Farm Produce Business:
Starting Small Business
Implementation of the Production Operations of the Farm-Produce Business brings the venture development challenges to the end of the Transition Phase and at the threshold of the Venture Startup Stage. Even more significantly though, the entity has now attained all the requirements and characteristic of being a small size business of self sustaining operation. Effectively, at this stage a Small Business of Farm-Produce Business has formed. Going forward, the operations are started and the rest of the team brought on board over time. The business is now at the end of the transitioning phase, and can remain in this development stage indefinitely. In fact, every small business has only effectively completed the transitioning but frozen in-place at the threshold of the Venture Startup Stage. However, from here onward, the specifics of the adoptions made in the Market Participation Planning are implemented and effected.
Acting on the initiation of the full implementation of the Market Participation Planning adoptions, the Office Manager is re-positioned and given more administration responsibilities including Human Resources Administration, Personnel Management, and Business Development Planning and may even become the Operations Manager usually. The immediate tasks, upon being given these added duties, are to bring onboard the rest of the team: Sales staff, Marketing staff and the General administration staff. Accordingly, the manager embarks on developing the Business Activities routinization to a limited extent into forming Business Processes, as well as develops some general guidelines of the Sales and Marketing programs based on the sales approach so far used to secure sales. Of course, two Market Participation approaches as options were available for the farmer-entrepreneur: Singular Reseller and Cooperative Reseller, each with its nuances which are now addressed
At this stage though the first staff, Sales staff, is brought in to keep securing more sales. For Singular reseller representing the strict small business, each sales staff operates at a personal level and Skill-set to secure the sales. No structured plan is usually followed. Sales are made on personal relationships between the buyer and the Sales staff. Even so it is worth putting in place the broad outlines of a Sales Cycle so that the sales person does not expend inordinate amount of time on any one potential customer. For the Cooperative Reseller the staff may be more than one, in order to support both internal sales and outsides. The first sale staff may be consigned with direct outside sales staff, while a second staff may be consigned the internal sales.
Subsequently, the marketing staff is brought onboard to mostly undertake marketing. Again usually no specific plans, but the general guidelines, are pre-developed and followed for implementation either. Usually the marketing staff is brought onboard and then charged with developing a plan for starting off the marketing, keeping in mind that the business, after all, is usually local, though at levels and sizes mostly regional. The marketing activities often include brochures being prepared and given to the sales staff to support the sales process including for mailing and hand-delivery cloaking unplanned sales visit to the buyers. Promotional plans are often conceived and implemented occasionally. Some such promotions include sponsorships of local events, involving games, community gatherings and some activism of community support. Local Newspapers advertisements are also often made either to inform on the products and the conveniences offered by the business, or to advocate the business image through advertising the Promotional Activities. Again for the Cooperative Reseller, the marketing activities are also distributed between more than one staff in efforts to bring focus on each of the marketing programs: Advertisement, Promotion, and Communications
After the sales and marketing activities expand into full scope and some additional revenue start coming in, the Administration activities are implemented. The general administration staff is brought onboard. Preferably the staff is positioned as an Operations staff in a general float to support all operations, and grow to learn to understand the activities of the other staffs without being positioned to replace them. The Office or Operations Manager continues to hold on the role of accounts clerk assigned with the accounting activities consisting of book-keeping, invoicing, banking and bank reconciliations and general record keeping. Again in contrast, the Cooperative Reseller approach to the Administration may be structured somewhat differently: One more Administration staff may be brought onboard and the tasks distributed differently. For instance, reception and general secretarial works and record keeping are assigned to one staff and the accounting activities consisting of book-keeping, invoicing, banking and bank reconciliations get assigned to the other, such that the Office/Operations Manager remains focused on the Business Development matters.
Finally the integrating of the business becomes center-stage. First step in performing the integrating project is building the launching of the operations with the building of the operations core with a setup an IT network. Advisedly, the rational stance to building this network is to hire a System Admin to handle the building of the IT network; the employment could be either on contract, P/T or F/T, but the hiring may be imperative for efficacious network implementation. In any event, the IT network must include at the core a setup of a domain controller. A paramount driver for this implementation is to allow the common use of several of the office machines such as the printers, scan machines, and etc. Further, the network would need to include at least one database. Of course, the office machines, domain controller computer and the database should all be Ethernet wired, while the staffs are connected by WiFi so that each machine could be connected and disconnected from the network at will with a log -on and -off. The system administration station may also be tasked to move as many as the productivity software to the database computer but allow remote yet in-office access to help secure certain critical data by ensuring the data to be generated right on the same storage computer
The implementation of the network, and the database, in particular, leads to further additional reassignment of duties such as having all records stored in the database. For instance the general administration staff gets assigned the data entry work related to record storage in the database. Additional office productivity machines may also be brought in to facilitate the data entry jobs.
Meanwhile, the System Administrator may start working on the corporate communication, image marketing and other corporate operations related matters by creating an Internet presence of the Farm Produce Business entity. In doing so, the Systems Admin develops hosted Website and Mail-Server, and any other form of Internet data exchange systems appropriate. However, the manner of the hosting is mission critical and requires careful consideration. Indeed while there are many website and email hosting companies, it is not advised that any of them be used at this stage of the development. The preferred and recommended hosting plan should be the Dedicated Managed Server on a hosting platform. This plan though somewhat more expensive provides all the comfort and preservation of the business history. Indeed there are unscrupulous hosting company any that holds company history hostage in a riots ways and end up squeezing the company. In any event, the recommended plan entails the leasing of a server of a hosting company dedicated to the company exclusively. The company's website and email records are the directly managed by the System Admin ensuring a regular backup and storage of the data.
Obviously as can be surmised for the Singular Reseller, Farm Produce Business, the business process aimed at routinizing the activities is usually taught to only one staff engaged for each operation, and so without redundancy the exiting of that staff after the farmer-entrepreneur dies leads to the closing of the doors. This is also the reason why many small businesses ultimately fail after the owner expires. The Cooperative again is different as because of its size may not be able to remain frozen in this stage. Because of its larger operations may also have redundancy - better termed duplicate skills; of staffs.
Besides, the Cooperative Farm-Produce Business is firmly disconnected from the founder-entrepreneurs personalities and therefore can survive the founder farmer-entrepreneurs, when any or all of them expires.
Elicited here is the stage of ventures development at which small businesses exist. This knowledge is useful to the farmer-entrepreneur in the sense of the scope and limitations of the operations that this awareness defines. Clearly, this is also critical knowledge for the farmer entrepreneurs who may want to grow past this point as a result of large volume harvests from farm size increases or go through a merger of the Farm Produce Business with the plan of growing larger for stability or otherwise. Ordinarily though, the Cooperative would grow past this point. The structured didactic presentations leading to the forming, at least, of a self-sustaining small business of Farm Produce Business has drawn upon various features from the contents of the Green Subsistence Farming publications also on this platform and so then much deeper insight into the interactive affectation is gained from the Green Subsistence Farming, by continuing to keep abreast of the presentations on the this platform.