If they had an all-star team for farm succession, the Hamilton family would be in the starting line-up.
The family’s sod farm and turf management company recently hosted a couple of busloads of attendees from the International Farm Succession Conference – a group which included leading Canadian and international succession experts.
“They were just amazed,” recalls conference organizer Melissa Dumont. “They were very impressed, not only by the success of their business, but by the thought and the detail that they’ve put into their succession plan.”
But guess what? Even after more than a decade of preparing son Jared to take over Mountainview Golf & Athletic Turf Specialists, parents Susan and Bill are still worrying if they’ve got it right.
“Farm succession is a twisted knot of financial, intergenerational and personal concerns almost too complicated to analyze, let alone solve,” the family wrote in a summary paper prepared for the visiting experts.
“Yes, it is scary,” Susan Hamilton says in a later interview. “Why? That’s hard to say. After 30 years, it’s hard to let go and you’re also nervous for him. I guess all I can say is that as time goes on, the confidence is building.”
So while the Hamiltons’ succession story is a textbook case on doing a farm transfer properly, it’s also a lesson about how each major step in the process requires a nerve-wracking leap of faith.
Mountainview arose on the Hamiltons’ small farm near the banks of the Ottawa River in Quyon, Que., about 50 kilometres west of Hull. Bill is the fourth generation on that land, but back when he was in high school, the farm’s sheep flock barely generated enough to cover the property’s taxes. It was a part-time job on a sod farm on the Ontario side of the river that gave Bill, now 50, the idea there was more money in growing grass than grazing it.
He was right, and he and Susan proved to be crackerjack entrepreneurs. They started with 13 acres of sod and have grown that 40-fold. More importantly, they’ve turned Mountainview into turf experts, with a host of golf courses, schools, municipalities and landscapers as clients. Sales have reached the seven-figure range and the company has 40 employees.
Their first succession plan was simple: Build up the business, sell it, and enjoy the ‘Freedom 55’ lifestyle.
“The company was their retirement plan,” says Jared, 24. “Then all of sudden at age 13 or 14, I sat them down at the kitchen table and said I want to be a partner in all of this.”
So Susan and Bill switched gears and began giving Jared the training he’d need if he was serious about pursuing that dream.
Naturally, that meant Jared had to learn to grow sod and cultivate healthy turf. He also had to prove his work ethic, which meant years of doing the hardest job on the farm – piling endless rolls of sod on countless skids.
“That’s the best thing my parents could have done,” says Jared, who has a diploma in horticulture from the University of Guelph. “I wasn’t just the bosses’ son who was being given the business. I had to earn it.”
Equally important, Jared was carefully schooled in how to deal with customers – going on delivery runs, gradually becoming the company’s main representative at trade shows (for several years he’s manned the Mountainview booth at the eight or nine such events each winter), and recently overseeing a rebranding of company name and development of its website (mountainviewturf.com).
This was a critical concession by Susan and Bill – nothing is more important to the company’s success than its customer relations, and they were letting go of something they excelled at.
“That was major,” says Susan. “We have a very close, very tight relationship with our customers. Some of them have been with us for 30 years. So passing on our way of dealing with customers was very important to us.”
Confident that Jared had both the necessary work ethic and people skills, Susan and Bill then took another scary plunge. Out went the old plan of paying down debt and sailing off into a worry-free retirement. Instead, the couple expanded aggressively – knowing their business had to get much bigger if it was to fund their retirement and still remain a viable enterprise for Jared, his wife Holly, and possibly younger sister Lindsay.
“We’ve had major capital growth over the past few years and it’s really strained our cash fl ow,” says Susan. “Now that we’re mostly past that, we hope over the next fi ve years as we pay things off, cash fl ow will get back to where it should be.
” Expansion meant other changes: The Hamiltons now realized the operation was too big for them – or Jared – to run on their own. So they created senior management positions. That may not sound huge, but Susan counts it as one of the most difficult decisions she’s ever made.
“Taking on large debts is scary but I would say equally scary is when employees come in and starting doing what you’ve always done – I’ll never forget how hard it was to give up the bookkeeping,” says Susan.
“But that really helped us when it came to succession. By learning to delegate to employees, we have gotten past the idea of ‘Either we do it or nobody does it.’
” There’s more to the Hamiltons’ succession story, and more to come. (Daughter-in-law Holly has become Susan’s understudy as vice president of everything financial, administrative and HR-related, while daughter Lindsay, just out of university, has yet to decide about joining the family business.)
What is certain is that every major step forward will inevitably come with a good dose of worrying and second-guessing. In fact, one of the positive signs of the plan is that even the always-confident Jared is discovering his own fear factor.
“This is my first year in the office and I’m finding there are aspects of the business that I didn’t even know existed,” says Jared. “So, for example, writing out a one-page quote for a big contract. It’s critical to do it well and you really agonize over whether you’ve done it right or not.”
Dumont says she came away from Mountainview convinced that fear and worry weren’t just side effects of the Hamiltons’ succession journey, but also drivers in the process.
“When you look at this family, I think because they’re nervous, they’ve made the effort to be prepared,” notes Dumont. “It’s people who don’t think that succession is a big deal and haven’t worried about it who so often find themselves dealing with some major issues they never expected.”
