How can i industry sign banking kentucky business plan template
good afternoon everyone and welcome to this edition of the aquaculture webinar series this series is brought to you by the national aquaculture association north central regional aquaculture center and the united states aquaculture society and designed to enhance aquaculture production and educational opportunities throughout the United States today's webinar is entitled aquaculture business planning and will be presented by Matt Parker aquaculture business specialists with a University of Maryland extension matt has more than 20 years of experience with aquaculture in the southeastern US working on marketing and economic issues related to a variety of aquaculture businesses he focuses on striped bass crawfish and more recently oysters matt has spent the majority of career educating aquaculture producers about the needs for proper business planning and assisting them with writing business plans and finding financing Matt's goal is to advance the u.s. aquaculture industry by helping producers develop financially stable businesses with realistic financial expectations thank you for being with us today Matt take it away I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in and joining us today for our aquaculture business planning webinar from the registrations I see we have a wide variety of people from industry participants to NGOs to government folks to extension to interested parties as well as a wide range of people with experience and production levels and lots of different species represented here in Maryland we tend to focus mostly on moisture aquaculture so most of my examples and pictures will be from will have moisture aquaculture phrases and examples in them but you can use the principles for any species so if I'm talking about an aquaculture lease you know that could also be a tank and a tank system or it could be a pond in a pond system or a line in a longline system so the the principals will be the same no matter what species just think of substitute whatever species you're interested in as aquaculture or excuse me if for esters so aquaculture takes many forms especially when it comes to oyster aquaculture you know you may have a remote tank operation you may have cages somewhere you may have floats they might be bottom cages just like you might have ponds or recirculating systems or aquaponic systems or cages and floats in pond to FIFA shing operations you know it's it could be anything that's grown in the aquatic environment and the principles behind the aquaculture business planning will be the same no matter what you're growing so what we'd like to talk about today or things that we generally have available or we were talk a little bit about the business of aquaculture and the impacts on what impacts farm profitability a little bit about some types of financial tools that are available I'll touch on the business plan some if we have enough people that indicate they would really like a focused how to do a business plan webinar sometime we can put one of those together in the future but I thought I'd keep it fairly brief or fairly general to go over to keep everyone kind of involved and then if you're interested in shellfish production we have some spreadsheets available from the University of Maryland to help analyze your business and there are others around that I could point you to for other species for fin fish or recirculating systems so your business plan you know you start off with a lot of questions you want to know if something's going to work what happens if it doesn't so your business plan is going to have all types of nation in it a lot of this information you've got it in your head already it's just taking it and putting it down on paper and a lot of people feel intimidated by putting it on paper but I tell them all the time it's all in your head you just got to write it down and once you write it down there are people and resources available they can help you organize it into something a little bit more formal but if I you're trying to get me to help you with it if it's all in your head and you don't put it down then I have a hard time helping people with getting their business plan written and put together so first we'll talk about the business of aquaculture and impacts on farm profitability so the first thing is you need to start thinking about aquaculture as a business you know raising fish raising plants raising oysters that tends to be the easy part running the business is what tends to be the hard part making the money work to achieve the financial outcome that you would like lots of times this has to do with having really good records of every presentation I've given I mentioned record-keeping because everyone could do a little bit better job with record-keeping we're going to talk about the cost associated with aquaculture production a little bit about sales and marketing and then at the end like I said we'll have time for questions as long as you put them into the Q&A box I can kind of go through them and answer them as we go or at the end so thinking about aquaculture as a business one of the first things you need to do is to set your goals if you don't know where you're trying to get to then it's really hard to develop that plan to reach your goal so we're talking about goals in just a second so you set your goals you write your plan to reach your goals you put that plan in action and your business plan should be a living document where it doesn't just sit on the Shelf forever after you've written it and you never look at it again you should pull it out periodically and evaluate how your business is doing compared to how you thought it would do and then if you need to adjust your plan to make those goals you know to meet your goals then that's what you