Module 5: Conducting an Opportunity Assessment & Developing Your Farm Business Viability Strategy

Module 5: Conducting an Opportunity Assessment and Developing your Farm Viability Strategy to Meet Your Personal Income Goals

This module brings together all previous modules to help farm business owners begin annually conducting strategic planning and developing a long-term business viability strategy. This module also introduces a tool for conducting an opportunity assessment to support growth decisions.

As you begin applying the tools that you learn from this virtual training program, you’ll increase your confidence in building an Annual and Monthly budget, developing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for comparing your monthly projected budget and sales projections with your actuals monthly Profit & Loss (P&L) statement, S.M.A.R.T goals for meeting quarterly and annual sales targets and staying within projected COGS and general expenses and developing an annual strategic planning practice using SWOT analysis. 

Upon completing Modules 1-4, you should be able to accomplish the following tasks for your business: 
  • Completion of your 2023 Annual Projected Budget;
  • Understanding of how to break your annual budget into a monthly budget for 2023;
  • Understanding and routine to compare monthly budget estimate to your actual spending and income on your monthly P&L statement;
  • Familiarty with using the sensitivity analysis tab of the Budget Builder to run different scenarios of sales projections;
  • Ability to make operational decisions based on the numbers and plan for profit;
  • Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for running monthly, quarterly and annaul reports and financial analaysis to compare your projected and actual budgets to track progress towards meeting your personal income goals;
  • Understanding of the basics for strategic planning, using the SWOT tool to help you define direction and set goals for the coming year;
  • Ability to conduct a SWOT analysis to help prioritize income streams, refine sales projections and strategies for growth;
  • Development of S.M.A.R.T goals and a plan to use them to reach your sales projections and staying within projected spending on your budget; 
  • Ability to execute your own SWOT analysis. Learn a project management framework for turning goals into actions and outcomes (Red-Yellow-Green management tool);
  • Ability to review your sales projections and set some goals based on your SWOT;
  • Action plan for turning your goals in to actions using the S.M.A.R.T framework;
  • [Bonus] Want to take what you’ve learned to the next level? As bonus work, try applying the KTC 10 Step Budget Building Tool to create a Five Year Projected Budget.