Silver Fern Farms’ Rob Hewett wins Chairperson of the year at Deloitte Top 200 awards (NZ Herald)

Rob Hewett, a prominent figure in New Zealand’s agribusiness sector, has been honoured as the 2023 Chairperson of the Year at the Deloitte Top 200 awards, celebrating his impressive leadership roles and the business success he has overseen.

Hewett is co-chair of Silver Fern Farms, a leading producer and global marketer of grass-fed red meat, owned in equal partnership by Silver Fern Farms Co-operative (a farmer co-operative that he also chairs) and Shanghai Maling Aquarius.

He is also chair of Farmlands Cooperative, Pioneer Energy, Woolworks, Fern Energy and Haulage.

Hewett has directorships at Pulse Energy and T&G Global.

Additionally, he actively manages a carbon-positive farm and participates in a think-tank for agricultural innovation.

The Deloitte Top 200 judges commend Hewett for blending strong commercial acumen with a deep understanding of agriculture and a profound connection to the land, spanning six generations of his family’s background.

Award judge Ross George says: “Rob has a very clear vision for the businesses he chairs, he communicates that well and maintains solid relationships with his managing directors”.

Describing his style as a chairman, Hewett says he’s collegial, and compares his approach to a traffic director in the boardroom.

“My job is to get the best out of the people around the table, give them opportunities, and shut them down if they start hogging the microphone,” adding that he is also not afraid to make hard decisions where necessary.

The past year was a banner one for Silver Fern Farms and the judges applaud Hewett for playing a significant role in its result, which saw a net profit after tax of $189.3 million, representing an 82 per cent increase.

Hewett says this was an all-time record by a significant margin, and while he points out that part of the result can be attributed to “a rising tide that all boats enjoyed” in the market, he says there is no question a large proportion of it reflected the business’ focus on the end consumer and the co-operative’s commitment to sharing the risk and reward of the operating company’s market performance with farmer suppliers.

A notable success is Silver Fern Farm’s Net Carbon Zero beef, launched in the United States last year. Although sales of this product remain relatively small, it casts a positive light on other areas of the business and demonstrates alignment with the preferences of discerning customers.

“It has great bones and great potential because it is exactly where the market wants us to go,” Hewett says. “Since we launched that product, markets internationally have had some headwinds, but it is still true to say that the attributes that programme has around sustainability and naturalness hold true.”

Silver Fern Farms’ performance has paved the way for its largest-ever investment programme, across a range of projects that will modernise its facilities and embrace digital transformation for long-term sustainability.

As a leader in the agricultural sector, Hewett emphasises the inherent commercial acumen of farmers.

“They are over-indexed in a few areas, but they manage risk on a daily basis without even knowing they are doing it,” he says.

Hewett considers a significant responsibility of his role to be nurturing the next generation of leaders. “We have put a very proactive succession programme in place,” he says.

A governance programme, “To the Core”, initiated by Silver Fern Farms and now adopted by Farmlands and LIC, helps to cultivate a pipeline of emerging talent in the agri-sector.

“That includes reaching into our shareholder constituency and identifying self-starters who have the ability and the time to go on and be governors of the company in the future,” says Hewett.

The Silver Fern Farms Co-operative now has three of its five farmer-elected directors on the board having done the programme, and two of the farmer-elected directors of the partnership board.

“Rob is very commercial, has an international outlook and is familiar with all aspects of global trade,” adds George, chief executive of Direct Capital. “But he is equally at home talking to individual farmers about their issues.”

Reflecting on the partnership with Shanghai Maling, signed in 2016 under his leadership, Hewett acknowledges that there were suspicions from some surrounding investment by a Chinese firm in the early days. But the relationship has stood the test of time.

“How we brought that together is one of the things I am really proud of,” he says. “The benefits we were looking for when the partnership first started have largely delivered.”

“Some of them haven’t. But it is absolutely true to say that where they haven’t delivered, things have changed, and the business is better than it would have been under the original plan anyway.”

Finalist: David Carter

With a remarkable three-decade career at Beca Group and a strong engineering background, David Carter assumed the role of executive chair in 2017.

Beyond his leadership at one of Asia Pacific’s largest independent advisory, design and engineering consultancies, Carter is a director at Meridian Energy, chairs the University of Auckland Foundation and is a guardian of the Aotearoa Circle.

In recognising Carter as a finalist for the Top 200 awards, the judges say he is an embodiment of the Beca Group’s ethos, steering it to impressive global heights. Under his guidance, Beca has expanded to over 4000 staff across nine countries, managing projects in more than 40 nations annually.

