For the last 6-8 months, we have been in a cash flow crunch that forced us to look seriously at selling part of our land base so that we could free up cash to continue to operate. We had a pretty good grasp of our numbers and were watching the gross margins (GM) closely, as we had to focus on moving forward quickly.  If the GM wasn’t exceptional, and it wasn’t scalable, the enterprise was cut. We still felt there was something missing.  We hired Ranch Right LLC to take hold of our accounting, explained where we wanted to be, and they said ok.

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What we have learned is that if we want to be excellent, change the trajectory of our operation, and reach our financial goals faster than we ever thought possible, we need to go beyond the gross margin. By outsourcing the production of our gross margins and working with a team of people who understand the ranch business, we had the luxury to look through binoculars that only had 80/20 rule lenses. Meaning we had the information we needed, the time, and the energy to look further for those parts of our business that would really grow our profits.

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The breeding ewe enterprise created an additional $307,000 in income through marketing (choosing to sell overvalued breeding animals and replace them at a profit), with no added overheads or direct costs. Had we scaled this enterprise by 4 x to provide the same gross product, I assure you the costs would have changed. AND, it would’ve required A LOT MORE CAPITAL, that we didn’t have.

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And right now, we are not forced to sell land!

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-Aaron and Tara Helmick