Pallets and Pastures with Chris Meade

In this week's podcast our guest, Chris Meade, shows that anything is possible with a strong will and a clear vision. 

Born and raised on a farm, his initial dream of becoming a veterinarian was set aside after his father died tragically and Chris ended up in the building industry. At the age of 23, Chris began what is now known as CMTP, a prominent name in the Australian packaging industry.  How his enthusiasm for cattle is woven into this story comes later. 

Beginning in the backyard of the Meade family's rented house, Chris's hard work soon led to an expansion of CMTP. In its early years, the company's primary product was potato and onion bins. Today, they can produce a painted and stencilled pallet every ten seconds. In the last year alone, the company created three million pallets.

CMTP's current operations include 11 sites with around 300 employees.  Chris reflects, “Lots of people say, "Oh, you can't do it." Well, we do it. And we have quite a complex business in terms of how many sites it's over and the amount of material we use. So, if somebody says you can't do it, they've got it wrong. You can do it." 

Chris highlights his commitment to the ethics and integrity of his company, as well as financial transparency. They conclude each day with a clear understanding of whether they've operated at a profit or loss, allowing them to promptly address any issues, rather than discovering financial setbacks months later. 

In 2008, he rekindled his involvement in farming by purchasing a small herd of unregistered and "unruly" Limousin cattle. He has since established a well-structured breeding programme and says his cattle are more like "puppies" now. Core values in his breeding programme include docility, polledness and structural soundness.

As part of their conversation, Mark and Chris discuss the impact of the F94L gene on Limousin cattle. This gene contributes to a 20% reduction in IMF and a 30% decrease in external fat cover.  It results in a 19% increase in prime cuts in the carcass. Also, animals with two copies of the F94L gene (98% of Limousin), maintain the same feed intake efficiency as those without it. This has a direct impact on methane production.

Chris's commitment to environmental sustainability is reflected at CMPT as well. Part of their sustainability strategy includes leveraging waste from their timber operations to enhance soil quality on their farms. Chris also shares how he sees his approach to farming as a form of self-insurance. By investing in properties, they can weather minor disasters without relying on external insurance.

Listen to the full episode to hear how Chris Meade has built CMTP into Australia's top pallet and bin supplier, whilst maintaining his abiding passion for livestock and genetics.

Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited, we help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best - info@nextgenagri.com.

Thanks to our sponsors at MSD Animal Health and Allflex, and Heiniger Australia and New Zealand.

These companies are leaders in their respective fields and it is a privilege to have them supporting the Head Shepherd Podcast. Please consider them when making product choices, as they are instrumental in enabling us to bring you this podcast each week.

Check out Heiniger's product range HERE
Check out the MSD range HERE
Check out Allflex products HERE

Transcript

Mark Ferguson: 0:05

Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at Next Gen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Heinegger as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd in Orflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand, australia's, largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information born out of this podcast can help their men and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals. Heinegger will need little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heinegger name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode.

Mark Ferguson: 1:16

Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we welcome Chris Mead on to the show. Welcome, chris. Thank you, mark, good to be here, excellent. Looking forward to this chat. I think it'll be a bit different to some of the chats we have on here, because your farming is only part of what you do. So, yeah, really intrigued. We've had lots of chats over the few years that I've known you're around building business and employing people. Yeah, I guess one thing I do know about you is when you walk around places that or your business, you sort of seem to know everyone that's there, even though you've got places that you've never been to. I think very much a people person and really keen to dig into that a bit further. But yeah, we might just start with, I guess, a bit of a cook tour of your career to date, maybe of how you ended up with CMTP, and eventually we'll get on to Pelican Rise Limbers.

Chris Mead: 2:08

Okay, Thanks, mark. I probably need to get back a little bit further, because I grew up on a small farm where we had 40 cows and about a heap of pigs as well. But the day after my father signed up to buy the farm, he was killed in a car accident and my mother was pregnant with the sixth child. So, and I was the fifth, so that's tested as right from the start. And then ultimately I ended up catching rabbits and paying me way through school a few bit, and then one of my brothers left school when he was 14 and took over the farm as well. So when he got married at 22, I moved off the farm and my preference would have been to go to uni and be a vet, but that changed in that situation.

