No-one needs reminding of what has happened to the country and the structure of our working lives in the last 12 months. Needless to say, within our consultancy businesses, we have seen a great deal of change with how we communicate and work with our clients.

Many of our on-farm activities including technical consultancy have been able to proceed in a Covid compliant way. We have maintained social distancing and checked with farmers before visiting whilst minimising the time spent on farm.

For a lot of business consultancy and strategic planning work, Zoom calls have been a great way of bringing people together. Whilst they don’t work in every situation and do require a different way of acting at meetings, for example you cannot look people in the eye, and it is hard to gauge body language.

For many things such as:

1) Reviewing accounts
2) Documents
3) Actuals versus budgets
4) Bringing up to date plans
5) Submitting planning applications for new buildings
6) Holding family discussions where members are spread across the country
7) Bringing together a range of professionals including accountants and solicitors to make decisions and moving things forward it has been an invaluable way of getting things done.

Some of the key advantages are:

1) It is easier to book meetings because it doesn’t require people to be in the same geographical location.
2) You can make better use of each end of the day in order to have meetings and they tend to be more focused.
3) We have been able to have several meetings in quick succession e.g. to prepare a budget, finalise a budget and meet the same day to go through the budget and make any changes has brought a process that might have previously taken a couple of weeks to complete to a much more concise time period.
4) It has lowered our carbon footprint and travelling time and become more cost effective for the client.

Several clients actually prefer this as a means of carrying out work, although obviously we need to be on farm for a large part of the meetings.

To take advantage of the new norm book a no obligation appointment to see how we can help your business by contacting Max at maxsealy@fcgagric.com or your local FCG Office.