At some point I’m going to have to try and track how much time we spend on “businessy things” as opposed to “the business”. The business is — riding horses, taking guests touring, stuff like that. Businessy things are taxes, bookkeeping, marketing, planning… It’s the difference between riding horses and being a desk jockey.
Not complaining.
At all.
Though I guess I’d be happier if I could do all of the desk-jockeying from the saddle.
Jeff and I sit down every year in the winter and go through a series of 20 questions about our business. There are the obvious questions like, “what went well? what didn’t?” Then there are the tougher ones like, “what new things are happening in your market?”
We’re like… ~blink blink~
Anyway, so we do that exercise and then when we’re done answering the questions we go over them together and then go over last year’s answers. Hilarity ensues.
I think at times our goal should really be to see how closely our answers reflect reality vs. our “dreams”. We were off the mark last year on a few things. For instance we really thought last year we could focus on a few events every year and that could be a good facet of our business. Pretty sure we didn’t do a single event last year.
We’ve been late this year in having our strategy session. We’ve actually been too busy. I know. Kinda funny.
It’s a valuable exercise, and we’ll still do it this year. I think part of the reason we haven’t is that the questions have become part of our regular business mentality. We are always thinking, “okay, this applies to the question about what we’d do differently next year”. We find ourselves discussing things in terms of the strategy we know we’ll be working on. In a way, it’s become something we do all the time.
The winery adds a new element to strategic planning. It is its own, separate business. But, we are still the same people. Our big question has been how we work the two together at the same time. We’ll let you know when we figure that out!
We’ve also tripled the amount of office work required of us. Wineries require a ton of paperwork. We’ll likely end up farming out the taxes, payroll, and reporting tasks.
Our marketing work is all social media and networking. That suits us. We like connecting that way.
But the “real” work — the business work itself of leading tours and making wine — that’s maybe only 60% of the work we do. I know, y’all thought we just drink wine and ride horses every day. Oh to lead such a charmed life!
