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I think the first thing to do is get comfortable with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when things come in and they're new, we're often bad at it. And as adults, you don't like that feeling of things being difficult or harder than they were, and it's just acknowledging that initially things are going to be harder before they get easier and just persisting through that. Hello and welcome
back to Shared Solutions by BCG. I'm Janine Batters and in this episode we're going to be speaking with Agrifocused's .
Carmen Quade who we have had on the podcast before. And I'm really excited to have again, she's going to be speaking with us about new technology in the farm office and how we can use it to not only make farm office work easier, but also how we can use it to make better decisions. And so we can be focusing more on what's important. So thanks so much, Carmen.
Thanks, Janine. Good to see you.
I'm so excited to have you back. And I should say, if our listeners haven't heard our last podcast with Carmen, I do recommend you go back and listen to that, because she is just a wealth of knowledge. And it was a really popular with our listeners . Carmen, And just for our listeners that don't know you, can you give us a little bit of a background on you?
Agrifocused is my side business. My main business is actually our farming business. So I farm in conjunction with my husband, and my brother and sister in law are also in our family partnership. So we're predominantly cropping and we're located at Tallimba, which is the northern Riverina of New South Wales.
And we've got a lot of qualifications, Carmen, you're very experienced. Can you just quickly tell our listeners?
So yeah, although they're dating me now, but I started off with a Bachelor of Business in Agricultural commerce, and then I've gone on to do a master's in accounting and had a stint actually lecturing at CSU in agribusiness and in accounting. And from that that led into my Agrifocused business now, which is more about direct to the farmer education rather than to, you know, graduate and undergraduate students.
We're so lucky to have you here today, Carmen. So can you tell us just for a start. So we're going to focus on a few things today. We're going to focus on some new technologies, some things that possibly some people are doing, but other people aren't. And then some things that we need to be doing now, definitely, if we're not doing them. So could you just start by giving us an overview of what are some of the things that are on the horizon?
Oh, it's getting really exciting. And I think the whole focus of it is reducing that mundane day to day repetitive tasks and automating all of those and more sort of voice recognition, text recognition. So with our bookkeeping systems, we see now, like if you're in Xero, someone can send you an invoice in Xero and it directly loads all the details into your accounting program. We're going to see more cross program, so you can send an invoice from MYOB straight into Xero. Or you can send them
Xero straight back into MYOB or everything like that. So why would.
You want to do that?
So instead of actually going there and typing in six bags of dog food, and how many thousand tons of fertilizer and whatever else, it's all loaded in there for you. Precoding all of that sort of stuff. It's all happening in an automated fashion. So it's just about you having those internal processes to say, yes, we've bought this stuff and yes, we're ready to pay the bill and we'll
see more of that text and voice recognition stuff. So basically being able to send a text to your accounting program and it might say Bill Joe Bloggs for 50 acres or 100 acres worth of spreading at $22 an acre, and it will do up the invoice and send it to him. And that's all you have to do. So that's not very far away in terms of text. It'll be a little bit longer with voice recognition, but it
won't be far away at all. So it's the equivalent of ringing your sidekick in the office, in the farm office, from down the paddock and saying, oh, can you just sort this out for me? And instead of it being a person on the other end of the phone, it's AI, or it's just a text message to an AI enabled computer program that will eliminate a lot of that admin for you.
So are you saying, just to clarify, say I went and ordered some chemical get the invoice. They're going to send me an invoice from Xero, and I'm going to be able to put it straight into MYOB , and I'm not going to need to allocate that.
That'll be where it'll go. You'll set up rules and things in the first place to, you know, so that identifies MAP as fertilizer and it identifies urea as fertilizer. And then that'll be the way that it will go. So there's certainly some things that are happening now that people will be doing in terms of directly emailing invoices
into MYOB or Xero or Phoenix and this OCR. So this optical character recognition is already reading some of those details in now in most of the programs, it's really quite capable of picking up the names of the businesses, the due dates and the amount. There's some programs out there. Dext is one of them that will read in every line item of the bill if you want it to. So those are sort of premium end products at the moment.
But like we know with all technology it starts at that premium end and then it tends to work down to the mainstream programs that are available at the average per month or per annual cost of subscription. So that's really not very far away at all.
