My first real farming job was at a farm on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. We would wake up early every Wednesday and load the pickup truck in the dark before heading south to a farmers market in Santa Monica. Just the thought of driving the overloaded little truck through L.A. rush hour traffic added a nice touch of stress to the morning.

My first week on the job, we arrived at market and began to set up a rather elaborate stand that included an overhead structure to hold long, gorgeous garlic braids (this was back when garlic braids were still new and kind of unusual). The structure had to be nailed together, and, unfortunately, we didn’t have a hammer.

The farmer sent me off to find one. One vendor finally directed me to an old Japanese farmer: “He’s always got his tools.” I got the hammer, we put up the stand, and the market was a success. And I came to two important conclusions:

1. When I got my own farm, I intended to be the guy with the tools, if only to help the poor kid who got told to go find a hammer on insufficient coffee; and
2. We had to do something to make certain we had what needed at farmers market.

I went home that night and put together a checklist to make certain we would never again get to farmers market without everything we needed to have a successful market. I’ve been a big fan of checklists ever since. We used them on our farm for deliveries, farmers markets, washing and packing workflow, opening and closing the packing house, and hooking up implements to the three-point hitch.

Here are a few tips adapted from The Checklist Manifesto for creating a great checklist:

1. Make them precise.
2. They should be efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations (hung-over, tired, or emotionally stressed).
3. Do not try to spell out everything. (again, brevity is important).
4. Provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even highly skilled professionals using them could miss.
5. Above all, make sure they are practical.

(The Checklist Manifesto is a great read, and even a pretty engaging audio-book!)

People feel better when they do things right. Unfortunately, conveying expectations about just how to do a job can confound even experienced managers – especially if you have inexperienced workers with very little idea of what a successful outcome looks like.

Even for experienced workers, incomplete instructions on the part of a supervisor can result in poor performance, even if they have done exactly what they understood needed to be done.

When you give somebody a new task, make it a point to check back in fifteen minutes later. That’s enough time for somebody to get started, but not enough time to do too much damage in most situations. Make it clear that it isn’t a matter of trust – you want to be certain you’ve conveyed the instructions and parameters correctly.

Management is its own job, and you only get the results you want by managing.

The office has always been an important part of my farm. Unfortunately, the farm’s office work often takes a back seat until the sun has set and the kids are fed. Too often, that back seat also means that we don’t take the time to make our office a more efficient, smooth-running part of our operation.

Here in northeast Iowa, we still have some snow on the ground. Before things get too crazy with spring planting, it’s a great time to look into some key time-saving performance upgrades.

Monthly Filing for Financials.  Stop filing your paper financial documents by vendor, account, or anything else. Start filing them by month, instead. After you’ve processed a receipt or a bill into your accounting program, just put it in a file labeled, “March, 2014.” If you find you need to refer to it later, you’ll be able to look up the transaction in QuickBooks, and cross-reference it to the correct month; finding the occasional receipt this way will take far less time than filing every receipt in its own alphabetical system.

Get a Headset.  Market farming is all about communication. If you have to kink your neck or use a hand to talk, you can’t take care of other things at the same time. You can’t type notes on the computer, you can’t enter orders or take messages quickly, you can’t water the plants while you’re waiting on hold.

In any case, you’re a farmer, and you don’t need a kinked neck leading to yet more chiropractor bills.

Learn Some Keyboard Shortcuts.  Every vegetable farmer knows that time spent moving your hands is time spent not working. When you have to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse, that takes time; and then you have to move it back. Every program has keyboard shortcuts, and most of them are the same across every program on your operating system. Learn them. They take a little more time than mousing when you are first getting used to them, but a few sessions spent intentionally not using your mouse will pay huge dividends.

A few of my favorites:

• Ctrl + x = cut
• Ctrl + c = copy
• Ctrl + v = paste
• Ctrl + n = new
• Ctrl + s = save
• Ctrl + a = select all text
• Ctrl + z = undo most recent action
• Home takes you to the beginning of the current line of text
• Ctrl + Home takes you to the beginning of the document
• Shift + Home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the current line of text
• Ctrl + shift + home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the document
• End works the same way, except that it takes you to the end of the line of text
• Alt + Tab toggles between open windows
• Ctrl + Tab toggles between tabs in your browser, or multiple windows in a program

By the way, most forms, whether in a database, in a spreadsheet, or on a website, can be navigated easily using the tab key to advance between fields. Type your first name, hit tab, and it takes you right where you want to enter your last name. Tab again to get to the address field. Shift tab takes you back to the previous field.

