“Become a More Savvy Consumer of Professional Services”

By now, if you’ve followed the process in a step by step manner, you have compiled all the ‘facts’ and feelings from everyone into a form that can be used with your professional advisors.

When you are able to get your advisors – attorney, accountant, financial planner, life underwriter, and any other professional advisors you have – on board as a team, the results will always be better than if you take the advice of any one of them.

Traditionally advisors come armed with ‘fact finders’ – forms to collect the data. Unfortunately these form turn out to be upside down, as are many of the plans they produce.

That’s because they are chocked full of numerical questions that seek data you are either unwilling or unable to produce

The process often grinds to a halt because these “facts” aren’t available or maybe because the actual facts are not fully known by the person charged with their delivery.

Many times the actual facts are locked in the desks of the lawyers and accountants who have compiled them over the years and who will not cooperate, often because they feel their important turf is being threatened.

Unless you take back control from these people, they can hold the entire process hostage and jeopardize the future of the farm.

When you do retrieve the data, information your advisors have collected, compiled, and calculated on your behalf – you have the basic information at hand that your team of advisors will need to do their work.

Your planning coordinator has been asking questions to ascertain the feelings of each person involved. In addition your advisors will need the specifics.

Family Information: To insure that they have the complete accurate information about your family they’ll need to ask a lot of mundane questions. Accurate answers are essential.

Family Background: Every farm family has a story, who homesteaded the farm, why they ran your great uncle off the place, how your family ended up owning the farm instead of the others, etc. Help your advisors understand your past – it will help them plan your future more effectively.

Balance Sheet Information: This is the key tool used by every professional advisor in helping their clients develop accurate management, estate, and ownership transition plans. At this stage you’ll be asked for honest unbiased estimates to get the process going. Later, before documents can be executed greater accuracy will be necessary.

When you (the planning coordinator) is working with a team of well qualified advisors and has provided them all the same honest, accurate information – the results will be superior to any single set of recommendations any one or two of them could have come up with.

If there was an end to the process of passing down the farm I would say you are at the end.

You have determined what’s important, you appointed someone to find out what everyone else feels is important, and along with your advisors you’ve determined what’s possible.

Now it’s up to your advisor team to put it all together in documents that will absolutely positively make certain that your wishes for the family and your goals for the farm will come true.

But there is no end.

Next I’m going to show you how to create a mastermind group made up of a few of your colleagues, other people you know, like, trust, and whose opinions you respect. people with no ax to grind and nothing to sell, with only your best interests at heart.

This mastermind group will help you with the long term planning – leadership and management training, and all those tough decisions going forward long after your paid advisors have left the building.

All the best!

Wayne Messick,