A business lesson from Franklin the Turtle

My kids’ favourite show is Franklin the Turtle. They watch it just before bedtime with a bowl of Cheerios. I watch along with them. It always has some sort of life lesson, and one I remember well is from an episode called “Franklin and the stopwatch.” Franklin finds his father’s old stopwatch and starts timing how long it takes him to do things. He’s feeling pretty good about himself, but then he starts timing how long it takes his friends to do the same things. Rabbit runs a lot faster than Franklin. Goose can do puzzles faster, even when it’s one of Franklin’s own puzzles that he’s done so many times. Franklin goes from feeling good to feeling bad. He feels very slow, and sad. He gives his stopwatch away and mopes around the neighbourhood. The next day he hears cheering at the old stone bridge. His friends are cheering for snail, who has just crossed the bridge faster than he has ever crossed before. It still took him four hours, but it was a personal best. Franklin saw the race in a whole different light. The goal wasn't to beat your friends. It was to keep bettering yourself.

I’ve been thinking of this story the past week or so. A reader emailed last week to express his frustration with the “bigger is better” business model. He didn’t like the message from Terry Kastens, a Kansas State University ag economist, whom I quoted in the March 23 Grainews. Kastens says big and ever bigger is the way to go in farming. That’s where the big profits are, he says, and it’s probably true. But at the same time, this message is discouraging to smaller farmers who can’t see themselves expanding to 10,000 acres any time soon. So if you aren’t ready to take on huge new debt and start managing extra staff, should you just quit? I don’t think so. Like Franklin learned in the stopwatch story, aiming for personal bests is a lot more fulfilling for the vast majority of us who are not the fastest or the biggest.

Concentrate on yourself and your own business. Try to get a little bigger, generate a little more revenue, become a little more profitable every year. To know how much better you’re getting, you need a “stopwatch.” Your stopwatch could be an accrual accounting system that gives you a snapshot of where you business is at this moment. Take snapshots a few times a year and monitor your growth. Looking at our neighbours as benchmarks is a mistake when really, you don’t know much about their situation. One of the best benchmarks and one of the healthiest and most satisfying ways to grow is to know your own financial situation and improve it bit by bit.