do so this should happen probably at least once a year sit down and evaluate your business to see whether or not you've met your goal your financial goal your production goal your expansion goal anything you want to do it's kind of like going on it going on a trip now I use Waze a lot if I don't pay attention to what ways it's gonna tell me on my phone and the directions from the GPS I missed the turn and I end up somewhere where I did not intend to go um usually that's not a big deal but in your business it could be the difference between a profitable business and going out of business and losing a lot of money so goals a good way to think about your goals is to think of try to have SMART goals so SMART goals are specific they're measurable they're achievable they're relevant and there's some sort of timeline involved so specific goals could be something along the lines of you want to increase your profit decrease your production costs you want to increase your production you want to expand it needs to be measurable how much of a change do you want to see so this might be I want to increase my production by 10% and the next year I don't want to increase my profit by $50,000 in the next five years and if you don't have a way to measure it you won't be able to figure out how far you are along and trying to achieve those goals they must be realistic and achievable if you come to me and you say I would like to make 1 million dollars in aqua in the first year that's probably not going to be realistic and not really going to be achievable unless you have some special something that nobody's ever heard of and they don't know they want until they see it so it needs to be achievable improving by 200% probably isn't realistic either it also needs to be a relevant goal is this the right economy for this type of goal say you want to expand you need to borrow money but interest rates are through the roof 19 20 percent from the bank it might not be the right time to borrow money to expand your operation or if is the goal too large it's kind of like relates back to achievable do you want to go from one hanger 100 acres of catfish to 1,000 acres of catfish in the next year you know it's just probably not relevant or achievable or probably worthwhile and then finally timeline how long does it take to do it um it might be a week it might be a month it might be in one year it might be 10 years it just really depends on what your goal is and how complex it is for example if you've had a investment of five million dollars into a giant aquaculture venture you know getting that five million dollar investment back in the next one year might not be relevant or achievable however if you do it want to do it in 10 or 15 years depending on what you're growing that could might be achievable and relevant but you've got that goal that you can measure you can see what's going on so now we have to develop a plan to reach our goals and this is your business plan you gather information about your business and that's going to be production information financial information marketing information you want to evaluate the current state of your business and looking at different financial positions or financial ratios is a good indicator if you're not in business yet you know the current state of your business is nothing so you want to try to forecast out where your business might be in one year in three years and five years and so on and then you determine what steps it might take you to reach your goal of getting your business started or continuing operations or increasing your profit or getting to a break-even price any of those things and then if you're already in business then you want to make some changes such as expansion estimate the benefits of the changes versus the cost of implementing those changes so if you are raising I'd say oysters and you want to switch to mussels you know the cost might not be that big of impediment to implement that change and you might get some benefit but let's say if if you could there's a new piece of technology out there and it's going to cost you 100,000 dollars to implement this new greatest whiz-bang piece of technology but it only lowers your cost of production by one penny you know that probably might not be the benefit to to justify the cost of that type of technology or change to your business so then you take all this information and you're gonna write your business plan so all that information your production information your marketing information your financial information is all compiled into that business plan and it gives you a map of where you where were you where you'd like to go and if you're already in business or you've been evaluating your business from from going for a while you know it can show you where you've been and what changes you've had to make and your business plan will help you and others such as financial institutions understand your business your goals and what you want to do there's very few of us who are independently wealthy who go into starting aquaculture businesses most people have to take out some sort of loan at some time and in order to do that your financial institution wants to see a plant and they're not going to go in let you sit down and just tell them what you want to do and say give me a hundred thousand dollars they're gonna want to see a plan to use that and so they can evaluate to see when they'll get paid back so all that type of information will go into your business plan generally you'll start with a executive summary just a one-pager one and a half pager and then you'll go through all the important information down to the nitty-gritty details of what your business is going to grow how its going to grow it where you're going to sell it who you're going to sell it to who's going to help you do it employees