The Spider-Man tingle

My boys have been watching Spider-Man of late and Peter Parker (Spider-Man) has a sixth sense, the Spider-Man tingle, that allows him the superpower of being able to sense things happening around him before they happen through feel and not sight.

Whilst I do have superpowers they are much more limited.

I am restricted to what I like to call the ‘gut-o-meter’. The ‘gut-o-meter’ determines all my decisions, large or small, because I am lousy at computers, spreadsheets, accounts, budgets, returning emails, details of any sorts really.

So where is this leading? I think for the first time since we started fluffing around three years ago, my ‘gut-o-meter’ is telling me that Bethune Lane Dairy is actually starting to work.

Crikey, that’s a bit scary!

We have had two months in a row of record sales locally through our Swan Hill distributor, Swan Hill Wholesalers. Our biggest customer though is Harris Farm Markets and they take our chocolate milk to 25 stores through New South Wales and into Brisbane and that order has been steadily growing. I think we are melting about 50kg of chocolate tomorrow.

For the first time, Bethune Lane Dairy (the Milk Enhancement Centre) actually paid Lake Boga Pastoral (the dairy) for the milk it’s been selling-or stealing, depending on your point of view! This is a small but significant step.

I get the odd heave leaning on me saying, “These numbers are showing you need to stop this milk processing folly at once!” However, I don’ t need it to make money in the short-term, I just need it to stop dragging cash out of the farm.

If we can be regularly revenue neutral then we have a platform to build on and that pressure to stop is silenced. Our biggest gap in sales is that we have nothing going to Melbourne. This is largely due to COVID restricting our ability to attempt to crack the market and where do you start? Any suggestions/contracts are welcome.

Our next biggest gap is our terribly inefficient cost of production, that’s very fixable, but we needed to wait until some signs appeared that this business had a heartbeat and there is definitely a faint pulse there at the moment.

Dairy farming and dairy processing are not sprints, they are marathons that require persistence and resilience (which is lucky for me as while the ‘gut-o-meter’ is useful for educated guessing, it does nothing for speed). I am hopeful that my Spider-Man like superpower is correct. The safest thing to do is not tell anyone because if we announce it, guaranteed to go pear-shaped.

In the meantime, I’ll be dancing a jig, in silence.