Charles Aris CEO Chad Oakley on our new Agriculture Practice

Our firm officially launched its Agriculture Practice in 2022. In this edition of the Charles Aris Podcast, CEO Chad Oakley shares his family’s connection to agriculture and how he met Practice Leader Eric Spell.

Below, you’ll find a full transcript of this episode:

My name is Chad Oakley and I have the honor and privilege of serving as the chief executive officer of Charles Aris Executive Search. Today, I’m excited to share with you the genesis of one of our newest practices, and that is our Agriculture Practice, which we started last year in 2022.

The creation of our Agriculture Practice has been the culmination of a number of factors, one of which is my family’s participation in farming, specifically on my mother’s side. For those of you who are familiar with Charles Aris, you know that we do work all over the United States. In the last 10 years, we’ve completed searches in 46 of the 50 states in the USA. What you may not know exactly is that we were founded and continue to be headquartered in the great state of North Carolina, where I’m sitting right now. And for those of you who are familiar with North Carolina, you know that farming and agriculture are incredibly important to the state.

Like most states in the South and Midwest, farming is the number one industry in North Carolina. My mother grew up on a farm in a small town called Oxford, North Carolina, which is about 30 minutes outside of Raleigh, our capital. During my childhood and that of my brother Allen, who is our president here at Charles Aris, and my sister Andrea, who runs our net promoter score process, we spent countless weekends and even some weeks during the summer on that farm. 

This was a small farm well under 100 acres. My grandparents were never wealthy; my grandfather worked in a shoe store during the day while my grandmother tended the farm and then together they would do all the heavy lifting on the farm during the evenings and weekends. It was mostly crops but my grandparents also had a dozen or so cows, pigs, chickens, as well, all of which was absolutely fascinating to a 10-year-old boy.

The commercial end of the farm primarily grew tobacco, which was a huge cash crop in the state back in the 80s and 90s. On occasion, my mother would send me out into the field with the workers to harvest the tobacco leaves. I can distinctly remember the plants were as tall as I was, and the tobacco leaves were huge in my mind – as were the bugs and the flies that landed on me with great regularity. I can remember how hot it was. I’m someone who tends to do pretty well in the heat, but I can distinctly remember how hot it was those days. 

In the afternoon, my grandmother would send my siblings and I out to the garden beside their house to pick fresh ears of corn and green beans for dinner that night, and then we would sit on their front porch and would shuck the corn and pick the beans. Really, this is where my appreciation and deep respect for the Ag industry started. 

I witnessed firsthand how hard farmers worked and truly how difficult it is to make ends meet on a farm. Anyone who has grown a business knows that there are always parts of that business, like new divisions, service lines or product lines, that you want to start or build but you can’t, either because you don’t have the resources or you don’t have the right people to lead it; things that fall into the “one day” category, like “one day we’ll get there.” Well, agriculture has always been that space for us. We’ve always had a passion for it, but we’ve just been fortunate to be very busy growing our other divisions, and we’ve never had the time or resources to commit to building the Ag Practice, until now that is.

I first met Eric Spell 20 years ago, and we were introduced through a mutual acquaintance. At that time, Eric was the founder and CEO of AgCareers.com, and we hit it off immediately. It helped that we both went to NC State and shared a love of NC State sports and all things Atlantic Coast Conference from a sports perspective. Shortly thereafter, Eric invited me to speak at his annual Ag career conference out in Iowa and we just cultivated the relationship from there. 

We stayed in touch and swapped recruiting stories from time to time and ultimately we were fortunate to hire Eric’s son as one of our interns, and that kind of rekindled our discussions. Then, just a few years ago, Eric successfully sold AgCareers and had shifted to running a division for an Ag company, but he had this burning desire to get back into the executive search world, something which I completely understand. 

It was the perfect opportunity for that “one day” to arrive, and we were so fortunate to have him join our team. Eric and I share a common vision: We want to create the number one agriculture-focused executive search division in the country. 

With Eric’s knowledge of agriculture and his deep network in this space, along with Charles Aris’s legacy and processes in executive search, it was a great combination. Many of you know Charles Aris is fortunate to already have long-standing relationships with some of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. 

As an example, for just two of the largest consumer-packaged food companies in the world, we’ve completed over 60 searches, so this is a space on the consumer-facing side that we know really well. And with Eric’s leadership we’re now adding the supply chain for all those consumer-facing companies, and we could not be more excited about it. We’ve already added two additional team members to our Ag Practice, and we look forward to adding many more. 

If you would like to learn more about our capabilities in executive search or specifically about our Ag Practice, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me directly at chad.oakley@charlesaris.com. Thanks for listening and happy recruiting everybody!