So is Dext a different software or is that a plugin?
Yeah, it's like a plugin that works with Xero and with MYOB, similar to Hubdoc. You send your invoice into that. It does some of that early level processing and then shoots it through into Xero. which is better? It's all about subscription cost versus time saved. So for a business that's processing 70 or 90 invoices a month, I think something like Dext is just a really good option. For
a business that's only doing 10 to 15. It's a waste of money, and you're better off spending that somewhere else, perhaps within your farm office or your farm business, because you're not getting the time savings that you need. So it's all about, I think, balancing these things off like any tech, like any tool and saying which one is going to give me the best bang for my buck. Eventually they're all going to become very much mainstream, and we're all going to be getting that same sort of
functionality as those programs continue to develop. Yeah.
So does that mean that I wouldn't have to do any allocating?
It'll happen. It will happen. Sign me up! And look, even now there's you can set up rules in your existing programs so that it always recognizes. And you've probably got these in place already, but it always recognizes that electricity bill is to be coded to electricity and your rates are the same. It's only those really large ones that tend to be problematic with the multi-product rural suppliers.
So that might be elders or Nutrien or AGnVET or Delta or whoever you use where they've got potentially 16 different codes on one bill.
They take the time, they're difficult.
So there are some great things that people are doing now that perhaps are going to become more mainstream in the future. And there's a lot of people that outsource their bookwork, but there's an increasing group of people that are outsourcing it internationally. And I think that's really interesting. So they've got a VA or a PA that's typically based in the Philippines doing their farm admin for them from a different country. So that's sort of a bit
mind blowing for some people. It wasn't all that long ago where we were individually paying all our bills from cheque from home and posting them off, and now potentially the same businesses have got someone based in the Philippines that they've never met who's doing a lot of that data processing for them.
Not paying bills, though, just processing it.
Well, depending on the relationship that's got set up, commonly it's processing. But again, you know, with time and with secure relationships and more secure connections, some of the banks are putting barriers in place about those people paying bills for you. But you know, it will happen. It will definitely happen because there's people at that corporate end doing it. Now, as we talk about that drift of technology that eventually then flows down to the smaller businesses as well.
That's amazing that the trust involved there, I think. Yeah, it would be great though, wouldn't it, to just go. You do that.
Yeah. Off you go. Can you do that. Yeah. And again like the sort of relationship that you would have with somebody back in the farm office, typically we ring mum and we get mum to do it for us. You ring your wife and you get her to do it for you. So it's that sort of relationship that you would text or you would have little some communication channel or a jobs program, and you would just get them to do those little jobs for you booking motels, booking in car services, all of that sort of stuff.
That's common.
Yeah. And it will become, I think, more common in the future. But obviously those people are available domestically based as well. The difference, I guess, between the international and domestic is generally the cost. Outsourcing is such a fantastic way of freeing up time because not only are you freeing up your own time, you potentially paying someone to do it that's quicker at it than you are, so you don't shear your own sheep, because why? You probably could if you
had to. But the reality is that you're going to be slower at it and probably not do as good a job. So you pay someone else to do that. And it's the same when we outsource bookkeeping, we're just outsourcing to someone that does it quicker than us and better than us, which frees us up in two ways the time saved and the fact that it's quicker for them to do it and then, in the long run, potentially cheaper for us as well.
And that doesn't actually mean that you might spend less time in the farm office, does it? And it might just mean that you're spending more time on those, the management side of it and looking at your figures and thinking about, oh, I'm a bit overspending there. Or rather than just doing the, the allocating.
Oh yes, it's sure. So you move from this whole, oh, if you think of a finance department in any larger business, you've got financial admin or a finance officer that's sort of at that lower end who does data processing, invoicing, paying bills, payroll and that sort of thing. And then you might have a management accountant who's actually looking at which sectors of the business are making money and which
ones aren't, and what needs to be done there. And then at the top, you've got a chief financial officer who's dealing more with that strategy sort of piece, modeling things out, looking at tax implications, looking at business structure, looking at that sort of 10 to 20 year plan.
So what you find is that as you automate more of this stuff that's at that finance officer level, it frees you up to do that bigger picture stuff, the budgeting, the planning, the scheduling, the comparing enterprises and all of that sort of thing.
