Business Strategy

If you have a small service based business, this strategy may work for you. The goal is to pass the client though the following stages of relationship building.

Phase 1: Free Information

In the first phase you find ways to provide free information to your prospect. When I say free, it should still carry a lot of value. Free junk is still junk. In order for this to work you want the prospect to feel he/she is better off for getting your information.

Phase 2: Sell Information

This is a complete departure from how most systems go. You can create an informational product, such as a video, training course, or ebook. When you sell this product to your clients you are building up their level of trust in you in an incremental way. Additionally, you can use the proceeds of the informational product to pay for advertising to get more people into your marketing funnel.

Phase 3: Sell Your Service

After building credibility, trust and providing true value to your prospects, the natural next step is for them to hire you. Additionally, they are certainly facing challenges putting into practice the information you’ve provided them.
Case Study: Selling Organizing Services

A professional organizer has a specific challenge. She/he must sell the prospect on the idea of using an organizer before any thing else. Let’s take a look at how the process above may be put into practice for someone in this field.

Phase 1:

The organizer creates is simple 2-4 page report that can be given away when someone signs up for weekly organizing tips. It seems a little counter-intuitive, but the first thing you want to figure out is a title for the report. I would use something like, “5 filing blunders almost everyone makes, and why they cost you time and money” or “Can a full garage create an empty marriage?” or “7 simple steps to stop the clutter monster from attacking your desk”

The organizer sends people to a simple direct response page where the prospect can sign up for the weekly tips and receive the free report as a bonus.

Example: http://www.DirectResponsePages.com

Phase 2:

The organizer creates a full online course on how to organize something (i.e. home, office, garage, closet, car, etc.). He/she uses learnhub to charge money for the course. When prospects sign up for the report in phase one, they become part of the prospect list for buying the course. The organizer would need to create or have created a sales letter to sell the course.

Related Link: http://www.LearnHub.com

Phase 3:

In both the report and the course certain language is sprinkled in. Examples: “My clients often face…”, “When faced with a particularly challenging garage, my client and I…”

The organizer has a signature line at the bottom of each email reminding folks at each phase that they can skip ahead and hire help.

The organizer could create a specific sales letter to send to people after completing the course. The cost of the course may be applied to the cost of the initial service.

Hopefully this article has helped you get your wheels turning. Please comment on this article if you feel it’s of value, and/or if you want me to write more in-depth articles on this subject. For example, I could write more case studies of how this could be applied in different industries.

An Overview of the Agribusiness Degree

Tomorrow I am giving a talk to students in Mexico (via teleconference) regarding the agribusiness degree, with special emphasis on the types of jobs our graduates take and the type of skills they are expected to possess. Below is the general talk I plan to give, written in the form of an outline, not a speech.

When a student graduates with an agribusiness or agricultural economics degree, what skills should they possess? The answer is social, business, computer, and communication skills, plus a unique understanding of agricultural markets and futures markets.

Social Skills: Graduates must have the appearance of a competent professional; including a firm handshake, a confident demeanor, professional manners, and actions that demonstrate responsibility and congeniality. The graduate should understand how to dress for the specific occasion, how to run a business meeting, how to network, speak with proper grammar, and understand the other person’s needs. These social skills prepare them for a career in sales of any good. We graduate students who sell pesticides and students who sell artificial knee replacements.

Business Skills: Second, they must possess the tools of a competent business person. This includes an intimate knowledge of accounting, finance, marketing, and management principles. Accounting ratios and balance sheets should be second nature, and so should net present value and loan amortization. Numerous graduates work in the banking industry and in the accounting department of firms. Finance and accounting are skills that depend on each other; finance skills without accounting skills are of little value, and vice-versa. Though they cannot be prepared for every marketing or management job, graduates should possess the basic fundamentals that allow them to learn their job quickly. Many graduates find themselves in positions managing goods from wheat in elevators to building doors for homes. A significant portion also lead marketing careers, typically but not always in the marketing of food items.

