What is doing nothing actually costing your farming business?
“What is doing nothing actually costing you?”
I asked a client that question recently, and the room went quiet. Not because they didn’t know the answer. Because they did. They just hadn’t stopped long enough to say it out loud. I let the silence stay there. I didn’t rush to fill it.
Last month I wrote about whether your business is ready for growth. This month I want to tackle a different question. If you already know what needs to change, what’s stopping you from acting on it?
Last year I wrote about why capacity matters, and how to audit it. The response told me something useful: most of you already know. You know you’re stretched. You know which tasks are draining you. You know, if you’re honest, exactly what should come off your plate.
So this new financial year, I want to ask you a harder question: what is stopping you from outsourcing?
I suspect your answer is rarely “I haven’t thought about it.” It is almost always one of three things, and all three are worth naming honestly, since none of them are really about logistics.
The cost you can see, and the cost you can’t
Outsourcing has a price tag. BAS and bookkeeping, payroll, an admin support person, a contractor for the spray run, all of these show up as a line in your budget, and a line in your budget is easy to notice and easy to resist.
Doing it yourself also has a price. It just never appears on your statement. It comes with the price of what else you could be doing with that time, and it shows up as the machinery maintenance pushed back until it becomes a breakdown in the middle of a spray window, or the finance documents thrown together the night before a meeting with the bank instead of prepared properly with time to make them count. Nobody invoices you for any of that, but you still pay it.
That client’s silence is the pattern I see most often. The cost was real, it just wasn’t measured. When you’re constantly busy, it’s hard to create the space needed to properly assess what that busyness is costing you.
The real comparison isn't the cost of outsourcing. It's the cost of outsourcing compared to the cost of continuing to do it yourself.
Trust is not the same as control
The second reason is more honest, and harder to say out loud. You may not outsource because you do not trust anyone else to do it as well as you would.
Sometimes that is true. More often, it’s simply unfamiliar.
There is a real difference between trust and control, even though they feel like the same thing from the inside. If you struggle to hand over the books, the compliance paperwork, or the succession documents, there is a good chance it is control you are holding onto, not trust you are missing. Control feels safe because it is familiar. Trust means letting go of something before you know how it ends, which is uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with the actual competence of the bookkeeper, agronomist or admin support person you would be handing it to.
If you outsource well, you have usually made peace with a simple trade: the work might be done slightly differently to how you would do it, different is not the same as worse, and the energy you free up by no longer holding it is worth more than the small loss of control.
What got you here won’t get you to the next stage
The third reason is the one you are least likely to say out loud, including to yourself. Many farming businesses have been built on self-reliance. For years, doing everything yourself, from the books to the spraying to the stakeholder communication, was a strength. It is proof of your commitment, proof of your capability, proof that the business genuinely needs you.
The challenge is that what gets a business to one stage is not always what gets it to the next.
Self-reliance builds a business and at some point, it can also become the thing limiting its growth. Once your identity is tangled up with doing it all, outsourcing starts to feel like a loss even when it is obviously the right call, and not because the business needs you to keep doing it. It’s because some part of you still wants to be the one who does.
This is worth sitting with for a while, because it rarely resolves with logic. Once you can say, clearly, “I am holding onto this because it feels like who I am, not because it is the best use of my time,” it stops being something that happens to you by default and starts being a choice you actually get to make.
Questions worth sitting with first
What is doing this myself actually costing me, beyond the obvious?
Am I protecting trust here, or am I protecting control?
Would I feel like I was losing something if I handed this over, and what, exactly?
Is this task something only I can do, or just something I have always done?
What would I tell a friend/another in my position to do?
Starting FY26/27 with your eyes open
Many clients I work with don’t have a delegation problem, they have a decision problem. They know something needs to change, and they haven’t stopped long enough to work out what is really holding them back.
Once we identify that, the actual delegation decision is usually straightforward. Not easy, necessarily, but straightforward. You stop arguing with yourself about whether to outsource, and you start working out the practical details of how.
The businesses making the strongest progress are rarely the ones doing everything themselves. They’re the ones making deliberate decisions about where their time creates the most value.
Through AgCelerate, this is a conversation I have regularly with clients. Most already know what needs to change. The value comes from working through practical solutions that free up capacity, allowing them to spend more time wearing the CEO hat and less time being buried in the day-to-day.
This article is general in nature and does not constitute financial or tax advice. I am not a tax accountant, and you should always seek independent financial advice before making decisions about your business, your finances, or your tax position. If you know you need to remove things from your plate but still haven’t made the move, that is a conversation worth having. Reach out directly or book an introductory call to explore whether working together through AgCelerate would suit your business.