Lots of places. I made:
1. STUPID MISTAKES: I didn't budget for fuel costs at all. I didn't budget for a manure spreader that cost me $900. I didn't budget for the costs of turkey processing.
2. POOR ESTIMATE OF COST MISTAKES: I thought it would cost me $700 over that period in rent, when it ended up costing me $3000. I underestimated the cost of seed by a larger margin.
3. MISTAKES OF YIELD AND CONSUMPTION: I thought I would get 40 pounds of honey per hive in the first year. Ha. I got about 6 pounds from the one hive that survived. I thought my pigs would have a hanging weight of 200 lbs at 6 months and only eat $150 of feed. They came in a 170 and cost me about $250 in feed. The final weight of the turkeys was about 3 pounds less than my estimate on average.
4. FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY PREDICT SCALE OF LOSSES: I expected some losses (for instance, I thought I would lose 15 of 65 turkeys), but I was way off on the amount of loss I experienced. Some of that was due to inexperience, but some was just due to the nature of dealing with living things that can and will get sick/die. For instance, I ended up buying 80 turkey poults and lost almost 30, 10 at a fairly late stage to coyotes. I lost 4 of the 5 packaged bee colonies I bought, and the one that made it to the fall was dead this spring.
5. FAILURE TO MEET ESTIMATED DEMAND: While I was able to sell all pigs, I only sold half of the Thanksgiving Baskets.
On the flip side, some costs and income were not budgeted for and offset the scale of the potential loss. For instance, my disc harrow cost me significantly less than predicted. I made some income on hay sales that I hadn't considered. I sold weaner pigs in late summer of last year that brought in some much needed moneys. I spent about $60 on the website after I decided to design it myself.
Overall, my main issues were a lack of experience in running a business, inexperience with with animals I was producing, and a tendency toward over-optimism. Luckily I had another job and a savings to cover the shortfall.
The second year plan is laughable in hindsight, but it was basically an extension of the unrealistic expectations from the first year.
So given what I learned from that experience, here's the plan I developed in the spring of this year:
I'll keep working at getting better at planning, and I'd like to include estimated time commitments to the plan to get an idea of my potential wage and if/when it makes sense to hire a helper.