David Farley, Executive Chairman at Matrix Commodities , has been around agriculture his whole life. He started off his career in agriculture as a jackaroo, which is a young man working on a sheep or cattle station to gain experience to become an owner one day. Then, David went on to work as a farm manager at Colly Cotton. Seven years later, he worked his way up to managing director then CEO growing the company to over 600 people. Not too long after his tenure being CEO at Colly Cotton, David joined Calcot in 2002 as the president, which was one of America’s largest cotton marketing cooperatives at the time. In 2009, he became the CEO at Australian Agricultural Company, which has been around since 1824, owns 15.8 million acres in Queensland & the Northern Territory, and is a publicly-traded company (ASAGF). Now, David serves as the Executive Chairman at Matrix Commodities, who are specialist investors in the global agricultural commodity food chain including private company equity investments, public company equity investments, traders of agricultural physical commodities, and consultants to agribusiness.
In this podcast, David and I talk about a wide variety of life interests such as: what it’s like to live in Australia, how he got in the agriculture industry, being a jackaroo, what it’s like to run a company with 29 million acres & 600,000 head of cattle, his transition from being a farm manager to a CEO, his most important lesson for all CEOs, his hiring process, building company culture, scaling Australia’s largest landowner to the next level, what it’s like to run a publicly-traded company, why family is so important, places he has traveled, his enjoyment of art, and where the markets are going into 2020.
Listen to the podcast below to learn more about this incredibly successful CEO and why he feels building a culture is so important in every business!