"A trusted advisor is someone you’ve heard your mates say is really good. Someone who, when you go talk to them, actually sounds like they know what they’re talking about."
— Rob Steele, Neer Enterprises
Rob Steele chairs Neer Enterprises, a family-owned business running three dairy farms in the Masterton and Carterton area. It's a well-run operation, but after years of being "price takers" — subject to whatever milk price the market handed them — Rob and the family wanted more control over where the business was headed.
They'd tried a couple of external accountants before, but they couldn't do the advisory piece — looking backwards, not forwards, to better protect the farm against milk price volatility. For a business used to holding itself to a high standard, that wasn't enough.
Enter Brett Wooffindin from Sidekick Rural.
What Rob wanted from Brett was someone who'd push back, someone who could challenge what the team was doing, and pitch how it might be done better. Seven years on, they're now one of the highest-performing dairy teams in New Zealand.
Watch their story to see how Brett is helping the Neer Enterprises team look further ahead — using tools like Milk Price Protection to make better decisions sooner, rather than absorbing the impact later.
Transcript
Rob: The family cares very deeply about the community and about the people they work for and work with. Each time you come to make a decision, is this actually going to grow an opportunity for the farm, for the people on the farm, for the wider community, for the stakeholders and shareholders of the business?
Rob: In farming, the key thing for us, and the most recent issue that we’ve been trying to deal with in terms of managing risk, is what price we get for our product.
In effect, in the past, we’ve been price takers. The milk price is the milk price. Being subject to that without being able to influence it in any way has created years where we’ve had very good surpluses and years where we’ve had losses. So it’s like riding a roller coaster in some ways.
Recently, becoming aware of a product offered by StoneX and Figured to actually set a base price for the product while still enjoying some upside is something that really intrigued us.
Brett: So the milk price protection tool by Figured and StoneX is basically an option. It’s what we call a put option. So it creates a floor in your milk price. Effectively, it means if the milk price drops below that floor, you still get paid that price. If it goes above that floor, you still get the market price.
Rob: Sidekick have been involved with Neer for, I think, seven years at least. The reason the business chose Sidekick is we’d heard some great things about Brett — the fact that he actually does care about his clients and the business, that he understands that business, and that he can provide a challenge to Neer to think about what we’re doing and how we might do it better with technology, the information you can get, and the products that are available.
Brett: There’s no reason why volatility needs to be impacting your business today.
We would strongly encourage more engagement with us, with the idea of trying to project out where you’re going earlier so we can make better decisions earlier. That’s a really key part of what we’re trying to do.
But also just to have a different opinion. We’re seeing a lot of clients who have all got different situations and have all had different experiences, so just sharing what people are doing differently with others — part of that learning and development is critical.
Most of our better clients — volatility doesn’t affect them at all because they accept it. They manage it where they can. Where they can’t, they’re aware of where it’s going and they’re making decisions earlier to stop the impact of that later, if that makes sense.
Rob: A trusted advisor is someone you’ve heard your mates say is really good. Someone who, when you go talk to them, actually sounds like they know what they’re talking about. Someone that you feel comfortable talking to and can relate to.
In our case, that’s Sidekick.
Read more about how Sidekick Rural is providing value through accountability in dairy advisory.
Or, learn more about the structures, habits, and tools that make Brett and Rob's relationship a success:
