— Jonathan Olmscheid, CFO
You deal with more uncertainty in a season than most businesses see in a decade. Commodity prices swing. Input costs jump. A dry stretch in July can undo a plan you made in January. You’ve built your operation to handle that, and we’ve done the same for your cooperative.
As your cooperative’s CFO, my job isn’t just to keep the books balanced. It’s to make sure Central United is financially ready for whatever the next few years throw at us, so we can keep showing up for you the way you need us to. Here’s a look at what that means in practice.
A lot of it starts with asking good questions before we need the answers. What would we do if a division had a tough year? Which projects could wait if we needed to hold cash? How would higher interest rates change what we can take on? Thinking through these ahead of time means we’re not scrambling when conditions change. We’re ready.
That same thinking shapes how we invest. When we’re deciding whether to put money into equipment, storage, or a new service, the return on paper is only part of the question. We also ask whether it makes the cooperative stronger, whether it improves what we can offer you, and whether we could still handle it if the next few years are tough ones. A project that pencils out great but leaves us stretched thin isn’t worth it, and a project that helps us serve you better is sometimes worth it even if the numbers are modest. That same discipline is why we hold on to retained earnings, patronage, and working capital: they work together to keep Central United standing strong through the tough years, too.
Being prepared also means staying ahead of the curve, not just catching up to it. Each of our business units come with their own set of variables, from commodity swings to weather to equipment needs, and as we build on a strong first year as Central United Cooperative, our leadership team and board are working to know those variables well across every part of the business. Alongside that, our finance team continues to strengthen their understanding of how grain, agronomy, feed, energy, transportation, BCA, and the Ag Service Center work day to day, because that’s what turns numbers into decisions that help you.
You can’t control the weather, the markets, or interest rates. Neither can we. What we can control is how prepared your cooperative is when those things move, and how clearly we explain the decisions we make along the way. That’s what we’re committed to, season after season.