How Does a Small Business Build the Right Team?
November 19, 2025
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 Every successful small business needs more than a great product or service—it needs a trusted team of advisors. Your accountant, attorney, financial planner, and market expert are essential, but so is your banker. As your financial partner, we don’t just provide loans—we help you make strategic decisions that protect your operation and position your business for long-term success. When your advisory team understands your goals, they can help turn your vision into reality.
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THE SMARTEST INVESTMENT A BUSINESS OWNER CAN MAKE IS BUILDING THE RIGHT TEAM!
By: Lee Potts | Vice President/Senior Credit Officer
Our May 2025 newsletter talked in detail about assembling your team of business professionals to help your farm or business reach its goals or provide clarity for succession planning, or estate planning, to name a few examples. If you recall, we likened it to a professional athlete draft such as the NFL where owners and coaches bring people onboard who they think will be the best fit in moving the team forward in the future.
As a further recap, we cannot emphasize enough that you are the owner of the farm or business and therefore, you are in the driver’s seat to choose the right professionals with which to surround yourself to help nail down a plan to accomplish whatever goals you may have. You as a business owner pay those people to help you achieve your goals of success, much like a professional sports team.
Time to start building your team:
Visualize a board room table. You, your spouse, and/or business partner(s) or family members are seated at the head of the table, in the CEO position. Who else might you want sitting at that table with you? Think of specific names. Who is the attorney you see sitting in one of the seats to help with legal matters? Who is the accountant you see sitting at the table to help manage the taxation and bookkeeping aspect? Who do you see sitting in the lender’s chair to help you with the financing side as well as helping you decide what is affordable or unaffordable for all parties? Who is that insurance agent or wealth management advisor? Is there someone else you trust that can take the role of moderator, general referee, or organizer to keep everyone on task? Maybe some names have already come to mind!
Once you visualize every person literally sitting around a boardroom table, start to think about how each person fits into the big picture of guiding you down a path toward your goals. The environment is highly professional, highly organized, and extremely results-oriented. In other words, the meeting is so efficient that you are energized by the progress being made. As they say, the “magic starts to happen!”
Since that May 2025 newsletter, our lenders have been involved in several such meetings where each of these professionals is brought together into the same room to help develop an initial plan that aligns with whatever the goals of the business owner might be. Sometimes follow-up meetings are imperative to keep things on track. As we say, it is never too early to begin this process. Even though plans are put in place, things inevitably change, the game plan must be adjusted, and therefore everyone must be ready to roll with punches. In other words, it is a journey, not a destination!
Every journey begins with the first step. Without that first step, the journey of reaching one’s goals cannot happen. The question in this entire process that most people would prefer to avoid is, “Why didn’t I take the necessary steps and assemble my team of professionals instead of putting it off?”
At our upcoming Ag Conference on December 2nd, be sure to pull your lender aside and tell them when you’d like to get going on assembling your team of professionals!
