The result

Extracted from the Farm Tender weekly Newsletter - Sign up and get the email every Wednesday morning before 6 am. www.farmtender.com.au

By Dwain Duxson.

Most of the time, we focus on the result, and rightly so, after all, that's what it's all about right? Yes and no, I say...

When I talk about the result, my thoughts go to all the wonderful Bull and Ram sales that have been, or are about to be achieved this year.

For those that have completed sales, I would say 99 percent would be wrapped in the result. Overall they have been phenomenal.

But when you step back and think about "how" it became a really good result, that is the most intriguing bit.

I remember when we took this covid thing seriously, I think it was back in something like April 2020. I may have read some stuff one morning and then had a little bit of a think about it, then I addressed the staff and said "we think things will be ok, and our primary focus is retaining all the people involved in the business, yep fingers crossed". For a little while, there was so much uncertainty, not only in business but also in humanity.

I don't know how long it took, maybe a week or so, but all of a sudden, we started to realise how a crisis had dealt us an opportunity of sorts. At the time we didn't really know it would all drag on this long, and we didn't really know back then the seriousness of it all.

We were all suddenly thanking our lucky stars that we were in the Ag game.

But getting back to the Ram and Bull sales. The guys involved were dealt a blow in that it took away their number one marketing source in Field Days and Shows. These things where they physically pick up their Animals, congregate in a certain spot, and show them to the potential buying public for 2, 3 or 4 days on end had been taken away.

And then they had to do all these weird and wonderful things like taking videos of the Rams or Bulls and sending them into Auctionsplus, who were all of a sudden becoming a key focus in the outcome.

Last year, what we saw in Winter/Spring was a surprise result from something we thought might have been a struggle. But customers adapted, and the sales went well.

But, in 2021, we all got a little better at it, and our customers accepted that this is the way it's done now, which led to some even better results. Sure, the season, prices and confidence also contributed.

So when we look back on all the wonderful results that have been achieved, make sure we put a focus on the "how".

The importance of the "how" far outweighs the result as it teaches us lessons.

Those lessons might mean different things to different people. But at the end of the day, nobody ever thought that the results would have been so wildly successful, doing it the way it was done.

There are learnings there for all of us...

End of message.