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Chickens and Eggs

My brother-in-law James started raising chickens this year. This is a perfectly respectable thing to do in Macon GA, and it's a good idea almost anywhere. James bought 20 little chicks, figuring about half would not make it to adulthood.

Miraculously, almost all survived, and pretty soon, James had to build a chicken pen, then a full blown chicken house. Right on cue, they started laying eggs, and now James's chicken enterprise is generating a dozen eggs a day. Trouble is - James and his wife don't eat a lot of eggs, so there is plenty of surplus for me when I visit.

James's chicken farm is like a lot of businesses - most folks don't plan for either success or failure - they just start feeding the chickens and watch what happens.

A better way to do this is to plan for success, and grow your business into that plan. One of the best books on this is The E-Myth Revisited.

Another key to survival of a small business is the ability to expand and contract fairly rapidly based on business conditions. You never know how many of your chicks will survive, and how many will be roosters rather than hens.

These days, it is a lot easier due to the multitude of out sourced services available. You can contract out (and use what you need) almost all aspects of your business - from space to people to systems. Just be careful you hang onto your core folks, and don't put all your Systems eggs  in the same basket. Get your phone, email, website, etc. from different vendors, so it's unlikely they will all go down at the same time (unless the blog below happens).

And most of all, you need to love what you do, since you will be knee deep in chicken droppings and be eating a lot of eggs if you are successful.

Update: James Cullen Pritchett passed away April 11, 2010 suddenly at the age of 53. Be sure to love what you are doing, since it may be the last thing you do.

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