I can't help but compare it to making a cake for a birthday party. Carmen. Yeah, I find that if I buy the cake , it ends up looking really nice because I haven't wasted my energy on making the cake, if I make the cake, I'm like, ah, can't be bothered.
And it's done. So it's the same as going. Rather than investing all this energy into something that someone else can do that doesn't have your brainpower i n the farm space, we only have a limited amount of time, so making smarter choices with your time so you can best spend it where your business needs it.
Yeah. And working to your strengths. I find, though, that the people that tend to be most reluctant to outsource stuff are the people that tend to be generally proficient at a lot of things, and they're the ones that find it the hardest. So they go, well, I can cook my own cake. What's she talking about? And I can do my own books. I can drive my own tractor and do the services and do all of this.
Those are the people that tend to find it the hardest to outsource because they're happy with the job they do. They know how they want the job done. So if that's you, just have a bit of a think about it. It's not just about giving away things that you're not good at. We've all got a limited amount of time. Sometimes it's about handing over things that yes, you can do, but in reality you can't do everything.
Which is a great point. I think a lot of those people that you're talking about become farmers. They they know how to do a whole heap of stuff and they know how to do it really well. So I think that message about just because you can do it and just because you can do it well, think about where you are spending that time and where else would be better to spend that time.
Yeah, exactly. And what brings you the most joy? Does that bring you joy? Perhaps not, even though you could do a proficient job at it, but there might be something else that is just more fulfilling for you. And, you know, if that's the case, concentrate on that instead.
I love that point. Yeah. What do you enjoy doing on the farm? Because there's so much to do. We often think about what we need to do rather than what do you enjoy doing the most?
Yeah, definitely. So there's other sort of really simple bits of technology that are available now that we're perhaps not using to their full potential, and one of those might just be your printer. So if you've got a fairly modern printer, it's generally got wireless capability. So you'd be
able to print from your phone. Yeah. If you set that up, you'll be able to scan directly into a cloud based document storage system, scan directly to an email, scan directly into a folder where things stay permanently and are never touched. So there's lots of capabilities there that people, I think have got already that might not be exploring.
We scan our farm documents from our phone straight to MYOB , because then you can't lose a receipt, can you?
Like those things are just great. And then on that other end, that OCR stuff's coming in. It's reading some of that information for you and eliminating that part of the process as well. So it's really, really good. We've got, you know, batch payments, rules, apps that link in with lots of programs. And we're seeing a lot more of that, aren't we? A few years ago it was like, if you're with Microsoft, Microsoft was trying to take over the world.
Nothing else would work with it. Everything was fighting one another. And you'd have these glitches between, say, Adobe and a Microsoft program, and they really wouldn't want to talk to one another. Whereas now it's all about this connectivity. So we're getting all of this integration between apps, which is
making things so much easier. So we have one data set that we're using, and we might have other bits of software that extract information or allow us to put in information or allow us to add on some extra information in there. So can you give me.
An example of that Carmen.
AgWorld, which people quite often use for their cropping? And we've got Mobble that links in with that. So it's a livestock system. So they're linked so that you can make some changes in one and they're reflected in another. So we've got uh Figured which links in with Xero. So Figured is a specific ag based software add on. And there are a number of other cash flow budgeting programs that are specifically built for agriculture that again link
with Xero and link with other programs as well. So what does Figured do? So Figured does your management accounting basically came from the dairy industry. So you know the dairy industry is so data intensive. And they can work out how many cents of labor
you've got per kilo of milk solids. So but in a more extensive or a mixed farming enterprise, you're looking at potentially comparing relative profitability of different crops and different crops in different years, and you're drilling down to then allocating some of those overhead costs across a number of enterprises. Again, more of that management, accounting and budgeting side of things, rather than just the data entry and the data processing of invoices and bills and payroll.
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Okay, so I keep interrupting because you keep saying really interesting things and I'm like, oh, what's that what you said batching payments too.
Yeah. So that's all of the accounting programs have got this ability and it's great. So typically someone will get a pile of bills. They'll go into the internet banking and they'll pay them one by one, and then they'll go into their bookkeeping program and they'll go to each line, which is hopefully being automatically read in by their software, and they'll go, okay, that matches up with this bill that I've got here from Nutrien and that was fertilizer.
