at least every week, without delay). Some businesses should do this daily.  As a small business, cash flow is your lifeblood, and the financial reports (Profit & Loss, Cash Flow, and for some, Balance Sheet) are the way you monitor the pulse of that critical flow.  If you already have some familiarity with this, at a minimum you'll save time and money when working with any type of professional business adviser.

If you're not monitoring your numbers, no-one is in the driver's seat (or someone else is driving).  Here's the analogy: if you're driving at night, and your car takes 130 feet to go from 60 MPH to a full stop, hopefully your headlights illuminate at least 130 feet of road in front of you, otherwise - despite the false comfort of seeing something lit up in front of your car -  you're quite literally driving blind.  Put another way, the accident has already happened: it's too late and you're merely a spectator, not a driver.

Think of your financial reports as headlights, and the frequency of data entry as the stopping power of your brakes.  If you're reviewing your reports a month after the fact, that's a month's opportunity you've lost to either correct a mistake or take advantage of a trend.  You're a spectator.  Having delayed data entry, or reviewing reports infrequently, gives you a false impression of visibility: the accident has already happened.

Most people, including business owners, are not born with the natural ability to read a P&L. For most of us, it takes time and familiarity to learn which are the numbers & features of the P&L that need close attention.  Give it the proper attention, and a 12-month Profit & Loss report will look like a map, or a painting. Your financial data, properly presented, tells a story. Why?  Because of early Islamic mathematicians and Leonardo da Vinci's religious friend.

Beginning as early as the 7th century, and reaching an early denouement in the writings of a Franciscan friar and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci,  double-entry bookkeeping (I'll leave it to Wikipedia for the concise explanation) was developed to guarantee no inadvertent errors in data entry.  The P&L or cash flow statement you review is a result of this system.  If your books have been well-structured, can quickly show you the most important states and trends in your business.

If you're still reading, here's the secret that experienced financial managers and forensic accountants know well: the numbers always tell the truth, even if they're wrong.  In proper business accounting, mistakes become obvious (a side-benefit is that intentional mistakes leave more evidence of their commission).  

It's all useful information in the right hands, and you should have at least enough familiarity to identify something unusual or something missing.  Don't be the last one to know, or a morbidly fascinated spectator at the car-wreck of your own unattended finances: confidently accelerate through the curves on your path.

Making Fast Decisions 101: Non-Negotiables (How to Work with a Consultant, Part Two)

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"he keeps the least who grasps the most"

Years of consulting with both successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs have impressed upon me that there are certain characteristics which are necessary, if not sufficient conditions for success. Talent, wealth, and intelligence are not among those conditions, though they can help.  

The number one characteristic is tenacity. They are inevitably tenacious; relentless, even. Number two, they make decisions quickly and don't look back, always moving forward.  I won't pay lip service to the vague notion of "quality" as if it floats independently above these others, that quality is the sine qua non of business success.  Sadly quality per se is neither necessary nor sufficient for mere economic sustainability; that's another discussion.

Making decisions, however, is the essence, the very kernel of the manager/owner/entrepreneur's role: clarity in pursuit of a mistake, quickly recognized, is better than interminable ambiguity on the "right path."  Too many businesses have failed doing exactly the right thing, but doing it badly or without commitment.

What comprises the decisive act, the art of discerning?  Most importantly it is saying "no." Saying yes, or worse, passivity and not saying "no" is likely to cause wasted energy and time.  Of course affirmatives are necessary to move forward, but for most small businesses, and entrepreneurs especially, saying "yes" too often or failing to say "no" results in too many possibilities, too many divided attentions, too many (paradoxically) lost opportunities.  

Small business entrepreneurs, makers, farmers, chefs... they thrive on the very notion of possibility.  Possibility, options, new ideas ... that will never be the problem for this type of business owner.  Saying "no" to a possibility feels akin to infanticide, an idea killed before it's had a chance to develop. To make decisions with this kind of compassionate ruthlessness, one must balance inspiration and restraint.

For those who find "no-ing" difficult, what then forms the basis of the necessary but quick negative decision, this compassionate restraint? Know your limits.  Know exactly the non-negotiable limit of how far you're willing to go, what exactly you will accept losing, how exactly you will respond.  I use the word limit advisedly; know the extents beyond which you will not go, irrespective of any other contextual factor.

Entering a negotiation knowing the least you will accept is empowering: you know what you can give up, yet still be content. Facing an ethical dilemma becomes much less stressful when you know with clarity what is permissible, at what point you would choose to cease working rather than work against your values. Risking resources, when you know exactly the extent of resources you will commit, makes the difference between thrill and horror in new ventures.

Knowing when and why to say "no," possibility abounds, and your reach will not often exceed your grasp.

How to work with a consultant, part one: what do you want?

When I first meet with a new client, I start with a lot of questions.  First, a big one, seemingly easy: "What do you want?"

The answers are often simple and direct: "More sales." "Profitability." "A business plan." "A new bookkeeping system." Simplicity in formulating a goal is admirable, but at times it can invite overly simple answers.  A small business owner should expect a management consultant to help them qualify those objectives in a way that prepares them for decision and action.

The next question, the follow-up, is hard: "Why?"

Do you want more sales so that you can build your retirement?  Sell your company?  Reach an economy of scale?  Attract partners or employees?

Do you want a business plan designed to attract investors, or to have a living, decision-making document?

What problems do you hope will be solved by a new bookkeeping system?

The specific answers paired with your particular business environment will determine the range of options that are both available and advisable.  "What" doesn't give you good answers without "why."

Once you know where you're going, you can save a great deal of time (and consultant billable hours) if you are prepared to make decisions quickly and effectively.  There's a simple thing that will help you make decisions, both while working with a consultant and after you start to put your plan into action and implement changes.  I'll cover that in part two: non-negotiables.

Good Work: Small is Beautiful

Quotes from the writings of E. F. Schumacher:

“To talk about the future is only useful if it leads to action now.”

 “Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.”

“Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.”

“An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.”

from Small is Beautiful, 1973

“It is no longer possible to believe that any political or economic reform, or scientific advance, or technological progress could solve the life and death problems of industrial society. They lie too deep, in the heart and soul of every one of us. It is there that the main work or reform has to be done –secretly, unobtrusively.”

“It is the individual, personal example that counts. The greatest “doing” that is open to every one of us, now as always, is to foster and develop within oneself a genuine understanding of the situation which confronts us, and to build conviction, determination, and persuasiveness upon such understanding.”

from Good Work, 1979