According to the National Weather Service, a tornado came a half-mile from my house this week. I was eating dinner and didn't even know it was happening. The tornado didn't faze me, but I could have easily been knocked over by a feather at the stallion sale at the regular weekly auction.
The general situation at the stallion sale that day was one of undervalued horses trading above and below each other. Most of the females sold were auctioned off below their intrinsic value (IV). I didn't expect to see this in a while considering how much more than IV they've sold this year.
maintain harmony
Those who went to fake buy and sell school before coming to me will be shocked to learn that you can sell a female that sells better than an IV and trade it for another female that sells better than an IV and get a great deal. I am. This school may pay lip service to relationships, but it completely ignores them. Another thing we ignore is that the reason we buy and sell works is because they are in harmony with the natural laws of the universe.
In this case, the law of polarity, or vice versa, comes into play. Even if these women sold below IV, the relationship still existed, and a skilled marketer taught the right things could still have made some profitable deals. There is a gender.
This week I appeared on the podcast Casual Cattle Conversation. We discussed sales/purchase marketing with a focus on breeding heifers. What to consider before selling or buying a heifer with Doug Ferguson — Casual Cattle Conversation
don't give yourself permission to fail
Over the past few weeks, I've been receiving calls from people who have chosen to attend other marketing schools. They ignored my warnings and are paying the price. They sold their animals, but can't find any to buy to replace them. Then they call me and ask for confirmation if now is the time to start over with a virgin purchase or sit back and hold the money for a while. They learned that I don't tolerate failure.
More on this later. Let's stick to the first thing. The first thing to run a profitable business is to make a firm and irrevocable decision to become profitable. There are many sexy topics that people like to talk about in order to make a profit.
make a profit
If grazing improves, the operation will be profitable. The latest pharmaceutical products make our business profitable. Some even argue that genetics make us profitable. None of that matters if you give up everything when you put the animal on the market. This is why I say, “It begins with an irrevocable and committed decision.” That means you can profit no matter what.
There are three questions you need to answer. 1) What do we want? In this case, the answer is already given: to make a profit on cows. 2) How badly do you want it? Most people say they want it or have to make a profit. When you get to the question 3) What are you going to do about it?, you'll know the real answer. If you're serious about making money with cows, the answer is to give them whatever they need. Now you can see that most people only want it if it's easy.
Please try again later
I sold a lot of cattle a few weeks ago and the price I received was as expected. My cost of gain (COG) was a little high, but I can see why it was high for this group. The following week, the cow I was planning to purchase sold for a high price, so it didn't fit my card. For new readers who do actual buy and sell marketing, we reap the benefits of buying and selling because this is the only thing we can control. We were unable to obtain the buybacks we had already identified and still were unable to meet our profit targets.
Did you understand that? I had them identify the repurchase earlier, highlight the word, and then sell. The people who called me weren't told that. We also learned about COG, which is necessary to establish relationships between animals. After learning this, I realized that I couldn't afford the animal I wanted to buy.
Over the course of 9 days, my team of buyers and I tried to get the cow purchased from 12 different dealerships, but all of them invalidated my card. When you sit at a sale all afternoon and don't buy anything, it feels like a waste of time. The problem is, I realized that the animals that were being sold were more overvalued than the ones I sold, and I ended up not keeping any, so that was okay. In some cases, the way to run a profitable cattle business is to come home from an auction with an empty trailer and try again later.
Never give up on trading
One afternoon, the buyer finally called me and said he had a working package. The important thing here is that I never gave up on trading. He doesn't build a seven-figure business by giving up a trade and starting from scratch. Some of the people who called me were just turned off by one sale and were prepared to take a loss by holding on to their money or buying at virgin.
If you press the “Reset” button and purchase without purchasing instead of replacing it, your loss will be fixed. This strategy is a failure mindset because it leaves money at the point of marketing, wasting bait and time. If a cattleman intends to do this repeatedly, as some cattlemen do, he is better off getting a W2 job.
rationalize = rationalize a lie
My school defines the word “rationalization,” which only justifies lies in the mind. That's exactly what instructors are doing with this strategy, building an escape hatch from failure into the curriculum. People like this because it fits into the existing paradigm of how cows looked at business before going to that school, where there was no personal growth.
Our success in the cattle business is determined by the decades we have been in business. Unfortunately, some who attended other schools may not be able to see the end of his decade as a cow owner. If we continue to do business like this, we will eventually go out of business.
cost of profit
If you continue to be unable to find profitable buybacks, you should stop trading and understand why. I wrote an article a while back about leading indicators, and if you pay attention to them, there are a lot of signs that will show up. If a high COG makes repurchases difficult, consider why the COG is high and what you need to do to become more competitive.
Unfortunately, similar causes produce similar effects. If this person learned from someone who didn't believe in buying and selling enough to do it themselves, he may not have been taught how to discern relationships. Avoiding depreciation or focusing on LRP is not buy-sell marketing.
There are other major time and money drawbacks to the reset strategy. I'll explain that next week. An irrevocable determination to make a profit is like burning a ship. Get the value of everything in your inventory pyramid.