Clothier Family

For years, our systems lived in someone’s head, or across three or four different filing systems that people from two generations had built in our individual ways. If you stood back and looked at the whole picture, there was stuff going everywhere. We were relying on one or two people to create labour-saving systems, and that reliance was one of our biggest costs.

We’d watched our mate Russ Fowler, over in Bothwell (Tasmania), get real value out of working with Enable Ag, and that got our ears pricked up. If we wanted to grow the business, including our new brand, Limestone Coast Eggs — without working ourselves into the ground, we needed the same thing.

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Twelve months on, the shift is real. All our files now sit in one place we can all access, so it doesn’t matter whose phone or iPad someone’s using. Everyone knows what’s been fed and where things stand. We’re building the data behind our egg production so we can jump on lay-rate issues earlier instead of after the fact. And every week, the weekly coaching sessions put whatever’s front of mind on the table — so we’re working through today’s problem with other farmers in the same boat, not guessing on our own.

The biggest win has been getting what’s in any one person’s head out and into systems the rest of us can rely on. Our eggs processing day is the best example. Ollie has run our processing machine since it started, but recently he was away for a few weeks. When Sam had to run it without him, with nothing but the SOP and the Loom videos we’d built, it went better than when Ollie was there. That’s what building a system properly looks like.

We’re still working on locking in our business roles and structures between us as a family, and that’s our focus for the year ahead. But the ground we’ve covered in how we manage information, and in how we think about the business, has been well worth it.

So far, the journey has taken a fair bit of work, but it’s paid off. We highly recommend Enable Ag to any farmers wanting a business that runs on systems, not on any one person.