that you have and your past financial information if you've already been in business or any pro forma or expected or forecasted financial information so let's fast forward and we've we've got our business going for a while now we're going to evaluate our business you know as I said this could be done weekly monthly seasonally or annually it really depends on your markets and your production schedule so if you're in the southern US or in Kentucky and you're raising macro break IAM and you have a short production season you know you can do it a couple at the end of the the season if you're growing oysters that take three to four years to really to market size you know you want to take a look at it annually but also you know it's a long time for that crop to reach maturity for you to figure out exactly how things are going so it would depend on your markets in your production schedule I would recommend at least a yearly business evaluation you know you have to file taxes every year so it's a good time to sit down with your accountant and go over everything at least once a year that way you'll kind of know what's going on and where you're sitting and I highly recommend having a tax accountant or someone like that to help you with some of these some of these things as you go forward as you're evaluating your business determine which goals you've met which ones you did not meet and whether they're still relevant and figure out why you didn't reach them and how you're gonna proceed for the next time period after you've evaluated the success of your plan or the failure of your plan as the case may be you can figure out what you need to do to meet those to reach the goals you did not meet me so oh we her Akane came through and wiped out everything well there's not a lot you can do about a hurricane but you can kind of make plans to deal with your financial institutions or your partner's or decide if you want to continue the business those types of things and if you've met all your goals set some new goals try to get bigger try to get more efficient production try to lower your production costs expand your operation if everything is going that great and update your business plan to reflect these new changes and goals it's like I said before your business plan is a dynamic document that provides you guidance for your operations while being always open to modification and improvement don't write it throw it on the get your money from the bank or whoever throw it on the shelf and never open it again you know that's that's just not a good business practice I'm sure there have been some folks that have gone on to be wildly successful in business or aquaculture or some other field that never wrote a business plan but I bet that they would have done a little bit better or had a little bit better idea what was going on if they would have written one in the past so our next topic that will cover that will really help you with your business planning is record-keeping so why do you want to keep records well it helps you learn from past experiences it can help you predict future production can help you determine the cost of production and calculate break-even prices which helps you know if you're making money or you're losing money can help you obtain financing figure out future sales and helps you evaluate the success of your Aquafarm you know I I did an internship on a striped bass farm um when I was in graduate school and the owner told me you know we really thought we would remember where we put all those electrical lives that we buried to our tanks but you know what after 20 years they had forgotten where all those electrical lines were so you know if you had to dig up anything you had to shut the power down to that particular section of outdoor tanks you had to make sure when you were digging you didn't hit any lives if you did you fix them you had to make sure the fish were ready so that they weren't gonna die and it wasn't the weather was it bad so keeping records can be a really good and helpful thing so what types of records can we keep well we can keep production records which could be a daily harvest a seasonal harvest a monthly harvest whatever your production schedule is and then financial records so sales your cost of supplies labor equipment purchases loan payments tax payments we did a workshop in Maryland last night about tax management and had an accountant talk and I've learned there is no shortage to amount of record-keeping you can do to help keep you covered for anything in the future you can do so the more records you can provide those professionals to assist you the better off you'll be so you might have daily record
so for if your for your shellfish farm or your pawns or your tanks you might be collecting water quality data you know especially in the hot summer time and ponds you know what's the oxygen what's the temperature what's the weather like how things have been going any time you harvest you should write it down so that you'll know what is in your pond or on your lease or in your cages um these harvest and daily records can be used to help determine your production costs seasonal records so like chronological records of what goes into your farm and what comes out of your your farm seed fingerlings shell harvest mortality is a big one if you don't write down that everything has died if you had a problem or don't quantify it in some way you could end up wasting a lot of money by feeding an empty pond or over feeding upon in ecology more water quality problems personal consumption you know that's a big one if if you're pulling out lots of your product to give us samples to chefs or to restaurants or whoever you know write it down because that can add up over time or I've got shellfish sample data here but that could also be fingerling sample data