Browser-based apps usually have their own shortcuts. I use Gmail to manage my email, and the keyboard shortcuts (see this link) allow me to manage my entire inbox from start to finish without ever touching my mouse.

Besides, if I don’t touch my mouse, I can’t click on the bookmark for Facebook.

Supercharge Your Keyboard Shortcuts.  I have used a fantastic little program called ActiveWords since 2007 to do all kinds of things with just a few keystrokes. For example, if I type frwx, that immediately expands to “Flying Rutabaga Works”. Rsfx expands to Rock Spring Farm. Typing cellx expands to my phone number. Datex expands to today’s date in my preferred date format. Fsig expands to my business email signature; listx expands to the signature I use for list serves.

I find it especially handy to use ActiveWords for hard-to-type words, such as post-harvest handling or E. coli 0157:H7.

You can use ActiveWords to substitute text, insert formatted text, open websites, open programs, open files, open folders, and open control panels from anywhere you can enter text. Most of what you do on your computer you do over and over and over again; why not automate that, rather than clicking through multiple windows?

Over the years, I have used ActiveWords to facilitate answering emails (csafull could expand to the standard statement you use to explain that your CSA is full), make data entry consistent, share data that I can’t remember (whslx expands to the url for Rock Spring Farm’s wholesale sheet, http://www.rsfarm.com/WholesaleSheet.pdf; tfrlink (short for The Flying Rutabaga link) expands to the link to sign up for this newsletter), and input a formula in a downloaded payroll report.

Manage Your Passwords. Do you have time to deal with hacked accounts in August? Neither do I. Get LastPass to manage unique, high-security passwords for all of your accounts. LastPass uses a master password to bring all of your other passwords under one roof; an extension in your browser and an app on your phone make it easy to access and recall usernames and passwords for individual websites. I won’t pretend to understand the technology behind it, but I’ve seen enough referrals from people who do to go with it.

The LastPass browser extension also provides form filling; unlike the form-fillers that already live in your Chrome or Firefox browser, you trigger the form to fill. You can even use LastPass to store credit card information so that you can fill payment information quickly and easily, without having to let web stores store your information.

You can buy tools, or access land, or hire people, to increase your likelihood of success. But you can’t buy success.

Too often, we think that that one tool (one field, one person) will prove to be a game changer. But they almost never turn out that way.

The real game changers are:

• Farming skills – the real nuts-and-bolts knowledge gained through years of experience about how to get the work done.
• Acquired instincts – the year-over-year acquisition of that gut feeling that tells you when you need to plant instead of cultivate, harvest instead of transplant, or get back home to roll down the sides on the greenhouse.
• Real markets – where enough people are willing to spend enough money to buy a quality-differentiated food product.
• Business management systems – the development of systems on the farm that keep the important work of sales, employee management, and financial record-keeping and decision-making on track so that you can focus on farming.
• Knowing what success looks like – understanding what healthy crops, weed-free fields, and properly prepared produce actually look like. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t create it.
• Getting it right – you can spend all of the money you want, but if you (or your crew) overwater your transplants, drive the tractor crookedly down the row, don’t set the transplanter right, or don’t provide workers with the guidance they need to perform their jobs correctly, you may as well flush that same money down the toilet.

It’s easy to look at another farm and see their shiny tractors, fancy packing house, or automatic watering system and misidentify these as the source of their success. More often, success is the result of the unglamorous work of getting better at the game, rather than chasing after game changers.

I grew up in Seattle, so watching the Seahawks dominate the Super Bowl was a special treat. One of the best parts was watching coach Pete Carroll's postgame speech. Praise and praise and praise, all of it legitimate and all of it earned.

He praises the team members so much that they take it up themselves! Imagine what that means to everybody who worked so hard, to everybody that felt like they sometimes came up short, to everybody who doubted himself as he worked to accomplish something that stretched beyond his comfort zone.