Chris Mead: 2:56

So, having moved off the farm, I then worked in a few other farming operations and then accidentally ended up in the building industry. And then another accident again. While I was doing some work in the building industry I heard me back and ended up in traction for a week and when I come out of that or somebody had said the boss said you've left him. I said, if that's okay, so just have. So. Then I started a building business where we built a lot of dearies you know, herringbone dearies for farmers and then I decided to progress from that. So, fun enough, during we spent three days my honeymoon getting registered as a home builder and then went on from there. And so at 23, I employed 23 people, which included bricklayers and carpenters et cetera. But at 22, I'd also started what is now known as CMTP. So I run the two businesses together. And now I'd already always planned to get out of the building industry when I got into my 40s and probably just as well I did, because it was extraordinarily stressful and I was working extremely long days. So it was not uncommon for me to work on an 18 hour day on a regular basis or most times and then a lot of weekend. So we started what's now CMTP in 1976 and started on the backyard of our house we rented in Carlich and then moved into other rented premises not too long afterwards and then ended up buying our first premises in, I think, 1985 and then built up from there.

Chris Mead: 4:49

We took on a contract in 1990, somewhere about 1990, for doing packaging for Ford to take all the car components out of New Zealand, and your fellows were going through a depression over there, and so the government said, well, we need to assemble our own cars, and the interesting part was that we were involved in the packing, of providing all the packaging for that, which was fantastic, and that was a good kickoff for us really as well. From there we progressed into doing more pallets, et cetera. Our original product was only potato and onion bins. We had one product. That was it. Until we done that part, we still are the largest potato and onion bins builder in Australia and we don't let go of that part of our business.

Chris Mead: 5:40

Being a young fellow, you make a lot of mistakes in employing people, and because you're back to the wall, you tend to be a little bit too hard on people, and so it took me a long time to mellow, and now a lot of people are working for me think I've mellowed too far, so I poke a bit of photo of that one, which is fine.

Chris Mead: 6:02

I accept that well and truly Some of our major moments.

Chris Mead: 6:08

It's a good lesson in persistence as well One with Losscom pallets, who Losscom set up in New Zealand ultimately, and I think they've reset up back there now, but I was chasing them to see if I could supply them pallets and it was five years from when I started chasing them until I eventually got my first order, and then we become their largest supplier and we're making anything up to over 300,000 pallets a year for them, so it's a massive amount.

Chris Mead: 6:37

In the process, I went to the US and bought a machine from over there that would allow me to pump out a pallet every 40 seconds, which was since the past. We now have a machine that pumps out a pallet pated and stenciled in every 10 seconds, which come from Italy, and these days, I think in the last 12 months, we've produced 3 million pallets across our business. So there's a simple sum. In a Western culture, there's one pallet made per person per year in each country. So if you take the UK, 66 million people, 66 million pallets the US is 360 million, so you can do the sums. I think Australia is 26 million, so we do well over 10% of them.

Mark Ferguson: 7:22

Hopefully that comes up in a quiz night one night. That'll be handy.

Chris Mead: 7:26

Yeah, that's right, that's a good one for that. I was out for dinner one night in Mount Gambier. A fellow sitting at the table from one of our competitors said to me you start winning, you're going to buy our business, and this was in 2007. In 2008, we bought the first part of their business, which was their Adelaide operations. I went back in. Well, that was April 1st, april Fool's Day. Then in October I went back and bought a controlling interest in the balance of their business, where they had about eight sites. They were in financial difficulty. They were in deep, deep trouble, as was the first one that I bought as well Nice Bar was. With the first one we bought, they'd run at a loss, a substantial loss, for the nine months of the year before I bought them. We turned a profit on our first day, which was April Fool's Day, which everybody was amazed at. I had people walk out on that first day as well. I had some pretty ordinary people in the business. A couple of them refused to work. They just walked out, which was a fine. Unfortunately, a couple of them come back and then insisted that they keep working the next day. I had to try and move them on Some of the key parts for what we do when we're changing a business is we really get in and know the numbers.