or sample data of the fish or whatever else you're growing to see how they're grow or to see how they're growing throughout the year to make sure nothing's going wrong so I've got just a quick example record sheet here for say an oyster farm or a muscle or clams or something like that where it's May first we stocked a hundred and fifty thousand baby oysters we measured our dissolved oxygen we checked the salinity we put it into quadrant one or field one or whatever in June we pulled some out and we sent them off for disease testing we priced it or written down which which area those came out of whether it was quadrant one or two four and then the next month you know we put another 150,000 baby oysters in in this particular quadrant - in August you know we harvested 10,000 Easter's we took a though excuse me though water quality information and where we sold them to where those were going to and all this can be very helpful with your production to figure out what you've got eighty one time knowing which pond different sized animals are in where to harvest from if there was if you stocked a bunch of animals and they died but you didn't take the oxygen level in the water was it the oxygen or did you get a bad set animals from the hatchery something happened if everything's good on your end you know maybe it wasn't your ponds or something you did maybe you got a bad set of animals so it's marrying for it to keep keep good records in that sense and then we've got financial records so sales records the total number of animals that you've raised and sold and what whether you do it by the pound by the each by the bushel the price you received who you sold it from what form was it in what did you head off Macker break IAM whole macro breaking frozen boxed on ice shelled product shuck product whatever it is write it down and then that way you can keep track of wind that person pays you which is always a good thing in your business is to get paid for your product also keep track of your cost of your supplies seed electricity utilities fuel how much you pay for each production input because if you don't know how much your supplies cost there is no way that you can figure out what your cost of production is to know if you're making any money I did some of these workshops in Myanmar in Southeast Asia a few years ago they were recording the cost of their feet but they did not record transportation or delivery costs so they had an idea of what their feed were costing them for fish but they didn't have the true cost of feed because they weren't including the delivery charges so there's little things like that it if you I always say if you can spend money on it write it down and then keep track of your labor you have paid labor it could be the hours the payment rate for each person you could have unpaid labor you should estimate an hourly cost for that should you have to go out and replace that person and hire someone you know how what kind of impact that would have on your business if you trade someone fish or oysters for work that is still a cost that you should keep track of and from what I learned from our accountant last night the in the US the IRS is very particular on what they call an employee so I would talk with your accountant to make sure you got all your ducks in a row all the paperwork that you should have and all the records that you could have so that you don't get into any trouble should you get audited by the IRS if you have equipment purchases you know what type of equipment that costs the loan information and this is another big one when it comes to your taxes the percentage of time is devoted to farm work so you need to keep a log if you use your pickup truck for work and for personal use if you don't if it's even if hundred percent farm use and you don't have that log the IRS will only allow you to claim 75 percent of the costs associated with operating that vehicle for the farm unless you have a log that shows it's 100 percent and you should also estimate the useful life of your equipment there may be certain standard useful lives for equipment that you should talk with your accountant about and this will be helpful when it comes to Kyle they depreciation which we'll talk about shortly some financial records like I said you know loan and rent payments if you've got a mortgage on the farm or a loan on the farm or you're renting dock space those types of things the principle amount interest amount who you paid the date your loan balance and a receipt number sometimes receipts get lost checks get lost in the mail somebody forgets to write something down the more records you have to back up your side of the of what's going on the better off you'll be and then tax payments sales tax income tax property tax you know the amount you paid when you paid it who you paid it to all of those types of information can be very important so like said why do we need to collect so many records so you're gonna take all these records and you that's what you fit used to figure out your financial position of your business profitability your business the cost of production if you don't know your cost of production how do you figure out a sales price that's gonna make you some money and then it can help you figure out market demand also so the different costs associated with aquaculture this is when we go into a little bit more detail on some of the definitions of some of these costs and what category they would go into and say an income statement or enterprise budget some of it will sound familiar from previous sectional record-keeping that's okay because it's important to know it's a variable costs these are costs that are directly incurred as a direct result of your farming business if you don't own an aquaculture farm you're not buying catfish fingerlings or oyster seed so