Across the US, it isn’t a lack of capability or effort stopping advisory practices from growing. It's structure. JC Ag Financial Services supports over 110 farms across the US — here's what their operational foundation looks like, and what it means for practices trying to grow.
JC Ag Financial Services supports over 110 farms across the United States, from Washington to Maryland, Texas to North Dakota. As a business, they don't advertise. They don't cold call. They don't even have a website.
Owner Jarod Creed and his team have grown their practice entirely through referrals
But this article isn’t about their referral strategy, or how to market a practice. It's about what had to be operationally true before that kind of growth was even possible — and what it means for advisors who are trying to build something similar.
Fundamentally, a scalable ag advisory practice runs on live data.
Before JC Ag had the data foundation they run on today, supporting clients was significantly more difficult. Schedule F data from CPAs, estimates from the bank, university budgets, the farm’s own numbers … everyone worked from something slightly different, and almost all of it months out of date.
The problem was that the best information everyone had at that time was consistently incomplete.
In Jarod’s words, that meant some farms thought they understood their cost of production, but were “actually 20, 30, or 35% off from reality.” For some farmers, that was survivable. But this was coming out of COVID times, with grain markets moving hard and inflation running through input costs. Navigating this well required something better than guesswork.
Learn more: Variable Expenses Are Flat. So Why Is Cost of Production Still Moving?
Incomplete data coming from disparate sources, all of it out of date — this was a structural ceiling that meant practices like JC Ag couldn’t scale.
"From impossible task to reality. That's the easiest way to put it,” he said in a recent webinar. “When you start collecting Schedule F data from a CPA, or working with a budget that was created by the banker and the farmer, it was a consistently incomplete dataset, and it just resulted in guesses all over again."
"The fact of the matter is, we couldn't do it before.”
Jeff Janssen runs the financial operations side of JC Ag. The first thing he does when onboarding a new client is connect every bank account and credit card associated with the operation.
"If we don't have complete information, we're not making 100% accurate decisions,” he explained.
From there, he pulls at least 12 to 18 months of transaction history to establish a baseline. Then the team can start working with live data: reconciling new purchases within at most a few days of each transaction clearing.
The JC Ag Rhythm in Jarod’s Words: "I like to explain to the farmer in black and white: 'I swipe my card today, the transaction clears the account tomorrow.' Within 48 to 72 hours, that transaction has been reconciled and allocated down to a crop year, allocated down to a crop, allocated down to a field level where necessary — and in turn, those actual expenses are now being measured up against a budget so we understand whether we are tracking above or below the forecasted budget into the end of the year."
Learn more: Why Traditional Accounting Tools Are Failing US Farm Clients
Part of what works about JC Ag’s system is that, as Jarod puts it, their referral network tends to bring in producers who want to treat farming like a business, and are really eager to get a better grasp on that side of their operation.
And the value JC Ag can deliver to them is specific — as Jarod frames it, they have the ability to give producers a clear picture, not just looking backwards but forwards too.
“There’s one thing of being able to tell a producer that they’re at a breakeven,” he said, “versus being able to explain to a producer that they are staring down the barrel of generating hundreds of dollars an acre of profitability by taking XYZ steps.”
“It’s making a complicated business model a black and white picture.”
JC Ag has been able to scale advisory to over a hundred clients across America because it has its fundamentals right: modern infrastructure on both the financial and production side, feeding a complete picture of the farm to the whole team in near real time.
Jarod and Jeff don’t need to spend all their time chasing data, rebuilding models, and maintaining custom files. And neither does your business.
What stops most practices from growing isn’t the quality of the advisory, it’s getting stuck in that manual work. Learn more about how to change that — delivering planning, budgeting, and forecasting consistently across every client — in our free guide, The Modern Farm Financial Planning Framework.
Or, read more about JC Ag’s story by downloading their full insights here.