Chris Mead: 8:57

For us, it's absolutely critical that we know exactly what the numbers are on any given day. In the business in South Australia that we bought, they had corrupted their spreadsheets. When they were pricing jobs they had their numbers wrong. My first day I went through the spreadsheets, corrected all that and went to our customers. They said, oh, you're not going to put the price up. I said I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll put the prices up for everything that's too low. I'll put the prices down for everything that's too high. They said, oh no, we can't have that. I said it's not negotiable, that's the way it's going to be. That's what we've done. Some of those customers we went to see then which was in late 2008, are still extremely strong customers today, or most of them are actually extremely strong customers today. We have a very good relationship there. That's continued on that time.

Chris Mead: 9:51

To me, it's always about ethics and integrity. You don't play games. You want a customer for lifetime. If you can have them To do that. You don't rip a customer off. You really stick to doing the right thing all the time.

Chris Mead: 10:06

In recent years we've grown the business by doing some more acquisitions around the country. In Melbourne from our original acquisition we have two sites down there. We have one in Adelaide and Tassie. We bought one which was a sawmill. It too was in deep trouble. It took me a bit longer to turn it around.

Chris Mead: 10:29

One of the exercises I've done down there which is of interest, or should be of interest, to people was, I said, everybody down in the place and asked them how much profit did they think we made? Most of them had a grin on their face and knew very well that the business was operating at a loss. That part's fine. But then I asked them how much should we make? They came up with a pretty reasonable figure. I'll share it with you. The typical number was between $600,000 and $1,000.00.

Chris Mead: 11:02

To make life easy for my next part of the thing, we settled on $750,000, which was quite a sensible figure for that business to make in a year. I then asked them what do I do with that $750,000 profit? They all started laughing and said you have a holiday, you go and buy a holiday house, you're a new car, the whole works. I said well, we've got a few other responsibilities. First One of those. I said well, the tax office. How much do they take? They looked at me and said oh yeah.

Chris Mead: 11:33

I said how much do we need to put back into the business? I said well, the tax office takes a third of what you make for a starter. There's $250,000 gone. I said we've still got $500,000 there. What are we going to do? They said well, still, that's good for a holiday and whatever else. There's been no money spent on this business for a long time, so we need to start putting some money back into the business. Well, that's what we did.

Chris Mead: 12:00

At the end I said to them now I've paid all you people since I've taken over here. Yes, they said, and if you didn't, we wouldn't work here, which was a good call by them. I said well, I don't expect to get paid for five years on this case because there's so much money needs to be injected back into this business. Kind of long story short those key people who were there on that day are still with us and the business is absolutely flying. It goes really well. It's a pleasure for me to be there because there's a real connection between us and the employees, because they knew the workload that we went through and the investment that we did and the commitment we made to them and to the community. It was really well received and it's always a pleasure to be over there to see the crew in Tassie.

Mark Ferguson: 12:46

Awesome story.

Chris Mead: 12:48

We've since built a board treatment plant over there as well and they run the saw mills in Branksham where they also manufacture potato and onion bins and apple bins and a variety of simple products to what we did. But we have a treatment plant in just outside Scottsdale where we do a lot of posts, mostly rural supplies a lot of posts, some rails et cetera. That too started off on a tough basis but it's going extremely well now as well. Here's some of the originals we've then bought. I've got to think about it. We've bought two in Sydney, combined them together. We bought two in Brisbane and one operates at the top end of Brisbane, one operates at the bottom. Very challenging employing people in Brisbane. They don't like to come to work five days a week, seven. We're thinking about going to a four-day week up there, but working along your tube. When you get them there, keep them there and do 12 hours work rather than go away.

Chris Mead: 14:05

In the industry part. When we bought the major business, the head office and the owners of the head office had a family culture of. Everything was for them, and our culture is exactly the reverse of that. It took a long time for the people there to adjust. In the end I had three or four people that just couldn't adjust. Some of them were factory workers, so they weren't even involved in the management but had dragged the culture down. I went to the union and I said, look, I'd like to pay out some people. We're never going to be successful in this business to the level we should be while we have them. We had some pretty serious discussion and eventually I wrote in a reasonable size payment for them and moved those on. Our culture changed straight away. A young girl who was working for me at the time heard I was sitting down discussing the culture and the penny dropped for us that our issue was if we employed people that were selfish, we couldn't build a culture. If we employed people who were unselfish, it was a piece of cake to build the type of culture we wanted. Interviewing these days, in the early parts of our interview that's what we're looking for to see. Are they selfish or unselfish? That's an absolute key driver of success in business and culture is a key foundation of business at any stage.