So I code that. So in batching we reverse it. So what we do is enter all of the information into our software program first. So it might be Phoenix or MYOB or Xero. Any of them do it. We enter all the information in first and we code it. And then we go into the bookkeeping program and say, I want to pay that bill. And the program generates
an ABA file, an Australian Banking Association file. You then go into your internet banking and it will drop in 30 or 40 bills with the account numbers, the name and the amount. And you will do one authorisation to send all of those bills off all together. So what that saves is that individual authorisation, the pay bill. And then it sends you a text message. And then you can type in the code. And then you want to put
the next one in. And you've got to make sure that you've updated the account details and all of that sort of thing. And then you make mistakes, and that's what takes the time, I think we often don't recognize as you just transpose two digits, and then you get to the end of the month and you're trying to
reconcile everything and nothing matches up. So then you've got to work out where there's an underpayment or an overpayment, whether the payment was right or the data entry in our accounting system, when we make mistakes doing batch payments, they're really consistent. So the mistake is everywhere and the mistake is exactly the same. And once we work out what we've done wrong, we only fix it once rather than going through and fixing it one in that bit, but
not in that. And then again, so things like that, they're there now. They've been around for years. Um, but there's still people that may not be using them or may not be using them to their full capability.
I think I inquired with our bank and they said that we needed to have a special business profile, or we had to pay an extra amount.
You mentioned two really good points there, Janine. One was that there are different internet banking profiles for lots of banks. So lots of banks will have a generic basically domestic consumer based internet banking profile. And they will also have a higher level business banking internet tool. And some farmers might be just using the domestic version, and the domestic
version will have limited security features. Limited features in terms of authorizing payments potentially might be a little bit quicker to use. But will have some limitations. So the the more professional ones will have more security features like two factor authentication. They might have some features that enable you to have staff or outsourced help for some of these things. So the staff might have authority to upload a payment file to the bank, but they can't send off the money.
They can get that to a certain point. And then one person, or perhaps in some corporate fields, they might say we need two people to authorize a payment. So they would have the ability for one person to authorize the payment, and then two other signatories would come in and authorize that. But they'll often have unlimited amounts of payments. And that's a really important time saver for people. So
we've all had to pay those really big bills. You might be limited with internet banking to 20 or $30,000 or $40,000. And you go there one day, $40,000, next day, $40,000 next day, and then you're counting them up on your fingers trying to work out whether that tractor is paid for, with those higher level business banking type internet facilities, it'll be just one payment.
Do you recommend that?
Definitely. It's a huge time saver and they are more secure. So they do have a higher level. We've got two factor authentication to get into them and then two factor authentication to generate a payment that they yeah they're definitely well worth exploring.
Yeah. What else, Carmen, what other things are on the horizon?
What else? Look, there's apps for everything. Anything you can imagine. So if you've got a data collection or a data recording problem, someone, somewhere has developed an app to solve it. Like in anything in farming. There's great people out there just making their own stuff in the shed. And that's what I really like just to see happen. So I did a workshop up north last week, and there's one
off the shelf free program called Jotform. And a lot of people would be familiar with Google Forms, and we can put some links to these in the show notes. So one fellow was a contractor. He developed his own
job logging form for his staff. So if they went out and did some harvesting, it allowed them to jot down who the person was, who the farmer was, how many hectares they'd put in, which paddocks they'd done, which implements they'd used, their starting hours on the machine, finishing hours on the machine, diesel litres, etc. so he'd personalize that just to exactly the information that he needed. And then he got real time access to that information as
soon as the job was done. And then another person had done a similar sort of Google form to record fuel usage across their farm and where they were using it, and that was helping them with their fuel tax rebates. So, look, there's apps for both of those sorts of things. But they found a really entry level, low cost solution by having one standalone form that they used. And a lot of those have got QR codes that you can generate.
So if you've got perhaps staff that come in and out, you can just give them the QR code to log in. And I've got one on my website I've set up as a visitor register. So QR code on the gate or QR code on a piece of paper in the shed.