that's a variable cost you know they may increase or decrease as your production increases are decreasing so the more fish you stock the higher the variable Costco and you might be able to allocate some of these costs to individual ponds or shellfish leases or particular tank operations if you've got more than one like your seed you know where it goes if you put shell down or fingerlings you know where it goes you know which place that or which lease that vessel was operating on you know where people were working but some production costs might need to be allocated to the whole operation as a whole you know fuel because you know that that's where that truck was everywhere you know you bought a lot of fuel you keep it in your tank you know you don't keep track of where that thing goes every day electricity if you've got a hundred ponds you probably don't want to deal with the hassle of having 100 electric meters out there to monitor your paddle wheels or your pumps or whatever is going on and then some types of labor so when the guys mowing all the levees and the dikes and around the fences and that kind of thing you know that's kind of allocated to the whole operation so tracking some variable cost it's just a simple spreadsheet that I've put together here so you have a date a lease a pond number or a farm or a tank number the item that it is how many how much they cost per unit and the total cost so you can keep track of all this and add them up at the end of the year to figure out how much money you ended up spending so there's the seed or fingerling cost you know you have a choice you can buy seed or buy fingerlings or you can produce your own so when it comes to figuring out the cost of which is better when you buy seed you know it's the cost of the item any delivery charge if you're going to produce your own you have costs associated with producing larvae keeping brood stock keeping small nursery ponds the cost of and the technical ability in places to spawn the animals transport them to wherever they need to go in the time that it takes to do that with those animals so you got to figure out which is worth your time and effort you know is it is it cheaper and easier to buy seed or buy fingerlings probably when you're starting out it's a lot cheaper to buy cedar or fingerlings than to produce your own if you get to a point where you're so large you need that ability to do your own because you can't get what you need you know that might be the time to start looking into that side of the business in electricity you know you've got pumps you've got aerators you've got heaters for water and tanks sometimes you've got equipment to handle nets and tumblers and washers and fingerlings lights other equipment electricity really adds up you might can find other ways to reduce your electricity costs such as looking at solar options or wind options depending on where you're looking where you're at lots of times you can find grants to help you put in these types of items to help reduce your electricity cost I've had some growers tell me that they spend $200 a month on electricity for an oyster operation and I've had some people tell me they spend five thousand dollars a month on electricity because the pumps are running the coolers are running the refrigerators freezers they're running the equipment they're running so it can really add up and it makes you need to make sure you're paying attention to it and if you've got a pump that's not being very efficient or a tank aerator that's not being very efficient maybe you can look into a different piece of equipment to help lower that cost and then fuel you know you've got tractors you've got aerators you've got trucks you've got boats pumps generators other types of equipment fuel really adds up you know if you see that fuel prices are gonna go down and you've got the ability to store fuel on your farm it might be a good idea to buy when the price is low if you see something going on in the in the world that you think fuel prices are gonna go up really high maybe buy it now and hope that food prices don't go up or if fuel prices go high you've insulated yourself against that cost a little bit and then labor you know you might have full-time labor part-time labor seasonal labor family labor your own labor don't forget to pay yourself so all types of Labor should be considered whether they are paid or not and that's because if you have to go out and hire somebody it's going to be a cost so you should estimate how much that unpaid labor would cost you should you need to go out and hire someone and exchanging goods and services for labor is still a cost so estimate a cost of those goods or those services you've exchanged so you can get an accurate representation of what it costs and produce your your product and then there's maintenance costs everything breaks down at some point so you're gonna have to repair something you're gonna have to change the oil and the other fluids and your trucks and your tractors you're gonna have to lube up aerators you know the weed whacker is gonna die eventually you have to buy a new one you know everything breaks or needs to be maintained to keep it operational and keep it working to be like this picture where a hurricane came through you know that kind of or a big tropical storm that really messes things up when you're out in the water and also the cost to maintain buildings and structures every building probably needs a coat of paint every once in a while the doorknob breaks you know something like that the light switch breaks you know eventually something's going to need to be maintained on everything so all these are types of variable costs so now we're going to talk about fixed costs fixed costs don't change with your production so it doesn't matter if you produce one catfish or a million