Chris Mead: 15:32

Coming back to the numbers part, I think I said earlier you must know the numbers and we pretty well run a daily P&L through the business. We have 300 employees. We have 11 sites, yet we have an idea at the end of every day we're reasonably close at the end of every day as to whether we run at a profit or a loss, and just what it was. Then we can address any issues the next day rather than find out 60 days later that we've just burnt a lot of money. To me, that's a really powerful tool.

Chris Mead: 16:08

Lots of people say, oh, you can't do it. We do it and we have quite a complex business in terms of how many sites. It's over, the amount of material we use. We have 20 or 30 semi-loads of timber dryer coming through our front gate every day and then we cut it into different shapes. There's lots of different things happen. We have a lot of cardboard as well, which we cut and shape and other products that go with it. If somebody says you can't do it, they've got to roll. You can't do it.

Mark Ferguson: 16:39

It's a good approach to take to life. When I did have a quick look around the Coal Lake factory I think you talked about shipping wings for Boeing. You've done some pretty or engines for Boeing or something. You've done some pretty cool things over the loss of the company.

Chris Mead: 16:52

We have. We're expanding that. Yes, we do all the boxes for the wings for Boeing to go from Melbourne to Seattle. Some of those are 12 metres long. There's, in rough terms, there's about a million dollars for the wings in a box. We have to protect those and do it really well. We also now do the boxes for the stealth drones, which we only do four or five a year. But the stealth drones are a pretty unique weapon. You can ask me where they go. I actually can't tell you, which is pretty good. Maybe there's some secrets about that.

Mark Ferguson: 17:30

Probably a good thing not to know. I think so. They're not shipping into Coal Lake? I don't think. No, I don't think so. A quick interruption here to remind you of Head Shepherd Premium and our consulting services at Next to Niagara International. If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit the hubnexttoannagrycom and sign up for Head Shepherd Premium and get an extra podcast each week. If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximise the journey going to your livestock and feel more confident around the decisions you're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at nexttoannagrycom and we'll get in touch and see where that takes us. Yeah, obviously a really successful business story. Somewhere along that journey you obviously got back into cattle and now run the Palakon Rise numbers and study of the President of Australian Limousine Society and obviously a passion for cattle. When did you get back into farming along that journey Along?

Chris Mead: 18:33

the way. I'd had small parcels of land and I'd had 10 and 20 and 30 cattle here and there. But in 2008, I ended up buying a small herd of limousine and they weren't registered the first lot, but they were also a bit crazy. I marched them out and then went shopping again. I waited a little while to work out whether I'd pick the wrong breed and looked around and then I found out that I'd settled, that I really had picked the right breed, and so I went to a few different places. Donnell Valley was one up in Southern New South Wales. I ended up buying some animals there and a few others Then.

Chris Mead: 19:13

I didn't know anything about EBVs at the time either. I was fairly naive on that. The game had changed a lot from when I was a young dairy farmer to what's happening in the industries today. I didn't understand the dosility side of things, but I quickly learned and reshaped our herd a fair bit, I think. Now we typically run 50 limo brewers. We have 15 to 20 re-sips in a year, so we're typically looking at around about 65 to 70 calves a year on the ground. We look at dosilities being an absolute core requirement, poldiness as a core requirement and then getting the structure and softness. I'm pretty excited now that limousine are ready to step into single-step genomics. We're very strong users of EBVs and I always refer to the EBVs as the resumé. If you're going to take on an animal, the EBVs give you the resumé. Then you go along to have a look to see what you need to see that is in the EBVs Our structure, width of muzzle, softness, all those types of things that make up the ideal animals.

Mark Ferguson: 20:39

Yeah, so I guess, over that journey, the dosility breed, which has been an absolute game changer for the limo breed, obviously coming out of France they hadn't had a lot of selection because it always been close to humans. So it turned out when they got released into Australia they had a little bit of behavioural issues that needed sorting out. But the power of genetics is, I always think I mean, I always talk about the power of genetics for different aspects and yeah, the change in the cattle through selection, through that locality breeding bay, has been enormous, hasn't it?

