Something like 90% of businesses fail within the first two years. The main reasons? Structure, strategy, and accountability.

When you’ve got millions of shareholders you have to report to (like Apple, for example), Wall Street analysts break down your company and try to out-predict you, and you’re on a whole other level of business. Most small businesses don’t have that same pressure to perform, though, which can be both good and bad.

With my background on Wall Street, helping businesses raise money from investors, I’ve learned a lot of strategies that Fortune 500 companies use. Today, we’re going to apply those to the common farm.

A few months ago Scott spent five days in Ukraine—a spur-of-the-moment trip.

He visited a company called Agro-Soyuz in eastern Ukraine, not too far off from where the war’s going on with Russia.

He learned a lot about their company. But he also learned a bunch of things that made him want to come back and kiss his American soil.

It's tough to find good help, isn’t it?

Scott’s made a lot of mistakes hiring farm workers, from hiring really close friends to not properly interviewing people, to not setting expectations.

But successful hiring is extremely important, especially in something like farming, where a small group of people are doing complicated, stressful work in an outdoor setting.

In this episode, Scott discusses three things that help with hiring the right people on the farm.

Scott does his farming over here in the Dakotas, and sometimes this podcast is guilty of focusing only on the type of farming that happens out that way. But of course, there’s a whole country (and world) of farming out there.

So today we’re going to be focusing on some of the hot farming topics in the state of California. This episode is an interview with Vaughn Brenda and Jeffrey Chapman from Valley Farms Supply and Fence Post Ag.

In most categories of life, there’s that one elite group.

In business, there’s the Fortune 500. In the military, there are the Navy Seals.

Scott just read a book called Unbeatable Mind by Mark Divine, who was not only a Navy Seal, but graduated as the top Navy Seal—which is insane. In the book, he teaches how to become what you want to be in life. All entrepreneurs—farmers included—should have an understanding of the mental state and conditioning he teaches in the book.

Specifically, there are four skills Scott learned that will help you farm like a Navy Seal.