Grant Young might never have discovered his talent for innovation if he had picked a more profitable line of work.
Young was just 22 when he returned to his native Newfoundland in 1988 to help run the Downhomer newspaper (now a magazine and website called Downhome) founded by his father, a Toronto policeman, and some friends.
It was a hit with ex-pats wanting to keep up-to-date on doings from The Rock, but it wasn’t the most lucrative business.
“We’ve had a good circulation, but advertising has always been hard for us,” says Young.
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“It’s hard to get national advertising for a niche publication, and we’re not a fit for many local advertisers.”
So Young began creating complementary businesses — and had trouble stopping.
“Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess, and we had to get into more things,” says Young. “One thing just spiralled into another.”
First came a Newfie-themed gift shop in St. John’s and then books about the province. The latter led to publishing and a mail order business. Building a website got Young into the website design and hosting business and then graphics and digital printing. And on it went.
It’s now a “lifestyle company” with 11 divisions, including Auk Island Winery, which makes “iceberg” fruit wines in Young’s childhood home of Twillingate, the iceberg capital of Canada.
But as it grew, it became harder to keep everyone in the loop. Naturally, Young found a creative solution, one that larger farm operations should consider.
Large farms are increasingly multi-family operations split into divisions, but when it comes to effective communication, it doesn’t matter whether you’re related or not.
“When you get to the point where you have divisions in your company, that causes divisions,” says Young.
“The first thing you start hearing is, ‘well, no one told me.’ Then you get people filling in that void in communication with their own version of the facts. That’s when the bickering starts.”
The problems typically start small. A new DVD lands in the store without advance warning.
You’re planning to spray but the cousin who runs the custom business never said he’d need both sprayers all next week. Each incident adds up and resentment builds. If you’re frequently hearing, “no one told me,” consider it the business equivalent of a fire alarm.
Young experienced this 15 years ago when the number of workers he employed, now at 53, hit double digits.
“When we were still seven or eight people, we got by on water cooler or hallway conversations,” says Young.
“But then that just wasn’t enough.”
Not surprisingly, he found an innovative solution. He’d once worked for a multinational chemical company that used a logbook to keep everyone informed.
Any noteworthy happenings at the plant were logged, and everyone coming on shift had to check for new entries and then initial the last one they read. The simple system chucked the no-one-told-me excuse out the window.
“Since we had different locations, a logbook wouldn’t work, so we created an intranet that we call an info database,” says Young.
“It was pretty rudimentary when it started, but it’s evolved. Now when you read it, your name is (electronically) tagged to it. It’s really become a mandate to become informed.”
An intranet is just a closed version of the internet.
At Downhome, all sorts of things go into it, everything from the employee manual to news of the latest ventures, such as a recent deal to sell Funky Puffin, Krooked Cod and other iceberg wines to China. Not everyone needs to know everything in the system, but if you do, it’s there.
The system works only if it’s transparent. Everyone in the company, from senior managers to part-time clerks, can see everything in the database.
“The other day we decided to put the inventory data from our winery on there,” says Young.
“The idea is it has everything you want to know. I’ve found there’s not a problem on Earth that can’t be solved with better communication.”
There are a number of intranet software programs and Young is considering creating and marketing an easy-to-use version for small businesses.
An intranet may sound too high-tech for your farm, but the same could once have been said about futures trading on your smartphone while riding in your GPS-controlled tractor.
As in every business, the most precious commodity on today’s farms is time, which means you need a smarter way to use it and ensure no one gets left out of the loop.
