Is money the ball, or the game?

When you play a game, do you get caught up looking at the ball?  Or do you make sure you watch the game? 

It seems that the way we view profit at Wyndham has drawn a fair bit discussion lately, we consider ourselves similar to everybody else, that may or may not be the case.  I thought that I would take the time to describe how we view profit so that then you can see how we “roll” at Wyndham.

Now when I mention the word “profit” most people think of money, that is certainly one way to profit, we also look to the environment to profit, the people and even the livestock health.  In fact cash profits can be very short term, while environmental regeneration and the health/wellbeing of people are capable of locking in more long-term profit.  We view money as fuel for our business and yes that is a resource that needs to be considered when planning, it isn’t as finite as land or people.  Another reason we don’t focus on monetary profit is that decision making can very easily compromise the long term profit, by long term I’m not talking 5 yrs, more like 50yrs+.

I have been told by many that economics factors in people, the environment and other associated issues with running a business.  Now with my knowledge of complex ecosystems and sciences inability to fully understand the interrelationships involved in them I doubt that very much.  So I would consider it inaccurate for an economic value to be put on my health/relationship or the health of our landscape, for example, besides that isn’t the language we speak.  Unfortunately an economic value may be required on the landscape so that our society values it, which tells a story about our community.

I love reading about leadership and the qualities/thinking associated with great leaders, now in my reading great leaders spend time improving their core resources (Mainly the people), with the end result being they make more money/returns.  So we look at that and say well if we focus on improving our land, making sure the people are right, then money will turn up.

If you have taken a look through our website you will see that we have no specific goal for profitability or money at all and this is a function of our view of it.  So with that in mind there is more than a fair chance that we won’t be multi millionaires that is absolutely fine by me.  We set our goals around being “pasture growing millionaires”, so if we grow the most productive landscape then we have a major resource.

You might read through this and think that we are just a hobby farm not making much of a profit, more a feel good option.  The driver behind us taking this pathway is our strong values and principles as well as our LOW equity levels.  By following our values and principles the people are very happy, we all work as effectively as possible and by protecting our physical/human resources we become more of a low risk business.