I recently interviewed an owner of a chicken farm who used one piece of advice that improved their production and efficiency by 1500%.
Best of all, what she learned is directly applicable to every business. Even yours.
I want to tell you about my daughter, Jenna, and her Kansas farm which has about 1,200 egg-producing chickens. The eggs from Jenna’s chickens are all given away to hungry people through the non-profit she created and each month, she provides hundreds of dozens of farm fresh eggs to people in need.
Needless to say, I’m one proud Dad. But this story isn’t just my chance to brag about my daughter. This story has a profound lesson in it for every one of you.
When Jenna first started out with her non-profit chicken farm, she did everything by hand. The chickens all roam around in coops (150 feet long and 24 feet wide) eating grain and drinking water. When she started, the water for the chickens came from 8-gallon watering containers which had to be filled with a hose, and then, carried into each coop, with 3-5 waterers per coop. (Each waterer weighs over 65 pounds). Jenna did that. She also had to pour grain into the feeding troughs, and then, go around to the 30 nesting boxes (where the chickens laid eggs), and collect each egg individually.
After collecting the eggs in buckets (at the beginning, about 140 eggs a day), Jenna would haul the eggs to the sink, individually candle the eggs (that’s chicken-talk for checking for cracks), and then, hand scrub each egg to make it clean, finally putting each egg into a carton and labeling each carton. For 140 eggs, it took her about 6 hours of work every day. As the chickens laid more eggs and Jenna added more chickens, her days grew longer and longer, all the while feeding more needy families.
But a funny thing happened that changed everything: The guy who provided the metal for her first chicken coop was named Marvin, and one day Marvin mentioned to Jenna that during his weekend, he helped collect 14,000 eggs at his father-in-law’s farm.
That got Jenna’s attention and she asked Marvin some questions. Turns out Marvin’s father-in-law (Andy’s his name), had an automated egg production facility over in Missouri.
Shortly thereafter with Marvin’s help, Jenna traveled 3 hours away to Missouri to see Andy’s farm. And when she got there, she saw Andy’s automated conveyor belts that carried eggs from the nesting boxes into a separate egg cleaning room and a machine that thoroughly cleaned each egg, all automatically. She also saw how Andy’s coops each had automatic waterers (no need to haul 8-gallon containers of water), and automatic grain feeders (no need to haul grain and pour it out), and instead, an auger pulled the grain from a grain silo directly to the chickens, all by flipping a switch.
Andy willingly shared his knowledge and expertise and most importantly, the mistakes he’d made over the years that now allowed him to process thousands of eggs in a day. And shortly afterwards, Andy helped design a smaller, similar system for Jenna’s coops and that system was installed this Spring.
Now, with this investment in her business and the time she put in to learn all the new processes and machinery and reconfigure every part of her egg production business, she took a tremendous leap forward, all because of Andy sharing his expertise of what worked and what didn’t.
If you’re interested in statistics, Jenna went from feeding, watering, collecting, cleaning, and packaging 12 dozen eggs in 6 hours at the beginning of her business to doing all the same processes with over 1,200 chickens, but now she can process over 62 dozen eggs in 40 minutes by herself. A 1,500% increase in efficiency.
But here’s the lesson: None of this increase would have been possible without Marvin mentioning Andy’s name and Jenna being inquisitive and asking more, and Andy taking the time to take Jenna through an eye-opening introduction into efficient egg processing.
And finally, Jenna questioning how she was doing business and wondering if it could be dramatically improved.
The key in all this was Andy. Andy was the Accelerator. Andy shared his knowledge, mistakes, experience, and processes with Jenna and helped her see a vision for her non-profit and what was possible to accomplish in a fraction of the time she was spending, all enabling her to help hundreds of more people every month with free food.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could discover your own Accelerators for your business?
Well, guess what? You can!
3-Days of Accelerators: Sign up for our Online Destination BootCamp
I know you’re busy and you don’t like shameless plugs, and I know it’s the holiday weekend, but hear me out: Unlike most business classes you might have taken, I teach a class that is filled with business Accelerators: Real lessons from successful business owners who I’ve studied, who I’ve picked their brains, and lucky for me, these brilliant entrepreneurs shared with me how they got to where they are today.
This class is my Destination BootCamp. In my newest version of the Destination BootCamp, I show you my entire 14-step process to make your business irresistible to consumers that I learned after interviewing over 10,000 business owners.
Best of all, in our upcoming 2020 BootCamp classes, I’ve totally rewritten each chapter to add techniques and steps that will help you generate more sales and attract more customers to your business, even during this Covid-19 pandemic when people might not be coming in to your business in the same numbers or frequency.
Lucky for me, I have met owners who were unafraid to share their secrets and success strategies with me, who were unafraid of me sharing it with others who might need their lessons.
Plus, now my Destination BootCamp can all be taken online: No need to travel to Colorado, stay in a hotel for 3 nights, get on a plane and all the other issues that make traveling and sitting in a room filled with people not the best idea these days.
We have a Destination BootCamp class that starts this Tuesday, July 7. I still have 3 seats left. But you have to register by Saturday night if you want in.
Then, this year, we also have Destination BootCamp classes on September 1-3, and October 27-29, if you want to attend later in the year.
Think about it and email me directly at [email protected] if you want to learn more, or if you want to read about the BootCamp or register, just go to www.DestinationBootCamp.com.
OK, on to a new topic:
ATTENTION ALL COMMUNITY LEADERS, HERE’S A CLASS FOR YOU:
I want you to think about becoming a Facilitator for our Destination Creation Course
If you don’t know about our Destination Creation Course, it’s a shortened version of my Destination BootCamp class described above. You can read all about it here: www.DestinationCreationCourse.com
If you would like to help your local business owners, we are looking for people who can lead my Destination Creation classes.
The Destination Creation Course was started last August, and we now have 53 trained Facilitators of our Destination Creation Course in 19 states and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. Check out their smiling faces by clicking here.
Here are the states where we DO NOT HAVE Facilitators: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.
We also DON’T have Facilitators in the other 8 Canadian provinces that aren’t Alberta and Saskatchewan. (If you’re in Canada, you know who you are).
I’m listing all of these states and provinces because we’d love to have a minimum of one (1) Facilitator in each of these locations. We can take more than 1, but we’d like to at least get 1 in each of these States and Provinces.
If you or someone you know in your community would be great at helping business owners with an entirely new class that can help them grow their businesses, learn about the Destination Train-the-Trainer class (the class you have to take to become a certified Facilitator — next class is July 28-30). You can also see and learn about our current skilled team of Facilitators and what others have said about the Destination Creation Course by going here: Click here to learn more.
OK, that’s it for this Independence weekend. I hope I gave you something to start your weekend off successfully.
And remember, if you have any thoughts, questions, or if you just want to say hello, email [email protected].