catfish you still have to pay the same loan amount to back to the bank so things like loan payments lease payments licensing fees those types of things tend to be fairly fairly consistent over time and don't change a whole lot so they're called therefore they're fixed so like I said lease and rent payments so you might have a shellfish lease might have to run a dock you know you might be renting the farm that you're on you know you might be renting ponds on somebody else's farm do you have government fees do you have loan payments you have equipment payments for land and buildings depreciation which depreciation is a non-cash expense and it helps you some value that your equipment or property losses due to age so like when you buy a new car for $10,000 and then you drive it off the lot and you drive it back on five days later and it's not at Carmack's and you change your mind they don't give you back what you paid for it you know it has depreciated in value and you may have a capital or investment costs that you would need to figure out you know purchases used to expand your building do you know do you need to borrow money for large pieces of equipment do you need more land to make your business grow or to make things go a little easier construction materials all these types are are costs that you've invested back into your business that you have to spit so I mentioned depreciation and that's a big one because it doesn't show up in your checkbook but eventually it's going to catch up with you so it's the annual devaluation of equipment over time and it's a non-cash expense and the way I like to think about it is it helps you show how much you may need for replacement now I used to give a quick depreciation example but after I met with our accountant and our workshop last night he told me there are about nine different ways to calculate depreciation so I just from now on my example is to consult with your tax accountant for the best way for your business to account for the depreciation before you make that big purchase he told me an example of there was a farm that they were taking 150 thousand dollars of depreciation for a piece of equipment every year for seven years when that eighth year came you know nothing changed but he had 150 thousand dollars less and profit that year just from no longer being able to write off that depreciation so it's a it can be a biggie it can jump up on you and need to plan for it alright so now we're going to talk a little bit about predicting sales and marketing so when you bid go to business school they tell you that there are the four PS of marketing but I've learned there are actually the five PS of marketing so the first is your product which is what you're producing your place which is kind of like where you're at where you're going with it what are you going to sell where you're going to sell it at the price you're gonna sell it at and they they stop at promotion which is how are you going to let people know about your business but when it comes to aquaculture there's this big fifth one called politics that could often be larger than the whole rest of it so let's just use Easter's for an example the market is going gangbusters for oysters right now but it's difficult to find a good place to grow oysters you can't grow oysters everywhere you can't grow them enclosed water because they'll make people sick if they eat them so that's a not really a political issue but that'
the politics and where those lines are set help you or would be part of politics or when if you want to ship product overseas so if you want to ship oysters to the EU I don't think you can do that from the US right now because there's some political discrepancies going on so if you want to ship internationally or maybe to a different state say you you're growing tilapia fingerlings and you want to ship tilapia fingerlings to a different state well you have to deal with the rules from that from the other state to be able to even drive through it before you get to where you're going let's use grass carp for example they've produced a lot of grass carp and Arkansas and some other places in the state well if you drive through South Carolina they're gonna want to stop your truck at the border to make sure that you only have grass carp but not something you're not supposed to have and then make sure that they're not going to get out in the wild and reproduce or anything so that's a extra step and extra time and extra cost that you have to deal with for traveling grass carp through the state of South Carolina there may be other issues like that when it comes to aquaculture and what you wanting to grow or what you're wanting to produce and it really comes into play and if you are transporting live animals that's when it gets a little bit tricky so when you go to sell your product there's a couple of different routes you can go you can go wholesale to like a distributor or to a processor and you can go direct to consumer or you might go direct to retails restaurant sales so if you're going direct to your consumer or director restaurant sales there may be additional licenses that are required especially when it comes to shellfish to be able to ship or ship and sell to these folks versus going directly to a processor or a wholesaler I had one wholesaler tell me that restaurants tend to be fairly notorious for being late on payments would you rather get one cheque from him or have to chase down eight or nine different payments and spend your time doing that so there's some key components of looking at your marketing look at your competition you know fish is a worldwide business you might be growing them in Maryland or Arizona or somewhere like that but your competition is everywhere I have a grower in Maryland who can get in harvest Noah sure today that would be sold