“David is equally at home in detail, strategy, governance and culture,” George said.

Carter says his leadership style is rooted in openness, inclusivity and transparency — a set of values he believes is essential in an employee-owned business. With more than 1600 employees as shareholders, Carter emphasises the power of collective direction.

“The ‘we’ is stronger than the ‘me’,” he says, acknowledging the strength derived from shared goals and a united team.

Carter says his longevity at Beca comes as a result of his wide range of interests and the opportunities the business has given him to move into a variety of positions and geographies.

“I’ve stayed in the business because I love people, I believe in its philosophy, and it has allowed me to have a very diverse career.”

The judges note that a pivotal moment in Carter’s legacy was the recent appointment of Beca’s first female chief executive and first non-engineer in the company’s 103-year history, Amelia Linzey.

Carter downplays the emphasis that is placed on historical firsts, asserting that Beca hires 50 per cent non-engineers into the business, and the key focus when recruiting a chief executive was to appoint the best person for the role.

“We are delighted she said yes,” he affirms, noting that the move aligns with the company’s ongoing effort to refresh leadership for the younger generation of owners before it is needed.

The smoothness of this transition stands out as one of the significant highlights of the past year for Carter. “That is your number one role as chair and it has gone as well as I could have imagined,” he reflects.

The judges also commended Carter for his role in promoting environmental sustainability and robust infrastructure in New Zealand.

Carter says working at Beca gives him the luxury of doing that but cautions that the world has yet to grasp the magnitude of the challenge of climate change and how fast it is coming at us over the horizon. He thinks the world hasn’t yet committed to addressing it with the urgency that it needs.

“We cannot keep building bigger seawalls to stop the ocean eroding houses,” Carter says. He advocates for a systemic approach, where the world and the environment are viewed as an interconnected system.

“When you go and visit parts of New Zealand where we have fenced off nature and allowed it to recover, the bird life is just sensational,” he says.

“There is a real opportunity to regenerate and bring nature back inside the borders of our cities.”

Finalist: Scott St John

Scott St John is chair of Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and director for ANZ New Zealand, Mercury, NEXT Foundation, and Fonterra.

His leadership philosophy emphasises the need for boards to have unwavering conviction in the strategic direction of the firms they oversee.

“The board should validate the strategy from management, challenge it, change it if necessary, but leave it up to management to execute on it,” says St John, underlining the delicate balance between strategic oversight and operational execution.

He explains that while directors need to go deep from time to time, they need to take care not to end up managing the company and inadvertently allowing upward delegation to occur. “If you do that, you lose some of the ability to deliver accountability.”

The Top 200 judges recognise St John as a chairperson of the year finalist due to his impactful leadership, particularly in steering Fisher & Paykel Healthcare through the Covid-19 pandemic and giving it the confidence to expand its business during the disruption.

George commends St John’s foresight during the pandemic. “It would have been easy for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare to pull back on growth investment off the back of Covid,” he says.

“Instead, St John ensured his board kept them focused on the long game, not a short-term profit-driven one.”

St John explains that despite the turbulence, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare adhered to its annual planning process that considers a 15-year horizon.

Focus remained steadfast on the long-term plan, driven by a commitment to deliver for patients.

“Right across the board, our eye is relentlessly on what we can deliver long-term, and not making tactical decisions that might enhance the short-term optics of the business,” he says. “It would take an awful lot to knock us off our rails.”

Reflecting on the transition from the Covid period to the subsequent “hangover”, St John highlights that during the pandemic there were great costs involved to supply patients “no matter what”, and the business had to bring hundreds of extra staff in.

“As we moved out of Covid, we were left with a bunch of legacy costs as we adjusted back to the way we were running the business with the long-term plan in mind,” he says.

“During that period we could have chopped costs and restored margin. But instead, the business headed in the opposite direction, consistent with its long-term plan.

“We are creating new products and developing new markets, staffing that up appropriately, and ensuring that our R&D stays well ahead of the game. There was never a thought of doing it any different.”

To help deliver on that ambition, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare is expanding its footprint by planning a second New Zealand campus in Auckland and expanding its manufacturing operations with new facilities in Mexico and China.

It has also added strong environmental and social responsibility goals and targets into its annual business plans.

While St John’s governance roles span a broad range of sectors, a consistent thread is his belief in the importance of working with businesses that are important to New Zealand.

“Beyond that, I have got to feel a sense of affinity with the businesses I’m involved in,” he says. “I have to believe in them as well as the people I am sitting around the table with. That is tremendously important.”

The Chairperson of the Year award is sponsored by Forsyth Barr.