I started reading Richard Wiswall's book The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff - and Making a Profit (2009).

A particular strength of the book is an enterprise budgetting approach to tracking expenses, revenues and profitability accross multiples lines of business. Each crop is considered a separate line of business. I recommend the book as a useful reference for learning how enterprise budgetting works in an organic farming context that makes enterprise budgetting concepts easy to read about and understand. A real estate entrepreneur managing multiple flips, for example, might benefit from seeing a practical example of how enterprise budgetting works. Adapt as required to your context.

The motivation for today's blog, however, comes from Richard's discussion of goal setting and an interesting worksheet he presented as part of that process. The worksheet is called the Personal Values Worksheet (p. 9) and the idea is that you set your goals based upon your values. You can use the worksheet to clarify what values are important to you. According to Holistic Management, the process of personal (and business?) decision making and goal setting should derive from clarified personal values so spending some time studying and completing this worksheet might be a useful exercise.

The originator of the Personal Values Worksheet is Ed Martsolf and you can follow this link to download the instructions for completing the personal values worksheet (PDF).

What I like about this worksheet is that it provides concrete examples of what we mean when we use the term values. It shows the diversity of values and offers a useful partitioning of the space of all values. The worksheet rating system (columns A to D) is also an interesting approach to clarifying value preferences.