Chris Mead: 21:16

It has. It has. Even some of the stock agents still can't believe how much we've changed it in that time. And you know, limousine are now, if not the quietest certainly equal quietest animals in Australia in terms of the beef industry and the easiest to handle. There's still odd patches here and there where there's some animals that are not quite there, but overall and they are pleased to deal with and each year our clients are coming still got smacked at how quiet they are, and they'll comment to me months later when I make contact with them to see how everything's going and they'll say oh, they're just fantastic. We feel so comfortable amongst them, which is really important.

Mark Ferguson: 21:53

It's a great thing and I guess with like any breeding bay, it's the good thing is that's good and getting better. So while having that breeding bay, you can continue to select it so they can keep. It's not like we just make them better and then leave them there. They can always be. We can always be selecting for better facility, which I guess it's it'll meet. Eventually They'll be like kittens. You want to get to some already, which is a problem. Still need to be able to shift them. But yeah, it's, yeah, hugely powerful. I guess the diamond in the in the limos is the F 49L gene. You've sort of been a fan of that gene and what it can do for cattle and yeah, it's obviously. I don't know how well known it is, but there's not many single genes that are useful.

Chris Mead: 22:38

But I can give you a bit of an update on where we have on the F 94L gene. They've made a realization recently that there may well be a great impact from the F 94L gene. That has an impact on methane output. There certainly is. What we're going to do is get the final bit of science to prove it. But because of the impact of that has on the growth of the animal and the conversion of food, you've got an automatic reduction in methane production. So you hire efficiency less, less feed intake for a more beef output is a key part of it.

Chris Mead: 23:17

All the other things with the F 94L gene is the texture of the meat as well. It's a much softer meat with them that you don't see lines of fat in it, which some people would like to see, but it's a softer meat and if you combine the limos with British breeds, what you end up with is something that's a nice balance for people that you soften down the texture of the meat. You do get a little bit of the intramuscular fat then from the British breeds and it's probably second to Wagyu. It's the best beef you can really get and Wagyu is at another level. It's a different type of product really, but in terms of every day, eating limo over British breeds is sensational. It's outstanding, and that's one of the results of the F 94L gene.

Mark Ferguson: 24:09

Yeah, and I guess that's the really that's the position of limos in the market. But I want to say, is that crossover over a British herd and there's obviously plenty of them around, and I guess it always amazes me that people would run a straight maternal beef situation where you wouldn't have some terminal in there, because there's just plenty of spare females, I suppose, because cows do live longer than longer than my beloved sheep. So you've got, you can run them out for a few extra years and therefore you don't need the same replacement, right, and therefore that option to have those terminals. Obviously there's a big, big market for that, for that young cattle market in people, sort of milk-fed market almost straight off, straight off mum, with that pretty explosive growth that they can have. Yeah, it's a great product and really efficient beef production in some of those in Victoria particularly.

Chris Mead: 25:03

It is yeah, there's a lot of demand for that. That's the high-end restaurants chase that exact product. So you're eight, nine, 10-month-old calf pretty well straight off mum, and that delivers what they wanted in their restaurants. It was interesting.

Chris Mead: 25:19

Recently I had two separate visitors around our farm and they were looking at our commercial cattle side as well. We now run, I think, around 400 commercial head as well and we run resips in some of those and then cover them with limousine bills. And there were some that were covered by Angus and there was some by Speckle Park as well. And the fellows coming through they've seen the black calves that were by the limo bull and they said, wow, we'd buy those and put those into carcass comps tomorrow. And they're just running on straight on grass, but you could see that they stood out as well. So the growth is exceptional in them and I really can't understand why more people don't do it. We have a few local breeders here that run Angus Herds that buy limo bulls from us because they know that they just get that extra punch and that extra weight at the end to sell. So they're picking up a nice little premium for that.

Mark Ferguson: 26:14

And you obviously get the hybrid vigor, the heterosis as well on that cross. There's heaps of positives, heaps of opportunities there really. So, yeah, it's definitely something we can see advancing. So you have been looking hard in the feed efficiency, setting up the Vitale unit, so they almost up and down.