Can you just log into this and log yourself in as a visitor so you know there's lots of potential there to either explore what's out there and what's already been made, or potentially just make your own little thing in the office that'll do a good enough job for what you're trying to achieve.
You talked about some of the things that are on the horizon. I'm pretty excited about some of those things. What are some things that we can be doing right now? Carmen in the farm office using new technology.
Oh, look, I think the first thing to do is get comfortable with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when things come in and they're new, we're often bad at it. And as adults, you don't like that feeling of things being difficult or harder than they were. And it's just acknowledging that initially things are going to be harder before they get easier, and just persisting through that.
That's such a good point. I think because you're right, it can be quite difficult. And you think, oh, this is hard and I've made a mistake and I think it's okay to to make the mistake too, isn't it? And go, well, I made a mistake. I'm not perfect at this yet, but I'll get better and asking for help too.
Oh, definitely. There's so much help out there. There's so many things are easier than they were. Mistakes are so easy to fix in anything tech wise. They basically have dumbed things down quite a bit. Don't be afraid of breaking stuff. There's nothing, nothing out there that can be broken. The other thing that you need to do is sort out your internet connectivity. That's what I've got that down as number two, but it's probably the number one thing that you have to do. It is well worth spending
the money on. So we recently had the On Farm Connectivity program. Round one's finished. Hopefully round two will come out soon. And there's some grants out there for people to increase their on farm connectivity. But it's about researching what you need. What's going to work best for you, is about making sure that everything around the house and sheds are good? Or is it about making sure that
you've got greater levels of connectivity in your tractor? Because that's essentially where you're doing the majority of your office work because you're on Autosteer. Each farm business is going to be different in where their priorities are, in terms of where they want to spend their dollars on internet connectivity. Do you have any recommendations? There's a great website called Better Internet for Regional and Rural Australia, and there's some
really good recommendations there about what might suit. We've certainly, like a lot of people have moved on to Starlink and really noticed the difference there. And we've beamed that out to a little shed and to a my little office. And, you know, there's some just great potential there that we didn't have even 3 or 4 years ago. And again, prices are getting cheaper even with the existing Skymuster satellites there. Before that, you're getting more data. It's cheaper. Things are
just getting better all the time. So it's just about staying up to date with what's available. The other thing I think that you need to do, if you haven't done it already, is sort out email addresses. So with things like digital signing, it's really important for everybody to have their own individual email address. Now, lots of people, when internet first came in, it was Bigpond for all of us. And you often have a joint email address with your spouse. You can't get away with that anymore.
We've got to have all got to have individual email addresses to make sure some of these things work, and it's well worth having separate email addresses for the farm bills. It makes it easier for someone to access that if they need to. So if you're looking to outsource, you can just say rightio. We'll redirect this particular mail inbox
to you. Or just to keep that. We get so many emails just to sort of basically draft it and say, all of these are bills that I need to check them once a week or so, but these things that are coming in are likely to be more important. And I check those on a daily basis.
So you're saying with the auto sign that say two people in the business, you both need your own email address to do the auto sign?
Yes.
And you're also saying that you need two email addresses each for the farm or just personally.
Look, I think it's going to vary person to person and business to business. I think you need one junk one, and that's often just a matter of just retiring your old Hotmail or your an old Gmail address or something like that. So basically, any time you sign up for a $25 discount or free shipping on something, you can just use that email address and then not get bombarded with the spam mail. That's a really good idea to
start with separating business and personal. So you might have multiple inboxes and people think, oh, that's so hard to handle. That's just too much logging in and logging out. It's not. You can use Gmail or Outlook to actually set them up. So you just go into outlook and you've got your 3 or 4 different email addresses there. One of them you might be checking once a month because it's mainly spam. One of them you might be checking once a day
because it's mainly important correspondence. Another one you might be checking just 2 or 3 times a month because it's mainly farm bills. And again, it's just about being able to then maintain privacy. If in the future you decide to outsource some of this. So if you've got one email address, which is everything, it's really hard then to give someone the autonomy to say, as each email comes through, process that in the way that I want it processed.
So you're not there forwarding things all the time.
Otherwise you're really not saving any time, are you? No, you're.