for lunch tomorrow in Los Angeles you can get anything in the world in two days so your competition is everywhere think about a brand and then also try to write a plan and put down your marketing ideas to make sure everything makes sense so a couple more topics on marketing and sales good marketing can help you generate sales however high sales volume does not mean your marketing is good you know if you sell 100,000 pounds of catfish to the processor have you really done any marketing or did you just go to the processor you know there's a big difference so sales if this was a live audience with interaction I would have asked you this question before I showed you the slide but the only way to make money in aquaculture is to sell your product if you're not making money you have an expensive hobby and you should sell your product for more than it costs to produce it and how do we figure that out from all of that record-keeping that we've had so if you can't sell it you just got a hobby if you're losing money you've got a hobby you need to sell it for a profit to be a successful commercial venture so that all right so my sales file how do I know how to figure that out well you can look at your past sales history how much was sold what sizes were sold what price did they sell are there different types of the site different times of the year that you have better sales and other who bought your products getting customer feedback is critical for good decisions if you they'll let you know if something's wrong you know an unhappy customer tells five people a happy customer tells one you know so actually nowadays an unhappy customer tells the world on Twitter so if you figure out you can figure out what's wrong or if there's something that's not quite right it can help you and you can make a change it can help you in the future so sales people often ask well how do I figure that out well you know you can look at market trends from other industries or not other industries but other other producers and talk to them know what's going on if you can figure out sales trends you can help you plan your production so that when you might get be harvesting when prices are better and people used to say well Matt I'm not in business how do I know how sales and things are going well you can look at harvest records you can call around if you're dealing with shellfish you know those harvests have to be reported so here in Maryland I put together a graph of bottom culture aquaculture oyster harvest by month for the last several years and what you can see is there is a steep increase in sales in March and then that trickles down a little bit and then there's a little bit more of a bump towards the end of the summer and then it goes down to almost zero sales almost every single year from October until March again well from October to March is when the wild oyster season in Maryland for commercial harvest is open so the bottom culture guys have the last few years haven't been a lot of product in the winter fall winter because that's when the price was lower because of all the wild product that was on on the market so once the wild product went away the prices went back up and they started selling product so you can look at harvests if it's something like shellfish or if there's a competing product so if you're growing hybrid striped bass you can look to see when the wild striped bass season is to kind of get an idea of when things might have an impact on your price you can also look at figure out supplying demand you know generally as supply goes down price goes up the demand goes up price goes up it's kind of an inverse relationship so by analyzing supply and demand you can help plan your production for time there's a high demand like the oyster farmers in Maryland have been doing take advantage of higher sales prices which can help increase your profitability and it also helps you better predict to your cash flow so now I have a couple of business planning resources that I threw in here at the end since I saw a lot of people are interested in like writing business plans so you can go to - or I recommend all of these services I have used a quick plan before it is a free online tool then where you can write a business plan and it has all the sections spit out the focus mostly on traditional agriculture they also have a AG transition so if you want to pass your farm down to your children or your grandchildren a plan to help you do that smoothly or if you want to go out of business how to do that smoothly without being abrupt in the last year or so there's been one put up called fish biz plan org which focuses on the commercial fishing industry which could be adapted to aquaculture very easily and it is put together by the same people that did a clan comm and those are put together by the University of Minnesota Extension Center for farm financial management I believe it's really good products you can also contact the Service Corps of retired executives this is a small branch out of like the Small Business Administration and it's retired executives or business people who volunteer their time to help businesses write business plans and their website is WWF and then also you can contact your University Extension Service every state in the United States has a land-grant University that has an extension service with it and I'm sure there's someone there that can help you with writing business plans they may not be familiar with aquaculture but they can still give you a lot of helpful hints when it comes to writing business plans so here's my contact information should you have any questions down the line I can help you out a little bit or if you're watching this at a later date and you had a question feel free to shoot me a message and I'll I'll try to get back to you pretty pretty quickly you