Chris Mead: 26:33

We should have it already and done by the end of the month. We've got the last few things done. We've put in a set of tapari stockyards out at the latest farm that we bought, which is where our Vitale system is, and we've just got to connect a few fences and we've got all the equipment going in just over a week's time. So we're keen to kick that one off and we run at first run through. We'll just run through some of our young bulls and young females just to get our own systems right, to make sure that we've got our feed mixers right before we start going into the serious measuring of our other bulls and then also contracting to other people to do their feed efficiency records for them as well.

Chris Mead: 27:16

So it'll be open for other breeders to get in there Other breeders and even other breeds. So we've already got. I think we'll have seven spaces a year, which we want, two spaces ourselves. One other breeders said he'll have at least one lot, perhaps two lots. We've left provision to put another set up on in. If we get overwhelmed with orders we'll go again.

Mark Ferguson: 27:44

Yeah, you don't strike me as someone that's worried about scale.

Chris Mead: 27:48

No, not at all. It's always good to do more of something and do it better.

Mark Ferguson: 27:55

What's the end game? Is it continue buying country, run more cattle, or?

Chris Mead: 28:00

run more. Here we are. We're negotiating for a bit more at the moment and it probably leads into something that links a lot of our businesses together. I often work consider life works in triangles, and so we have a commitment to our carbon footprint through our business. We're working hard to reduce that and part of our farming operations is to help us do that as well. So we're looking at how we can use our waste from our timber side as well to go into the farming operations to increase organic matter in the soil.

Chris Mead: 28:32

We also have another angle where we look at self-insurance. So the farms create an opportunity for self-insurance. If we've been doing it for a few years now, that's one of the reasons for building up the farms. If typically in an insurance policy, 30% or 33% of your insurance actually goes to insurance, the other 66 or thereabouts goes into costs and profits etc for insurance companies. So we invest into these properties to self-insure. If we have a minor disaster, we can borrow against whatever we've got. If we have a larger disaster, we can't borrow against it. We can sell cattle or whatever off one of the properties. If we have an extreme disaster at a bad time, we could then sell the cattle and the property if we really had to. We've got a series of properties for that. So we're still buying properties at the moment and we'll continue to do so for the next few years and then reassess from there.

Mark Ferguson: 29:34

Yeah, it's a pretty good policy and you've been fortunate to have at least one or two Sons back involved in the business.

Chris Mead: 29:42

Well, yes, I have four Sons, of which the third SON manages, runs and manages the CMTP business. My second SON runs the commercial cattle operations. My oldest son is less ambitious but he does a lot of the training within the business, within CMTP. He's highly regarded by all the other employees because he cares so much about them, teaches them in a great way and makes sure that their life's enjoyable on that part. Now younger SON runs a boating room which we're expanding at the moment. So in the boating room he's boating and packing beef, pork, lamb and venison and a couple of odd bits and pieces and smoking, smoking hams and doing bake and some small woods etc as well. But that's expanding quite quickly as well.

Mark Ferguson: 30:35

So it is a fully family business, then it is, it is.

Chris Mead: 30:41

So it's integrated in an interesting way.

Mark Ferguson: 30:45

You've got Marilyn, keepin' your all in check.

Chris Mead: 30:49

I think she keeps her grandkids in check more than anything else. Yeah, you're right, a few of them kicking her out there is. It's none of those to keep under control, which is good.

Mark Ferguson: 31:01

And so one of those SONs has gone to the dark cell and running a few Speckle Park. Is that right?

Chris Mead: 31:06

He's a little bit down the mouth because I think Speckle Park sort of having a few challenges at the moment. But credit to him, he's very focused on the dosility side, on the temperament side of things in Speckle Park. Like a lot of breeds, don't get those sort of things right first up and so he's working really hard on that side of things. And the other part, travis, who runs our business. He's also focused on the wagyu side. We are growing our wagyu operations substantially.

Chris Mead: 31:39

One of the negatives of limousines is that limousine bulls last so much longer than most other breeds, instead of having a bull that you sell and two years later somebody will be looking for another bull. They last seven or eight years and even longer, reports of them lasting 12 years after serving. You don't roll over as many of those. But our Wagyu side, we're growing that part and we'll continue to grow that because we're also looking at how we maximise return per acre of land, remembering that Wagyu grow at a slower rate as well and they serve a different market as well. So Wagyu are sort of the Lamborghini of the beef world.