Not, you're not. You might as well be doing it yourself. And I think that's the point that people come to. If I've got to forward that email address to them and then I've got to approve that payment, I may as well have done the whole thing myself. So it's about just setting things up so they're easy for other people as well. Think about that in terms of business
continuity as well. So a lot of us are running businesses that might be quite large in terms of turnover, but small in terms of admin capacity, and we don't have replication in our farm offices. So if we're taken out or another family member is taken out, that might mean system shut down. So think about if we quarantine all of our business email to one email address, we can quickly redirect something, ring our accountant, engage a bookkeeper
and say look for the next six weeks. Can you just take over this part of the role and make sure all my staff get paid and my bills get paid? It's harder to do that if we've got every single thing about sport and school and footy and the grain marketing and the bills and the newsletters and mates emailing us if that's all in the same inbox, it becomes a much harder job.
That makes sense. What else, Carmen, can we be doing right now?
Well, the other thing is online safety. And I think when I've said some of these things, there've been people listening, going, oh, that sounds frightening. What if I get hacked? You know, it's all too hard. Your money's all on the cloud anyway. So realistically, if you're concerned about putting a document in a Google Drive or a Dropbox, just get over it because all your money is on the cloud. Just get.
Over it.
It's not in a bank anywhere. No one's guarding it. There's no one standing outside with a, you You know, rifle or something. It's all on the cloud. So what can you do on your end to increase your internet safety? Multifactor ID on anything where you can switch it on is so important. So that's when they shoot you a little text message, and you've got to write that code back into the program. It's annoying.
My phone auto fills it. Yeah.
It doesn't work so well on the laptop or on the computer, but I love it when it auto fills. What I didn't love was a few years back when we didn't have a booster on the phone, and I'd have to run outside and climb up to the top of the cubby house, and then I'd hold my hand up to get the text message. And then it was like a race against time to get back into the office again to type the code in. So look, if that's still you, just spend the money, upgrade your mobile coverage.
If that's the thing that's stopping you turning on multifactor ID, or you don't have your Wi-Fi set up properly, make sure you spend the money to do that.
That's a good point. Time saver not getting into the cubby house.
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, definitely. So the installing software updates is really important as well. So when your phone says it needs to do an update, when your laptop or your computer says it needs to do an update, click to do the update. Because what they're not telling you is that they've found the hackers have found a way to get in, and they've got a patch that will
protect you. So make sure you keep those up to date. So, Janine, tell me, are your passwords, your dog's name and a combination of someone's date of birth?
They're not, I've recently done, a bit of a cyber security kind of thing. And that's why I've done all the password authentication - well when all the hacking happened, you know, Medibank. Yes. And yeah. So I don't anymore. But I can imagine that a lot of people would probably because there's so many to remember, there are.
So many to remember. And what we try and do is by just changing a digit on the end or just putting capitals on that one, you know, if we have 5 or 6 goes at it, it will eventually crack it. And you feel like a bit of a hacker just by getting in yourself. The reality is that if we're duplicating passwords, what happens is someone in the
tree gets hacked first and they're generally low stakes. So it might be just your local shoe shop is set up online purchasing, and they want you to get an account. And you sign up for that because you get $10 off or something. They get hacked. And because you've used your dog's name and your date of birth. They go, ooh, what's the chance that Janine has also used this password and this email address for something more important, and they will eventually get in that way. So duplication is a
really bad idea. We need to use secure and complex passwords. It's really hard to do that unless you're using a password keeper program. So there's some great ones out. Yeah they're amazing. So like 16 digit really complex passwords with all of the things. And the beauty of it is when we use that, they're not saying you've used this password before. They're not saying we need a digit, we We need a character. You haven't used a capital. The
passwords go through straight away all the time. And again, a lot of those have got the capability to pre-fill them. So those password vault programs, KeyPass, keychain, dashlane's one of the ones I use, there's 4 or 5 of them out there. That is all they do. You want a program that's standalone. So yes, Apple have got some capabilities to store passwords. Google have. But if they go down, the whole ship
goes down. So what you want to do is just make sure it's a standalone password keeping and password generating program and be prepared to pay money for it, because if you're not paying money for it, how are they getting the money? They need to keep your information safe? So definitely explore that. They are one of those things that does make life easier and makes you more secure.
