Finding Fairness in Farm Transition
How to manage your farm family’s expectations about inheritance
How does a family define fairness? Is it helping everyone be successful or is it helping the farm be successful after the farm transition?
Fairness keeps founders awake at night. Fairness means different things to different farm team members and the non-farming heirs. Elaine tackles the challenges most families face when trying to be FAIR during the farm transition.
The audience will receive the FAIR (Financial transparency, Attitudes, Intentions, Rebels) model:
- Understand the need to unpack financial transparency and the tools to do it (income streams, debt servicing, viability of the farm)
- Navigate attitudes towards money by encouraging families to have clarifying conversations about inheritance expectations
- Share an easy-to-use framework that will enable farm families to create clear intentions about how important decisions are made
- Get insights on what to do with the rebels who are never satisfied as founders shift roles
A farm is not a piece of pie. In today’s agricultural reality, farm families cannot make all of their children economically equal. Equality is no longer part of the transition language.
Elaine’s presentation will give you a new language to manage expectations and navigate finding fairness in farm transition so that everyone will be successful.
As one farmer said “this session gives me the confidence in what I have to go through.”
Contact Elaine to find out how she will make a difference in the lives of your audience.
Elaine’s books that cover this topic:
Discuss the UndiscussabullTM
Tools for talking about tough issues in life… and farm transfer!
Many farmers ask Elaine “How can we get folks to the table to talk?” Often the conflict and high tension around the uncertainty of the future of the farm is keeping people tense and unsure of how to start courageous conversations.
Yet, it’s the conversations that will give breakthroughs – once you deal with the “bull” in the middle of the room.
A Virginia Tech study of 400 farms found that those farm family businesses that communicate were 21% more profitable. Therefore, talking and creating solutions can make you money!
This session goes over the Discuss the Undiscussabull™ Approach that provides 10 practical steps to start crucial conversations for transition and conflict resolution:
- Take charge
- Come from curiosity
- Ask deeply
- Play with possibility
- Really listen
- Ponder and perk
- Cultivate trust
- Come to terms with death
- Extend the olive branch
- Respect boundaries
Conflict is a normal part of farm family business, especially when 2 or 3 generations are trying to figure out a plan that meets their needs. Elaine sees conflict resolution as a “business risk management strategy” and something that anyone can learn to do well.
Elaine’s tools give your audience the strategies they need to improve communication within their farm family. She’ll help audit key challenges. The audience will learn how to deal with resistance and listen to their head, heart, and gut. They will gain insight into tough succession issues to have life-changing conversations – finally!
If you want your audience to learn how to have courageous conversations and create the certainty for the future that they are longing for, let’s connect.
Contact Elaine to find out how she will make a difference in the lives of your audience.
Book Elaine For Your Next Event
Elaine’s books that cover this topic:
Living an Intentional Life
How to embrace change on your farm with the cycle of renewal
Farmers love farming and they never plan to quit. Their spouses, however, have other ideas!
They are both in different stages of the cycle of renewal, but don’t know it. Their adult children want you to move to town. What are they going to do? Nothing? That doesn’t feel very good!
Elaine’s insights will help audiences locate their current stage on the cycle of renewal map. She will provide action steps they need to take in order to live the life they’ve always wanted.
This session helps farmers identify the following:
- What they need to let go of
- What they need to hold on to
- What they need to take on and move on
- How to create action steps for aligning with their goals, getting ready for the next chapter of their life, sorting out what’s not working, and taking time to renew themselves
- How to question their many roles in agriculture and choose to live more intentionally with their personal role map
The tools Elaine is using in this talk are based on the research of the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara, where she trained as a certified coach.
This talk is specifically crafted for farmers who are stuck and need to make some life changes as well as women in agriculture who are feeling stressed, overwhelmed and need to let go of what’s not working.
Give your audience the gift of living more intentionally.
Contact Elaine to find out how she will make a difference in the lives of your audience.
Book Elaine For Your Next Event
Elaine’s books that cover this topic:
Farming’s In-Law Factor
How to have more harmony and less conflict on family farms
It takes courage to admit that everything behind the front door of your farm is not as beautiful as you would like it to be.
Elaine Froese is gifted at talking about the marriage stresses on farms that fuel the fear of divorce. She truly believes that love and respect are key to strong marriages, partnerships, and relationship capital on the farm.
This session is eye-opening and comforting when your audience discovers that they are not alone. Their ‘good’ farm team can become ‘great’ with better conflict resolution skills and more role clarity.
This session will help with the following:
- Farm dads to understand how to build respect, trust, and ask for what they need
- Farm moms, mother-in-laws and daughter-in-laws to be seen, have a voice, and stop being the “pig in the middle” of the conflict triangle
- Farm successors to stand up for what is right and seek common ground
- Farm sons and daughter-in laws to understand family of origin conflict styles and communication
- Navigate new language and approaches for positive conflict behaviour
- Provide tools for profitable family business meetings while sitting with deep emotions
- Outline the key ways to prevent divorce on farms for the young folks as well as the founders
If you’re wanting to empower your audience and give them something they need – not want – this presentation will be “the talk” of your event.
Contact Elaine to find out how she will make a difference in the lives of your audience.
Book Elaine For Your Next Event
Elaine’s books that cover this topic:
Elaine Froese
Speaker Reel
Meet Canada’s Farm Whisperer
Elaine Froese (pronounced ‘phrase’), CSP is a certified professional speaker, certified coach, and author. She’s a go-to expert for farm families who want better communication and conflict resolution to secure a successful farm transition.
As a farmer and mother to the successor of their farm, she understands the culture of agriculture intimately.
Her superpower is helping families find harmony through understanding.
Elaine’s Most
Popular Topics
Helping farm families find harmony through understanding
Elaine’s passion is to share simple, practical and actionable tools with farm families so they can talk about tough issues and get traction in their farm transition. Her topics are a catalyst to courageous conversations and conflict resolution. Expect her to WOW your audience by bringing clarity with workable and practical tools.
If you’re organizing an event and looking for a speaker who’s real, relevant, and transformational, Elaine and her speaking topics may just be the right fit for you.
Transition Planning Secrets
of Success for Founders
Interview with Tracy Brunet and Elaine Froese
Throughout the episode, Elaine shares the best of her wisdom from over forty years of helping families transition their farm to the next generation. Tracy Brunet, President of Impact Farm Marketing, and Elaine Froese chat about common mistakes and best practices, and they highlight four big key questions that founders should be thinking about to transition the farm.
Are you the founding generation of the farm? If so, you will not want to miss this episode and the wisdom that Elaine shares to get you started or unstuck on your farm transition journey.
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