Computer Skills: With today’s advanced information technology and the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft Office, they should be proficient in Microsoft Excel, Word, and Power Point. Excel is especially important. The graduate should be able to sort and summarize data, and calculate basic statistics such as frequencies and averages. Learning tools such as PivotTables in college gives the student an advantage over coworkers with fewer computational skills. If there is one skill that should be considered the most important to possess, it would be proficiency in Microsoft Excel.

Communication Skills: An ability to communicate effectively is a high priority. Graduates should be able to write basic business documents such as emails, business letters, and business reports without an abundance of grammatical errors; the reader should also find the writing succinct and clear. However, it should be noted that graduates are not expected to be excellent writers, only that their writing should not be embarrassing to the organization. Of greater importance than writing are oral communication skills. An ability to present information in an organized, clear, and succinct manner is of paramount importance, as is to give the aura of confidence during the presentation. This includes formal oral presentations, perhaps using Power Point, and informal oral communications such as phone conversations.

Agribusiness Skills - Understanding Agricultural and Futures Markets: All of these aforementioned skills are general skills, and would be expected of any business major. Agricultural economics and agribusiness majors have the additional advantage of a unique understanding of agricultural markets. They should have a unique insight into the long- and short-run supply and demand relationships for agricultural products, fundamentals which extend nicely to other commodities whose supplies are fixed in the short-run, such as oil and natural gas. For example, one of our graduates participates in a weekly meeting called a supply and demand meeting. All such majors learn the intricacies of futures markets, including speculating, hedging, and the use of futures to predict prices. This understanding of futures naturally extends to futures trading of non-agricultural commodities such as oil and foreign currency.

How does the department of agricultural economics at oklahoma state university instill these skills?

Social Skills: The responsibility for instills social skills rests primarily on AGEC 3323, Agricultural Product Marketing and Sales. This class largely focuses on teaching students how to “sell themselves” and develop personal relationships with people, as well as other skills useful as a career in sales. A variety of other social skills are addressed. For instance, the class hosts a formal dinner where students are able to learn and demonstrate table manners.

Business Skills: Students take a variety of courses in management, marketing, accounting, and finance. Most of these courses are in the agricultural economics department, except for accounting. Students who focus on a specific area such as finance or marketing will take additional courses on that area in the business college.

Computer Skills: All students are required to take Quantitative Methods in Agricultural Economics which focuses on developing Excel skills, and the communication courses discussed below shortly integrate both Word and Power Point into the class activities.

Communication Skills: While communication activities are present in a majority of classes, students take six courses that focus specifically on written and oral communication skills.

Agribusiness Skills: From the introductory agricultural economics course to its more advanced counterparts, students gain a unique insight into the supply and demand of agricultural and food products. All students take Agricultural Marketing and Price Analysis, which studies futures markets extensively. A variety of senior level courses allow students to specialize in particular agribusiness topics, whether it be an additional course focusing solely on futures markets or a course learning how to calculate crop insurance premiums.

What are some examples of jobs taken by past graduates?

Marketing – Lindsey Cheek works at Damian International, a marketing firm. The firm’s clients include food producers who seek advice on how to promote and advertise their food products.

Manufacturing – Randis Galloway, Lindsey Kuzma, Amber Houser, Shea Griffin, Jeffrey Clark and other graduates work at Koch Industries where they primarily analyze market and accounting information to help Koch determine business strategies. For example, students may track sales of gasoline to identify potential markets for refined oil, or gather information on the cost of carpet production for rival firms.

Commodity Trading – Many former students (Melinda Shults, Tim Cassidy) work for firms like ADM where they buy or sell agricultural commodities such as soybeans and soybean oil. Some graduates actively speculate on commodity prices.

Chesapeake Oil and Gas – This employer routinely hires our students and asks them to perform a number of functions. For example, Lacy Mann was once charged with taking data on oil well depth and oil well costs and develop a model they could use to give potential customers estimate on the cost of drilling oil wells.

