In this episode of the Arete Podcast, Richard Triggs sits down with Troy Setter, CEO and Managing Director of Consolidated Pastoral Company (CPC), one of Australia’s largest beef cattle producers. Richard and Troy go back to Troy’s time at AACo, so this conversation has been a long time coming.
Troy never set out to become a CEO. He left an agricultural boarding school in western Sydney to go jackarooing, mustering sheep on a motorbike, and spent the next decade working his way up to managing stations and feedlots. Joint ventures, live export and running a shipping company out of Darwin followed, then four years as Chief Operating Officer at AACo. He joined CPC as COO and within a couple of weeks found himself CEO, the company’s fifth in six years. That was twelve years ago.
His first move was not a five-year plan. He and his executive team surveyed the business and agreed the values first: leadership, trust, accountability, and workplace health and safety, with sustainability added later. Once the values were set, he says, the road map came together easily.
Richard and Troy talk about leading around 200 people in Australia and 600 in Indonesia, and what each culture does well. More than half of CPC’s supervisors and managers in Australia are women, which Troy puts down to a simple rule: the best person gets the job, and nobody should have to be someone they are not in order to succeed.
They also cover why volunteer leadership, where there is no pay cheque or employment contract to lean on, is some of the best training a manager can get, how CPC turned productivity gains on the land into carbon credits, and why AI has yet to make up for the growing weight of red tape on Australian business.
A conversation for any leader who believes culture is something you set on purpose.
TIME STAMPS:
05:23 From agricultural boarding school to jackaroo
11:11 Joining CPC as COO and becoming CEO within weeks
13:57 Setting the values before the five-year plan
20:09 Leading across Australian and Indonesian cultures
27:19 ESG, productivity and carbon credits
29:39 The best person gets the job: women in leadership at CPC
35:25 What volunteer leadership teaches you
41:20 The outlook for trade, AI and Australian business
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