Reflecting on a Year of Transformation and Success
By Nathan Craig, WMG Chief Executive Officer
As the year comes to a close, it’s a great time to look back on what we’ve achieved in our businesses and organisations. It’s also a chance to reflect on the challenges we’ve faced and grown from, as well as to take a moment to appreciate the good things that have happened – something we often overlook when life gets busy.
For WMG, this year has been a standout. From my perspective as CEO, it’s been the most successful year in my seven years with the organisation. What’s stood out the most is how we’ve transitioned to a more sustainable and profitable business model. While we’re a not-for-profit organisation, it’s vital to ensure we’re financially stable, and this year marked the end of a three-year journey of making changes that have had a massive positive impact.
One of the big decisions we made was to take Seasonal Updates and Spring Field Day events off the calendar. These events, while valuable in the past, had become costly to run and weren’t attracting as many people as they used to. We’d also consistently heard feedback that it was hard to cover everyone’s favourite topics, as we tried to cater to a broad range of interests like cropping, pastures, grazing management, sheep, cattle, and backgrounding.
Instead, we’ve focused on running smaller, discussion group-style events that allow us to dive deep into a single topic over a few hours – often with a beer or two to keep things relaxed! The response has been fantastic, with participants highly engaged and giving us excellent feedback. This format builds on our first event of this kind, which we ran back in 2021 as part of the BeefLinks Backgrounding Project.
In terms of numbers, we’ve engaged with about 229 farming participants both this year and last. But this year, we delivered this through 16 discussion group events, many of which wrapped up with a sundowner where everyone could catch up and socialise. It’s been great to see farmers coming to multiple events and building connections with each other – the sense of community has really grown with this new approach.
We’ve also changed how we communicate and share information. We now publish fewer social media posts each week, but each one is carefully crafted to provide what we like to call a ‘nugget of gold.’ This change was driven by feedback from farmers who told us there’s just too much information out there, and it’s hard to find the good stuff. On top of this, all our research articles are now published on our website, making them available anytime our community needs them. It also helps us see which articles are the most popular so we can deliver more of what farmers want.
Behind the scenes, WMG has been working hard to develop new tools and approaches to better support our members. This has helped us deliver valuable information and advice while keeping things running smoothly with our small but dedicated team. We’ll continue refining and improving into 2025, with plans to make our discussion group events even better at bringing producers together and delivering value.
I’m incredibly proud of what our small team of three has achieved this year – it’s easily been our most productive year yet. I also want to thank all our members for their amazing support. It’s thanks to you that we’re able to keep supporting the sustainable growth of agriculture in our region.
On that bright note, I wish you all a safe and happy festive season. I can’t wait to see you in 2025!
