One thing you will need to have before you can begin in any business is a concept. This will be the focal point of your plan I blogged about earlier. I am going to use the cattle biz as my focal point for this blog (like you didn’t see that one coming). There are many areas in the cattle biz, seed stock, commercial cow/calf, stalker/backgrounder, feedlot.
You must first determine what it is you can handle. For example some people can only handle cows and calves. Some can only handle heavy feeders and not three weights. If you buy the kind of animals you can not handle it is an expensive lesson you are going to get to learn.
One way to avoid that expensive lesson is to know yourself. It is tougher than a lot of us think. You need to know what it is you really want to do, and what you don’t want to do. You need to know what you can do and what you can not do.
If you try to do something you don’t really want to do, you will do a poor job of it. If you do a poor job of it you can damage your self confidence. Which can begin a downward spiral. I know this guy who will only buy steers. He knows there are times he could make more money if he’d buy heifers. Thing is he knows he does not want to deal with heifers and might not do a good job with them so he sticks to steers. I know another guy who is in his mid twenties. He wants to get into cattle bad. I told him to background some calves. It’s faster paced and cash flows every few months. He didn’t think that was a good idea because he didn’t want to be married to them. Meaning he didn’t want to have to be there every day to feed them. He wants cows so all he has to do is check on them once a week. That was the smartest thing he could have said to me. If he had to skip his partying to feed calves on the weekends he would grow to resent those calves.
Mr Cattlemaster 