Chris Mead: 32:25

Not in the speed of growth, no, definitely not the quality of beef is just so it tastes. Exactly, you're right. But I always say that limousine are the Mercedes or the BMW as well, because they're just right up there in a sensible position. So that helps, but we'll continue to grow that Wagyu side.

Mark Ferguson: 32:52

Excellent. So yeah, that's been a good chat. So anything we've missed any career guidance you've got for anyone listening out there or sort of big learnings along the way.

Chris Mead: 33:03

Yes, I have. Actually, if you've got to spare $10,000, the best thing you can do first up is to invest it in education in your own education, because I remember being laughed at many years ago for some of the investments that I made in education and it has multiplied out so many times. But getting the right business education in particular is critical. I spent in 2011,. I think I went across the US and I course in leadership over there and mixed with some of the really high-end business people over there Jack Welsh, gary Hamill and a variety of others also met Benazir Boute, who was the president of Pakistan at the time. Unfortunately, it was a sad meeting because I was reasonably sure that she would not live that long afterwards because she was a very powerful woman who wanted to do the right thing by Pakistan and was ultimately assassinated, but an extraordinary person to meet. But meeting some of the American business people and learning how they operate and the critical things for them was really good for me as well. So there was money very well invested and, funnily enough, on the plane on the way home I wrote down some notes because I felt our culture before I had left.

Chris Mead: 34:32

I felt we were losing an important part of our culture and I developed a scoring system which is a subjective scoring system which I didn't share with anybody else. It was a measure for myself and I scored all our employees out of 100 but I divided into two sections, so we were out of 50 for their work output and out of 50 for their attitude and their cultural values etc. And then I put those together and I remember there were some scores below 63 and I set a limit of saying anybody below 63 needed to go and work somewhere else. And then, as time when I moved that bottom score up of 63 up a few times and we could typically average it around about 84. And I scored myself as well, I was quite hard on myself to say how's my focus? Am I doing the right thing by our people? Am I being productive in the workplace, etc.

Mark Ferguson: 35:26

Fingers crossed you got about 63, mate.

Chris Mead: 35:33

So it was a nice little measure system which I've referred to in other businesses. Now I do a bit of advisory stuff for other businesses and I send them away to do their own score. And I said it doesn't matter what the number is, it's what the relativity is to other people around and if you have the best team you're going to win a lot more games than if you're carrying some passengers. And it's unfair on the high performers in your business to be sharing ground with low performers. They don't reach their real potential. Just like any sports team, you put one person in. If it's a football game and you have one person in the team kicking the ball the opposite way to what you're meant to be kicking it, you can't win the game. So you have got to be really strong on that part.

Mark Ferguson: 36:20

Yeah, that's for sure. Awesome words there, and I guess that investment in education can be in a whole different. Depending on who you are and what your drivers are and what your passions are. You can invest that in a whole different, lots of different ways. Whether that's in taking yourself away to a course or enrolling in something local or whatever it is, there's always opportunities to learn. I guess the sort of saying that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. I think that's fairly important.

Chris Mead: 36:49

Yeah, that's right. One of the other key ones is also I often hear people refer to the accountant in business and, rather than refer, they defer, and that, to me, scares the living daylights out of me. So if I walk into a business that's in a little bit of trouble and they keep mentioning the accountant, I start to get quite anxious and then we have to make some quick changes. The people who run the business should know everything about the business and the accountant should be there for compliance and to provide them with the numbers. It's for them to assess everything and understand the whole deal. The accountant typically works on history and can advise you what will happen going forward in terms of trends etc. But if you're the driver of the business, you have to know all that stuff really well and not defer to the accountant.

Mark Ferguson: 37:46

Yeah, excellent words. All right, it's time for you to actually get into some work there. I will do it, but yeah, I really appreciate your time today, chris. It's always great to chat, but it's good to get that recorded and I'm sure plenty of people out there are really going to enjoy those. I guess that I mean everyone loves the story of coming from the backyard through to success and obviously you've done a lot of hard yards along the way and deserve all that success. But yeah, it's been great to chat and look forward to catching up one day over here catching a trout or two.

Chris Mead: 38:24

Absolutely sounds good to me. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Ferguson: 38:27

Thanks, chris. Thanks again to our mates at Heinegger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflix, they offer an extensive livestock portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the HLP podcast.