Why I am building Acren

The job that afternoon was effluent runoff from a silage pit. Routine. The kind of call he makes a dozen times a month without thinking about it.

We drove back to the office. He put the kettle on, sat down at his desk and opened Word.

Client name. The work. The figure. The date.

Twenty minutes, from a standing start, typing it out the way you would type a letter.

Then he said we would head for lunch, and we headed for lunch.

I have no idea whether that invoice ever went out.

That was a quiet week. Nothing due, nothing closing, the phone barely going. I had not yet seen what the place looks like in the fortnight before a closing date.

And here is the thing I could not get past, sitting there with my tea. This is a man whose entire job is keeping other people right. Farmers ring him because he is the one who knows where they stand. What is due. What is missing. What will not survive an inspection. Half the county's paperwork is in order because of him.

His own business was running on Word, a filing cabinet and a spreadsheet.

His own business was running on Word, a filing cabinet and a spreadsheet.

I had asked a friend in consultancy whether I could shadow him for a few weeks, because I wanted to know what the job actually was. I thought I knew. You go out to a farm, you give your expertise, you give your opinion, you go home.

What I walked into was filing cabinets.

The work is records. Compliance and data, and nearly all of it set by what the Department asks for. An advisor spends his day inside a document the length of a novel, working down a contents page, trying to find the paragraph that tells him whether his client is standing on the right side of a rule.

Nobody trains you for that. You just absorb it, year on year, until it lives in your head and nowhere else.

I had assumed somebody had built software for this. That is the part I keep coming back to.

Plenty of people have noticed. The trouble is that from the outside this looks like admin, and admin looks like something you could fix from a desk in Dublin in a fortnight. You would have to know what a practice is like in the week before a closing date. You would have to know why an advisor does an hour of work he has no intention of charging for, and does it again the following week. You would have to know what it costs a firm when the man who held the client book in his head retires, and takes the book with him.

That is not detail you pick up along the way. That is the whole job.

I have been around this since I could walk. Lambing in the Wicklow mountains, every Easter and every summer. Twelve hours on an old Ford tractor turning hay, the first money I ever earned. Milking from fourteen to eighteen, herds of a hundred to three hundred cows. Grain harvest in Australia after school, then a beef farm in New Zealand, feeding out round bales on hills.

The thing that stayed with me was the paper. Out there, everything gets written down. Water troughs, mobs, rainfall. All of it on a phone. None of it in anyone's head.

And it is going to matter more here than it ever has. The money coming through Brussels is tightening and the rules are not. The Commission's proposal for the next budget period ring-fences roughly €300 billion for income support, against €387 billion in the one we are in. Less money, the same conditionality, the same closing dates. Every detail about a holding gets more valuable the tighter the money gets, and the man holding those details is the advisor.

Farmers are the hardest working people I have met and they are undervalued for it. They are not asking to be rescued. They want to keep doing what they have always done with a bit of support behind them.

The people who give them that support are agricultural consultants. A farmer's year runs through an advisor's desk.

And nobody has ever built that man anything.

Nobody has ever built that man anything.

So that is what I am doing. Every job an advisor does, logged where the work happens, priced off his own rate card, and billed. This is about a practice getting paid for what it is already doing.

A founding cohort of firms is building it with me, against their own client books.