Over the past 2 months, most businesses would have sat down with their accountant for an end-of-financial-year tax planning meeting. These meetings are valuable – they’re scheduled every year, have a clear purpose, and finish with defined actions and deadlines.
But it raises an important question.
How often are you holding profit planning meetings?
If your business is making time to plan for tax once a year, it should be making time to plan for profit at least quarterly.
One of the simplest ways to build this habit is to schedule a quarterly Working On The Business (WOTB) meeting. Taking time to step away from the day-to-day allows you to review performance, challenge assumptions and identify the decisions that will have the greatest impact on profitability over the next 90 days. So, what should be on the agenda?
One of the most valuable conversations you can have is around Cost of Production (COP).
Unlike the price you receive for your livestock, COP is something you can influence. You can reduce costs, improve production, or ideally both. It puts our focus onto a metric that we have true control over.
Our latest industry benchmarking, powered by FarmEye, highlights why this matters.
The data shows that the top 20% of businesses aren’t consistently outperforming because they’re receiving dramatically higher prices. Their advantage comes from maintaining a significantly lower Cost of Production, giving them the resilience to remain profitable even when markets soften.
That’s why COP is much more than a financial ratio – it’s a measure of how robust your business is when conditions inevitably change. It is one of the strongest indicators of your business’s resilience.
Whether you’re already benchmarking your business or just looking for a better way to make decisions, quarterly profit planning meetings provide the discipline to turn information into action.
If you’re a FarmEye subscriber, your quarterly benchmark results provide the perfect foundation for these conversations. If you’re not yet using FarmEye, our industry benchmarking gives you access to meaningful insights that can help you understand how your business compares and where your greatest opportunities lie.
And you don’t have to do it alone. Through bespoke coaching and consulting work available to anyone, an RCS Advisor will work alongside you each quarter to interpret your financial results, facilitate your WOTB meeting and help you leave with practical actions – not just another report in your inbox. Because better decisions, made consistently, are what drive long-term farming and grazing profitability.
As we talk about in the Grazing for Profit School – focus on maximise profit first, then look at minimising tax.
When is your next meeting to focus on maximising profit?
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