So, Carmen, security, what else can we be doing to protect ourselves?
Look, I think that in our family, businesses that tend to be most vulnerable are the older generation and the youngest generation. So for the older ones, it's about really
keeping in contact. So having those phone calls, just making sure that if they're worried about a text message that's come through about a toll, that they don't click on it, that they give you a call, that you show them how to block things, that you delete what needs to be deleted, that they're just really cyber aware, and also that they're not lonely because one of these things, and it's not necessarily a farm business thing, it's about the
online romance, friendship, investment, sort of scams. The people that tend to be the most vulnerable are those that are the most lonely. So keeping in contact and being a good family member to our oldies is just important for so many reasons. But that's one of them. That's such a good point.
I think there was an article The Barefoot wrote about that too, and about maybe just go over to your neighbor and have a cup of coffee.
Yeah, yeah. And if that stops them wanting to meet up with Sam from Nigeria, that's a great thing because they know that they've got someone to have a cup of tea too that's prepared to listen to their problems. Look, younger generations, it's more about that sort of sextortion type sharing nudes piece. And again, it's about education again. It's
about conversations again. It's about making people feel happy in themselves, secure and all of those things so that not, you know, if something feels a little bit off, they've got the confidence to just say, no, hold on, wait. That doesn't feel quite right. So most definitely have those conversations with your family members.
Is there anything else that you would recommend our listeners do right now if they're not already doing, whether it's technology or cyber? Any other advice?
I think it's being open minded and excited about the future. It's easy to just slip into that zone of thinking, oh, it's all too hard and everything's changing too quickly. All of us can fall into that trap, but it's about just taking on the changes one by one, working out what needs to be done, and being prepared to make that investment in learning something for the pay off later on. We don't learn anything without deliberately making those choices to learn it. So just step up to the plate and
take it on because you might surprise yourself. It might be something that you really get into when you're really good at it.
That is such excellent advice, Carmen. Talking about keeping an open mind with these new technologies I'm just thinking about for people that are perhaps doing succession or someone starting to take the books on from another person in the business, would you have any advice on how to get that transition to to go smoothly?
Oh look, the technology transition and the intergenerational issues is often clashes there. You know, there's often a person within the business and they're probably the person listening to this podcast that just wants to move things along really quickly. So to all the tech people out there that are keen to make the changes, there's just a few things to be aware of. One is that if you are trying to implement change, just make sure that it's got
a fair chance of success. So if you're trying to get semi-literate truck driver to suddenly be using six different apps for six different things, it's probably not going to work. And you've got to look at implementing perhaps some easier ways to make that work, which might be just screenshots or still handing in a paper form, even though everybody
else is doing things the digital way. That's perfectly okay if you're taking something on and you are making some changes, the person that's taking it on, you've got to trust them that they're doing the right thing. I think that becomes a communication thing as well. So if you've got an older generation saying, oh, look, before we used to pay every bill, this person used to look over it. And then I used to ring this and I'd send a cheque off because that was the safe way of
doing it. Look, things have changed. And it's about really communicating that we still are doing fundamentally the same thing. We still have all of the checks and balances in place. They just don't necessarily look the same as they used to. But the fundamental things of what we've got going on, people are getting paid. We're doing it in a secure fashion we know we're up to financially. All of that still happening.
That's such a good point. Thank you. Carmen, was there anything else that you would like our listeners to know?
All just to get out there and explore something, just to talk to their friends about it and ask them what they're doing that 's different. It's great. Amongst any community. We've got some great early adopters out there that are looking at new things, and between the early adopters, some of them have caught on to something else before someone else has done so. My big thing is that if you've got a problem, someone else has already worked out
the answer to it. It's just about finding what the answer is.
That's such a good outlook, Carmen. So I do have one more question. What is the best advice that you've been given, whether it's on the farm or in life?
Oh, look, I think the big thing is that nothing lasts forever, you know, and it's just whatever season you're going through in your life, whatever seasonal conditions you're going through on farm, whatever it is, it never, ever lasts forever. So it's just very much about being in the moment and working out what needs to be done now and concentrating on that, because before you know it, something else becomes the highest priority.
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