I like to imagine a harvest crew having finished loading the truck for an early departure, and a farmer extolling their virtues: "We have done everything the way we wanted to get it done... I am so proud of what we've done... And how about that kale crew! Three people in two hours packed 240 bunches! And what about the CSA line! 200 boxes down the line in 87 minutes!"

It's too easy to let the small mistakes dominate, and we forget that at the end of the day - we got the truck loaded for market! We packed the CSA boxes! We hoed that broccoli!

"We're all we've got! We're all we need!" the players chant at the end. When we believe in ourselves, when we believe in our team, we play hard, we work hard, we have fun, and we succeed - together.

Employee performance is a function of outcomes compared to expectations.

If you want to get all math about it, Employee Performance = f (outcomes/expectations).

You can't evaluate employee performance without the ability to measure outcomes against defined expectations. If you haven't been clear about your expectations, you don't have any ability to evaluate outcomes - and more importantly, employees don't have a way to measure their own performance.

And ambiguity breeds poor performance.

When employees and teams fail to meet your expectations, the first question to ask yourself is, "Was I clear about my expectations?"

The basket of goods and services you provide to your customers has more in it than the explicit stuff. It’s not just the vegetables and the delivery and the newsletter - it’s the box you put the produce in, the label you put on the box, the invoicing system you use, and more.

People who buy your fruits and vegetables aren’t just buying produce and a newsletter, they’re buying everything that goes into buying that produce, from the way you present it to the story you tell about why and how you got into farming. Farmers market customers are buying clean and fresh farmers in addition to clean and fresh vegetables, and wholesale buyers buy a communication and delivery schedule in addition to their produce.

You can one-up the competition by doing exceptionally well at adding real value with service and consistency where your customers don’t even know that they expect it. At the wholesale level:

• Provide a clean, well-designed, and organized invoice, including your contact information;
• Use an email service like MailChimp to schedule availability notices at the same times every week (you can do the same with faxes);
• Promptly document credit requests for products that don’t meet expectations;
• Verify your customers’ overdue payment status every month, and let them know about anything that’s missing - including applying a credit to an invoice.

At farmers market:

• Clearly identify prices for your products where customers can easily see them (putting the price for radicchio on a chalkboard behind the stand does not make it easy for customers to identify the vegetable or its price);
• Be prepared with at least one “week-night” preparation for every product on your stand, and make sure your helpers have the same knowledge;

For a CSA:

• Provide a straightforward sign-up process (this doesn’t have to be an online shopping cart - Fair Share Farm in Missouri requires members to come to a sign-up event - the process just needs to be linear and clear in its description of options and process.
• Let members know what to expect in their share before you deliver it - at the same time every week;
• Make box return easy by providing instructions for unfolding boxes;
• At delivery sites, keep the boxes off of the ground to keep them clean and sanitary.

You’re always selling more than what you’re selling, and the extras are part of the price that your customer pays for their produce.

In agriculture, profitability has three components: scale, costs, and utilization.

You need to produce enough product to cover your overhead expenses. It costs the same amount of money and time to have a website or write a newsletter whether you sell $1,000 worth of carrots a week or $50,000. And many variable costs have a certain baseline to them - trucking and handling charges are often based on the pallet or the truckload, regardless of how much product is on the pallet or in the truck. The number of pallets is a variable cost, but each pallet costs the same whether it's carrying $300 or $3,000 worth of product.

You need to drive down your cash expenses as much as possible. Don't skimp on the water and fertilizer that make your crops grow, but don't pay more for them than you have to - unless paying more for them provides value in another way. (I try to buy my tools locally, and pay more for them than I would at the big box store, because my local hardware store provides tons of help and advice with smaller purchases; I buy seeds from a high-quality vendor rather than getting the sweepings from the seed room floor from a cheaper source.)

You need to maximize utilization of your assets - all of your assets. If you are in the crop production business, every acre needs to be working for you, whether it's growing a cash crop or next year's fertility. If you have employees, you need to maximize their productivity. If you are selling meat, you need to maximize your use of the entire carcass, getting the best price on every part of the animal. In the delivery business, your trucks need to run as many days a week as possible, and as full as possible whenever they are running.