Erik van ’t Hof is Finance Director at Royal Agrifirm Group. In conversation with Tom Hodgett, he shares his leadership approach, which centers on open-mindedness, transparency, and effective storytelling.

Erik also offers insight into Agrifirm’s innovative technologies and sustainability initiatives, discusses the farming sector, and explains his motivation for moving from agricultural firm Syngenta to Agrifirm.

How would you describe your leadership approach, both generally and when managing strategic projects?

From a leadership perspective, I always tend to be very open and transparent.

If you want to be a good Finance leader, you need to be open-minded, because you're not the expert in most things running through the business, you're supportive. You need to build your confidence and your understanding of the business by asking questions while being open and avoiding jumping to conclusions too fast which might kill ideas.

On the strategic projects part, you need to take the same approach. You need to be open, take everyone’s input, try to understand what they're proposing, and then make the best decisions. You need to understand the business case behind it and what's driving the numbers. Often, you need to continue asking questions about what's really behind the idea, why it is there, and how it is going to add value for both the company and the customer.

Sometimes, business people are a bit too optimistic, and you need to steer them to the right position and outcomes. That means’s asking leadership and each team has its own way of being influenced.

Finance often brings guidelines, acting like a risk manager for a company. However, you need to balance it as sometimes you need to take some risk and support brave ideas.

Some Finance professionals are a bit too negative or risk-averse, where they don't want to move ahead with some brilliant ideas and just kill them by overanalyzing. It’s just not workable. You need to be willing to take a bit of a risk and balance that within a business.

You can get stuck in the details of a financial model, and that can be difficult to overcome when the reality is that you need to try something first.

When you're in a leadership position, you also need to manage things from a communication point of view. In my case, we have a board of directors, so it’s very important to bring the right story, and understand the best timing. At times, you need to think about what's happening on the other side of the table: What's on their agendas? When’s the right time to bring your idea? What's on their lists?

Other times it just needs repetition. You need to plant a little seed and then it needs to grow. The first time, they may say it's not a brilliant idea, we won't go for it. But if you believe in an idea, it sometimes just needs repetition and then the seed might still grow.

When you’re in a leadership position, it’s important to make the trade-off and bring your ideas forward when you really believe in them; choose your battles.

Can you tell us about Agrifirm’s current sustainability initiatives and innovative technologies?

When we are talking about my business unit - Plant Based Solutions - we’re really focused on the crops. There’s obviously a strong sustainability aspect to it, because it’s all about the environment. Often, the solutions we provide can create a bit of friction between sustainability goals and practical application. So, it's about balancing those because you need them.

People often forget how important it is to have protection for a crop to at least get your food on the table. In Western countries, people are probably less connected to what's actually happening in the fields; they don’t really know what's needed to get a crop growing or yield and have your food on the table. That's sometimes tricky.

At the same time, we can make use of new tools to reduce the footprint that farmers have on the environment.

Examples of new ideas and innovation include spot spraying, where instead of doing a full spray on your entire field, you have a camera with an algorithm to it and you just spray on a specific area that requires it. It's really tailored, and those techniques are getting traction right now.

We are also working on a pest prediction model. You have an algorithm that can predict when a pest is coming based on the weather, temperature, etc. The tool will give advice on when to spray, which can reduce your footprint. And that’s only part of it.

Sustainability means different things to different people. Some companies are talking about decarbonization, reducing their carbon footprint, or offsetting their footprint…

Yes, we also do things around carbon capturing. We have a lot of data on what crops are taking in from a CO₂ perspective and you can build models around it. That's what we are currently investing in and investigating - how can we work with CO₂ certificates or similar for farmers and also sell those to a party who needs to find a way to offset their footprint.

How do you foster the culture of innovation within your team?  

When taking a broader approach, it comes back to the strategic piece. You need to be open-minded.

Sometimes, you get ideas that are out of the box, but you need to be open-minded to understand what's behind it, as some of these ideas are simply brilliant, because nobody else thought about it.

Have an open mind and then explore and explain ideas. Get your questions out on the table to really understand what's going on. Don’t shoot ideas at the start because, if you do, that's going to kill innovation.

Be part of the journey and help the team explain their ideas clearly. If there are still open questions, you need to help them find the answers or direct them to get the answers.

From a Finance perspective, you often get questions around how a new solution would work from a Finance perspective, or how a business case would work. Finance should step up and support those who are not so close to Finance, to get to the point where it starts to make sense from a numbers point of view.

How I foster that innovation in my finance team is a trickier question, so I will start with the background.

