a bit of a buzzword in the industry, but when I think about it we’re really focused on not just the products or the outcome. It’s really about building a system and a mindset that the organization is able to have and manifest innovation alongside with a really well-oiled operating platform. And the two don’t really mix very well. You need two different mindsets when you think about innovation. We’re a well-researched company. We have an excellent research platform, but innovation is something that will become near and dear to our hearts. One other thing that will continue is our focus on development and succession planning — but development in a broad sense, not just leadership development for, say, executives or senior leaders, but managerial training and also technical skills on the farm. I think that we want to become a world-class developer of people irrespective of how they’re entering into the swine industry. And so we’re going to be focusing and leaning in on that over the years to come. And then when I think about growth, it’s really about our opportunity to meet our consumers, along with our customers, the end user of our product, and how we can enhance and meet them where they’re at, what their needs are to essentially create better demand for our products in the years to come. Can we just get a brief background about yourself and how you escalated to this position? It’s been a long journey for me. I have 26 years in the swine industry, but my background is in engineering. I’m a structural engineer who graduated from the University of Waterloo. So I have an engineering mindset. It’s heavy in problem-solving and analytics and physics. Before I went to engineering school, I grew up in a city of 340,000 called London, Ontario. And I grew up in the inner city, and I didn’t get out much. But when I did, I was fascinated by these big, tall, stocky things. And my father told me it was corn and soybeans. When I got my driver’s license at 16, I headed out of town and found a job at a Standardbred racehorse farm and a cash cropping operation. That was where I got my knack for agriculture. Then I ended up participating in a swine company and building it in Ontario and Manitoba. And we finished all our pigs in Iowa and in Indiana. With that came lots of challenges, and we grew very quickly, perhaps too fast, but ultimately we sold all of the farms, and I ended up coming to work at Christensen Farms because I had became friends with Bob.
AN INTERVIEW WITH GREG HOWARD
Congratulations again on your appointment as president and CEO at Christensen Farms. Can you share your vision for the company moving forward and how you plan to continue its growth trajectory? Thanks for the acknowledgement of becoming CEO of such a great company. We’re in our 50th year this year. We don’t quite know the date, so we’re just going to celebrate it the whole year. But of course it was started by Bob Christensen and it was really the genesis of a 4-H project, but we’ve grown immensely throughout the years, and it’s a wonderful company to be part of. So there’s a lot of great things that were in motion already when I took the CEO position. Largely in part to the success of Bob, carried on by Glenn Stolt, who was our most recent CEO, and of course, the wonderful team that I get to operate with. We’re a company that really is focused on live swine production.We are part of an integrated platform, but we also serve other customers in the industry. I’ll refer to them as our packer partners. So I would say we have a very keen interest in maintaining our operating excellence in pork production. And we’re a very competitive group and it keeps us sharp in terms of how we think about the business, how we manage our pigs’ health, and all the inputs that go into the business. So, when I think about the future, and the vision of the company and growth, you know, I think we’re really at a point where we’re looking at trying to enhance the production that we already produce today. And what I mean by that is it’s not just about numbers or volume of any sort. It’s about being better every day, being more sustainable in utilization of our resources and how we deploy them in the effort of pork production. One of the key areas that I’ll be focused on in the next three to four years is our data infrastructure as well as the systems that are the backbone of the company. Focusing on that and modernizing those systems and processes are paramount. We’re excellent if you hold us to a 2004 standard. But today we’re able to leapfrog a lot of technologies and get into some really cool stuff as it relates to data. Innovation’s another topic, it’s
22
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online