Services

Business Consulting

Whether it be farming, grazing, intensive livestock or horticulture - it is all business. it is pressure, input costs, production, marketing, staff, growth and risk. Business management, financial analysis, fingertip control. Fundamental business elements to be co-ordinated and all working in the same direction. Maximising profit is what it is all about.

The FFS Profitable Strategy service is a tailored solution to your business, your requirements, your properties that help put the pieces together to give you the direction required to deliver profits.

Managing Family Businesses

We don't choose our parents, our brothers, our sisters or our children. Yet most of us in the rural sector end up working with them, living with them and sometimes fighting with them. Managing family businesses is just that bit more complex because we are family. This can be an incredibly powerful force - whether it is a good force or a bad force is up to the family.

We believe that a well managed family business can be unstoppable - but it requires unique management.

Succession Planning that Works

We all dream of being able to pass on our business to our children. And for some of us, we work all our lives for Mum and Dad waiting for them to hand over control. Planning for the handover should be a very positive and rewarding exercise. Unfortunately, some families implode at this point.

5 Years to Wealth Creation

5 years in business is a long time. Time enough to put the necessary pieces together, to follow the profit plan and to set yourselves up for the home run. We are all plagued by the doubts, what are we doing this for? Where is it all going? What will happen if?

The 5 years to wealth creation is about getting our businesses to look further down the track to lift the sights a bit and to help keep it in perspective; A solid 5 year time horizon is also the shoulder we all need to lean on from time to time to keep us getting out of bed when something happens that tries to push us off course.

Government Submissions

5 Years to Wealth Creation

Governments try to help in many, many ways. Interest subsidy support, vegetation management, water efficiency, etc, etc. The types of Government support will continue to evolve and develop as old "schemes" expire and new ones are announced. The sting in the tail is that every scheme requires a submission.

These submissions only ever become more complex because the scheme's themselves become more and more specific and tailored to a particular sector or outcome. Self assessment and submission writing is dangerous simply because the stakes are so high. $100,000 potential support (from interest subsidy for example) is a lot of money. We are very successful with writing these submissions because we do it all the time, we understand what the government department is requiring and we know who fits the requirements and who does not.

Bank Management

Joint Ventures and Consortiums

As our businesses become more and more complex, we need better team work from the team around us. This includes our advisers, our accountants, our solicitors and our bankers. A lot of effort goes into having a a smoothly run operation. The team has to be involved and working together. More and more, we are helping to engage the team, and in particular the banking team.

Our bankers are very necessary to our success. They are also being loaded with additional pressures and to a very real extent, bank customers who are painless because they provide the correct information proactively benefit with easier approvals, better margins and cheaper costs.

Joint Ventures and Consortiums

Economic forces on agribusiness is forcing each business to grow in order to survive. A highly effective business growth strategy is joining of forces with others to undertake a bigger business project. This may take the form of a Joint Venture, Partnership or Consortium. There are a number of critical elements required - a profitable project, the bringing to the table of complimentary skills and resources as well as an agreement on how, who, what and when.

We have successfully brought parties together so that together, the end result can be realised. Invariably, we provide the framework and glue to keep the parties working together and towards the agreed outcome.