Let’s talk about something most financial advisors avoid because it’s messy, real, and frankly, a little unprofessional. We’re here to meet you where you are – or where you’ve been. Sometimes, life gets messy. The crap hits the fan. And today, we’re talking about manure.
My late father-in-law spent a lot of his early years working for a feed company going from farm to farm. I remember that he would smell the air near a farm and say that it “smells like money.” He knew that that smell meant money. It meant income. It meant business.
I grew up in a small town, and I used to find it fascinating that you could tell what type of farm was coming up just by sniffing the air. All of a sudden you smell a chicken farm. A little while later, you can smell a pig farm, and then there were the beef or dairy farms.
You could smell it in the air and knew what kind of livestock a farm produced, and I think it’s also important to smell the air and realize that that there is going to be some sort of “crap factor” built into everything that we do and especially if you are business owners. Business owners have to deal with a lot of crap or manure in their business, and that is something that their hourly or salaried employees typically don’t understand.
You can usually spot a business owner because they are the ones handling the “crap factors”. I think of someone that I saw mowing our local baseball field on a Sunday. I think of a woman that my wife and I saw at a restaurant that was cleaning up a mess with a broom and a pan. They are willing to take on things that most people are just not.
When we first moved into our office on Main St., I had a client drive by with his friend and it was a Saturday or Sunday. I was out in my grub clothes trimming the hedges and weeding around the building. The client turned to his friend and told him that was his financial advisor. His friend said, “I would never work with a financial advisor that has to do his own lawn care.”
Here’s what he didn’t understand. Business owners think differently. They want to make certain that their facilities are looking as good as possible. They are willing to come in early and stay late. At some point, yes, you hope to reap the reward of all of that hard work, but as you go along the way, you just know that you have to put in the time and effort to make that business a success. We call that the “crap factor”
My brother-in-law used to own a chicken farm with about 225,000 birds. A couple of times a year, they would load up all of the manure from the barns and spread it onto the fields, typically in winter when the ground was solid. The trailer he used was an open-top manure spreader. One day, he was traveling down the gravel road to go spread it on a field and had a full tank of liquified fertilizer in the back. A car tried to speed around him, and he had to slam on the brakes. Well, the tractor stopped. The trailer stopped. The fertilizer did not. It continued at 35 mph up over the tank, over the tractor, and onto my brother-in-law. That is what we would call a “crap factor.”
When you’re dealing with crap, sometimes you get dirty along the way. That’s how ownership of a company works sometimes. You just buy into the idea that you’re going to get messy and dirty. It doesn’t matter if it’s a chicken farm, restaurant, or ball field, you do what needs to be done. I have a lot of respect for business owners because they get it. They know that the “crap factor” of today is likely going to be the fertilizer for their business’s future. If you handle and spread out the crap or manure of your life appropriately, it becomes the fertilizer for a new day. Like my later Father-In-Law would say, “Mmm, smells like money.”
If you’re navigating a season of financial manure – or want to talk about where your hard work is taking you – we might be the people for the job. We’ve been there. We respect it. We’re ready to help.