When I started more than half a year ago, we had tools from a reporting perspective, but the data coming out of the reports were often not telling the right story. So, we first had to invest quite a bit of time in setting up the right things and building the data hygiene in, building stability in the system and in the reporting, but also in the data inputs for the system. That took time.

That’s a bit of the background. Now, we are moving into the next phase - building on our reports and Finance data to better support the business in understanding the information, learn from it, and use that knowledge to take the next step from a traditional Finance position towards business partnering.

When it comes to innovation, that's probably the next step - when and where we want to put in extra tools. But the open-minded approach is the same.

What drew you to the agriculture and farming industry?

That's an interesting question because I was not looking for a job in the agriculture industry, but I was asked to for a role in Syngenta.

I started to investigate because the company name was unknown to me. I began to understand the business and its drivers, which really got me interested, because essentially, you’re securing food on the table.

If we don't fix things in the right way, there might be issues in getting food on the table for people - maybe not in Western Europe, but certainly when you take a broader look.

Many people might not think the agriculture industry is very innovative, but innovation is being triggered by laws and other things, which play a role in improving yields, the quality of crops, and their resilience against climate change.

The innovation gets really interesting - way more than you would expect before entering this industry.

You mentioned climate change earlier, and drought in particular has become a real issue recently. How does a farm manage that?

Even a small drop in yield can have a huge impact on a farm’s profitability, and without that, they can’t reinvest in what they need for the following year. And, the global population is only going in one direction, so demand for food is constantly increasing.

You're spot on. When we’re innovating or developing a new idea, especially as we approach go-to-market, we always try to keep in mind what's actually on the profit & loss of the farmer; we don't only look at what's happening in our P&L. So, when it comes to farmer profits, as you just mentioned, we keep that in mind when we do those types of proposals.

You spent around ten years at Deloitte and another ten years at Syngenta. I know you're still fairly new to your current role, but what do you think are the benefits of staying with one business for that length of time?

Honestly, I don't think tenure is so important. At Deloitte and Syngenta, I had many roles over time, so it's about having the opportunity to move on every two or three years and go into a new role to learn.

For me, getting the opportunity to learn and grow into something new is what it’s about. In both companies, I was able to move on quite well on that two-to-three-year scale. If I hadn’t had that opportunity, I probably wouldn't have gotten to the ten-year mark. I've seen a very broad spectrum of Finance in those different roles, giving me a solid basis. However, you don’t need to build it within the same company. For me, it was simply that I had the opportunity to build it in two companies.

To answer your question more specifically, one of the elements that helps when you have such a long tenure is that you have the opportunity to build a broad network. You know many people in the company whom you can ask questions. Also, when you're very familiar with processes, you can really understand them and easily make improvements or change things. That’s one of the benefits.

I do believe you need a certain period of time to grow into a role, to understand a company, and really start to add value. I don't believe you can do that within one year.

You transitioned from a big, well-known company like Syngenta to a smaller, less well-known one. What was the motivation for that move?

There are a couple of things. One is simply that I now take the lead.

In Syngenta, you have huge machinery because it's a big company, so you can't influence many things in set-up or processes yourself. You can tweak things slightly when there is a change coming up or have some influence. But now, I’m the one deciding what's going to happen from a Finance perspective for our BU. I can take the lead and decide how I want to evolve my Finance function and team.

For me, that’s a great new thing to explore. Previously, I was involved in those things, but in most cases, I wouldn't have had the final yes or no. Now, I'm often in the lead of giving a yes or no.

It’s a different position for me, and I was eager to learn that perspective and see how that responsibility would work. I am enjoying it.

Secondly, with my broad experience from a multi-national, with all its standard processes and smooth operations, I can bring something valuable and improve processes at a company that has a different set-up. We can take things to the next level.

I can already see my impact, even though it's only been just over half a year. I believe that, within a year, I can make a difference in improving the Finance function within my BU.

It’s not a small company, but it’s still easier to see your contribution and apply your expertise compared to a large multi-national.

Who is the most inspiring person to you in business, and why?

I don’t really have a specific person in mind. However, what has made me reflect over the past couple of months, especially in the US, is that while there are some great entrepreneurs and strong leaders, it sometimes seems like they’ve lost track of their own principles and values.

In finance, I like to see leaders who make numbers look easy by telling a clear story in an understandable way. Not just talking through a balance sheet or P&L, but really bring the story.

Thank you to Erik for speaking to Tom Hodgett, Associate Director in our Finance & Accountancy recruitment team in the Netherlands. 

Views and opinions contained within our Executive Interviews are those of the interviewee and not views shared by EMEA Recruitment.