Each year as you work with customers you encourage them to set goals.  Undoubtedly, some of these goals revolve around financial management.  Within your credit analysis review, you are looking at the past financial performance of the individual farm or business operation.  In this process, you likely look at their individual trend performance and may also benchmark this against their peers.  Hopefully, the customer has also taken the time to evaluate their financial position and talks to you as their lender about the business goals they’ve set.  These may be things like, “Reduce fertilizer costs”, “Improve marketing”, “Improve yields”, “Improve profit margins”, etc. 

Have you ever considered with your customers the impact these relatively small changes actually have on the business?  I suggest challenging businesses to work to improve their margin management by 5%.  It may seem like a simple task, improving gross income and decreasing operating expenses by 5%.  But, this 5% improvement can have a significant impact on a business in any given year.  And then, think of the impact over the customer’s career!