Government – Some graduates like Justin McConaghy work in Extension, and others like Allison Sherle and Curtis Stock work for the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Interest Groups – Megan Provost worked for American Farm Bureau, where she ran equilibrium displacement models to analyze the impacts of potential trade agreements on American agriculture.

Sales - This is one of the largest categories of agribusiness employers. While many have sales careers in agriculture, such as Monsanto pesticide salesman Travis Fenderson and ConAgra animal feed salespeople, many others sell non-agricultural goods and services such as life insurance and prosthetic knee and hip replacements.

Finance – Never a year goes by without a number of students taking jobs at a bank, often as a loan officer. Some are private banks, some are government-affiliated banks such as Farm Credit.

Self-Employed – One of our most successful graduates, Aaron Hughes, utilizes his business skills and personal motivation to develop land.

Higher Education – Many others go on to attend law school, vet school, graduate school, and medical school.

When an employer considers an agribusiness graduate for employment, what are they looking for?

For most jobs, the skills the student obtained from classes in college is small in importance next to the student’s personality. Employers are largely looking for students who have a high moral character, have a passion for their career and life, can work well with others, and can communicate effectively. Specific skills can be learned on the job.
How does an employer determine whether a student possesses this personality? It is determined largely through the personal interview. The employer places more importance on the personal interview as a judging tool than the students’ resume – much, much more. The second most important attribute employers want to see is that the student has participated in an internship or gained valuable work experience. This signals to the employer that the graduate works well within an organization. Finally, they will want to see that the student held a leadership position in a university organization, and the student made decent grades. Typically, the employer only cares that the student had a B average or better, though some employers like Koch Industries target students with high grades.
For some careers the employer specifically targets agribusiness students for the skills they learn in college. Some employers prefer our graduates because they understand commodity markets well, and some due to their more advanced Excel skills, compared to graduates from other departments.

Business Plans- What Consultants Don’t tell You?

Do you have a Business Plan? Congratulations, but you are in a small minority. And if you have a plan, is it integral to your business, and instrumental to its growth? If the answer to this question is yes, then you need to read no further. However, most business owners who actually go to the trouble to write a business plan have left it languishing on their bottom shelf, gathering dust! This is the dirty little secret of business consultants.


Most business consultants are only interested in selling their time or their ‘Business Plan in a Box’ but know that for a business plan to be useful, it has to be part of a Business Management System. But this is a much harder proposition for the consultant to sell, particularly to small business owners who are just looking for a quick fix. So most consultants just sell a quick fix solution- a business plan that they know will, within months, end up on the bottom shelf. Once owners have prepared their “fill in the blanks” plan, they expect it to transform their business overnight just by its mere existence. And because this does not happen, they never look at it again.

Business Plans do work, but you have to make them work. It is not a one-off exercise. If you buy a ‘Business Plan in a Box’, you need to understand that you are responsible for maintaining the plan. You also need to satisfy yourself that the product you buy is not just a fill in the blanks product. These plans always end up on the bottom shelf. They don’t show you how to do your strategic analysis (which is never a fill in the blanks exercise- no matter what someone tells you).

Business Planning is a real soul searching exercise for the business owner. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. Even if you prepare your plan yourself (without a coach), get someone else involved to keep you honest! Looking at examples of what others have done can help, but your business will have different strengths and weaknesses and will operate in a different marketplace. And lastly, make sure any off-the-shelf product you choose will show you how to implement your plan into your business.

When you use a consultant, insist that they show you how the plan should be implemented into your business process. And have the consultant give you at least one review of your performance against your plan six months after the plan has been delivered. While this will cost you extra, this will ensure that your plan does not end up on the bottom shelf- because you know you will be held to account!

Business Planning is not an easy process. It takes time and commitment. You don’t just do it once. This is not what business owners want to hear, and what most consultants won’t tell you, because it might cost them a sale. But the rewards from a well implemented business plan are worth many times your investment.