As California’s 2023 almond harvesting season nears its end, the management of Monte Vista Farming Company has begun to turn its attention from the almond producer’s seasonal flow of “almonds in” and “almonds out” to people and operations.
“After what we pay our growers for the almonds, our number one cost becomes labor,” explains Mark Lampe, who joined Monte Vista as CFO back in late 2021, just after the company had opted to convert roughly 100 contract laborers to full-time employees.
“I was a little nervous about how many people would ultimately come over as full-time employees, but to Monte Vista’s credit, almost 100 percent opted in,” recalls Lampe, who sat down with us at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld 2023 tech conference, where he was seeking to glean insight into one of the developer’s newest software entries: workforce applications designed to to help organizations with the tricky task of managing labor costs.
As it turns out, Monte Vista’s growing appetite for operational improvement—as well as its CFO’s laserlike focus on labor—comes after the 2021 sale of a majority stake in the almond producer to food and agriculture investment house Solum Partners.
The Boston-based investment firm, which owns stakes in a growing roster of agriculture businesses (including avocado and blueberry producers), is intent on investing in agriculture businesses that seek to achieve greater scale in their operations in order to expand globally.
“Eighty percent of the world’s almonds are grown in California, and then there’s a significant drop in share before you get to Spain and Portugal,” remarks Lampe, who reports that today Monte Vista exports 85 percent of its almonds—a fact that became magnified during the pandemic, when the Port of Oakland shut down at different times.
“If we hadn’t been able to get a certain percentage of our shipments out, we would have seen a pretty significant impact on our cash flow,” continues Lampe, whose finance resume includes 19 years inside the finance function of food giant Conagra Brands, as well as a stint as the COO of a manufacturer of handcrafted soaps.
According to Lampe, Monte Vista’s move to establish a full-time workforce in and of itself was no guarantee that the company would be able to achieve greater workforce efficiencies.
“We were actually able to give people more money,” he explains, “because there was savings when you consider the previous contract labor commissions.”
Still, future workforce savings and efficiencies will only be achieved according to Lampe, if Monte Vista management is able inform its labor-related decision making with more timely insights.
“In the past, we had had to wait to get information back from the contract labor company before we could do any analyses, whereas now we can see where our employees might be spending more time than perhaps we think is necessary, using information that’s now right at our fingertips,” comments Lampe.
As for expanding overseas, Lampe says the more proficient Monte Vista becomes at managing its labor the better prepared it will be when it comes to acquisitions.
He adds: “It’s definitely part of the plan, but you have to have a base of organic growth, right? … We’re building out the processes with acquisitions in mind, and we want to know that they can scale to handle to what comes next.”
This article first appeared on Forbes.com