_The importance of strategy for rural land-based businesses in an uncertain world

In running an estate or other rural land-based business, there are many elements that you just can’t control – the state of the economy, legislative change, climate and your competitors. Yet, uncertainty is rarely accounted for in strategy and often, a plan of action is prepared without understanding how that plan is likely to become a reality, and then the creators of the strategy just hope for the best.

Knowing your chances of success before you launch a strategy can go a long way to ensuring how well you execute it. Start with evaluating your capital and assets, considering the trends facing rural industry both at present and those on the horizon, and the strategic moves you plan to take.

Benchmarking in these areas, both internally and externally, can help you understand the chances your strategy has of succeeding before starting to execute it. Knowing how those chances change based on specific actions taken, you can tackle uncertainty with data, not just wishful thinking.

The use of geospatial analytics can be extremely useful as part of this process, providing context to the estate or other rural land-based business in terms of land designations, socio-demographics and market knowledge.

On rural estates and other rural land-based businesses, a broad range of assets and income streams together with diverse ownership motives means that benchmarking can be more complex than in other industries, but it is just as important. Using benchmarking can enable dispassionate assessment of a strategy’s chances of success.

A fully diversified rural estate encompasses so much, that there needs to be diversity in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enable the estate to be reviewed and specific parts of the business to be benchmarked independently. A simple framework is needed to start based on the relevance of the KPI, the availability of data and the ability to analyse to ensure that the key aims for carrying out benchmarking are not lost at the outset.

The need for rural Key Performance Indicators, which are sector focussed, is something that the RICS has recognised following the publication of a Nuffield Scholarship Paper on the subject on which RICS were consulted. This paper led to the commissioning and publication of the RICS Insight Paper on Rural Benchmarking, published in April 2022. Phase 2 has subsequently been commissioned, and a draft is awaited.

In estate management, we deal with a wide range of interests, not purely financial but people, communities, environmental factors and reputation. There is nothing wrong with having ambitious targets, but the desire to achieve success needs to be anchored in the realities of the business and the evolving context in which the business operates.

Assessing risk is essential to deciding what actions are worth taking. If you have a slim chance of success, but the level of required investment is small with the potential for high returns, that investment may be worth taking.

We need to stop developing strategy as though we know the future. By calculating your chances of success, you can see if the plan you propose is based on realistic aspirations or blind hopes for the future. An agreed strategy will align thinking and with objective benchmarking you, your staff and the wider estate will understand the strategy’s probability of success and those factors which influence the outcome.