With the arrival of the new year, I usually look ahead to what I want to accomplish. For some reason, I’ve been reflecting, and the last 12-18 months have given us many lessons.

When things get spaced out over time we may not notice right away. One thing when I was reflecting on the year is that many of the people who have been talking about sell/buy marketing on different podcasts have attended one of my schools. Kudos to them for being willing to do that. Legit sell/buy is a skill that needs to be expanded through the cattle business.

Paying attention to market

I have learned a great deal since I started teaching sell/buy marketing schools. Most of it has come from the people that reach out to me and ask questions. Some have come from challenging myself to get better and paying closer attention to the market.

Sometimes we need to pay attention to what we are paying attention to. With the lessons from the last 18 months, I am stunned that some people are still talking about trend lines and planning their operations around them. What happened in the last four months of 2024 wasn’t supposed to happen according to the trends, yet it happened, and some people lost massive amounts of money because of it. At the very same time people with marketing skills managed to generate positive cash flow.

Here's the thing that really gets to me. When I was young, I heard all the worn-out stale lines about there not being any money raising cattle. Yet some people are repeating the theories that previous generations have handed down, the same generation that told us we couldn’t make any money doing this.

Break the habit

What we are really witnessing is the power of paradigms. Even though we were told these things don’t really work, the thinking habits keep us locked in on them and we keep repeating them, hoping this time it will pay off. I could go off on a long rabbit trail about this topic, but here’s the point I want to make about it. It is these thinking habits that keep us from looking for the answer.

When I was young and people told me that I couldn’t make a living raising cattle and that I couldn’t start from scratch I decided I just wouldn’t listen to them. I believed there had to be a way and when I attended a sell/buy marketing school 20 years ago I knew I had found the answer. Once we accept that no one can predict what the markets will do and that these theories that’ve been handed down don’t really work, marketing and earning money suddenly gets a lot simpler.

Implementing sell/buy marketing

One frequently asked question I get is how to implement sell/buy marketing. After teaching schools for several years now, and the discussions I get to have because of teaching, some people have opened up and been honest with me. Some have admitted they have never tracked expenses before. If some tell me this, I know there are others that never have either.

This is the first, and most basic thing we need to do. If you are one that never has tracked expenses, this is the time to start. We need to know what our expenses are so we can plug that number into algebraic equations that we use to determine if we can or cannot prosper ourselves marketing cattle. This will mean calculating both direct costs and overheads. When we are not tracking expenses what it really means is we are in business with no intention of being profitable. Without tracking expenses, we will have no clue if we are generating positive cashflow. Because cashflow is the fuel for the business it is widely considered the most important statistic.

Improve yourself in 2025

Another thing we should be doing is to improve ourselves daily. Yesterday we should have been better than the day before, and today we should strive to be better than we were yesterday, and then tomorrow we should be better than we were today. When we do this compounded over time, we become elite.

A line I hear repeatedly at cattle auctions is “I am beating the average.”  Fitting in is a survival skill when we get to middle school. We get compared to other kids and learn to compare ourselves to other kids. This stays with most people their entire lives. With everyone focused on the average that is what holds the average down and remember some of those in that average have no clue what their costs are and therefore have no clue if they are profitable or not. If we just focus on making ourselves better, it won’t be long, and we leave average in the dust.

Over the last week I’ve had some fun and interesting conversations with some dads about their adult sons. Keep in mind that all these young guys are single. The conversation eventually got to the point where I asked if they thought their son spent more time this last week figuring out New Year’s plans or setting targets for themselves for the coming year.

The real education

I hated school growing up. The valuable part of our formal education only taught us the basics. Real education begins after we graduate, and it is this education that will help determine our success. I am not big on five- and ten-year plans simply because things change, and life throws curveballs. The experts tell us that when we make plans, we underestimate what we can accomplish in that five-to-ten-year window, and we overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. To me this means if we set high targets for the year and come up a bit short, we will be that much farther ahead than we expected to be when we do reach that five- and ten-year period, which will have us chasing even bigger targets than we expected to.

Production

The last point I want to address is production. An old paradigm that’s been handed down is we need to increase production to improve our odds of being profitable. I tell this story in every class I teach. Years ago, the value of gain was reduced to not much. To feed the cattle I was backgrounding to gain 2.5 pounds per day was going to require adding energy to their ration. At that time, it was expensive to do this and cost prohibitive. I calculated several options and based off costs, and value of gain, I went with a cheaper ration that would have the cattle gaining 1.25 pounds per day. This strategic move allowed me to continue to be profitable when everyone else around me was bragging about losing money. Production should only be driven up in a way that is designed to reduce the cost of production