Matthew Falk, CFA

I started in agribusiness credit at MetLife, supporting a large commercial agricultural loan portfolio spanning farm and ranch, biofuels, dairy and food processing. That job taught me what a credit file looks like from the inside — which numbers get scrutinized, which explanations land, and which files quietly get set aside.

From there I moved to a regional bank — a different employer and a different kind of lending — where I spent two years as a commercial real estate portfolio manager handling a $130 million book through the tail end of the Great Recession. Much of that portfolio needed active monitoring, restructuring or reserve evaluation.

What I took from those years on the bank side was this. I saw financial statements of every quality — some thorough and delivered on time, others badly delinquent and amounting to little more than a late-filed tax return. And I learned firsthand that the more a borrower helps the bank understand the financials and the situation behind them, the better that banker can re-tell the story while filling in underwriting templates and standing up to questions from a loan committee. That is a room the borrower never gets to enter. Everything I do is aimed at making sure the person in it has what they need.

In 2011 I became the founding CFO of a multi-entity grain operation in central Kentucky, and I’ve held that role since. I built the financial infrastructure from nothing — chart of accounts, month-end close, reporting across GAAP, tax and managerial views. I run the commodity hedging program, own treasury and cash forecasting, manage the insurance strategy, and lead every lender conversation. I’ve done that through an aggressive growth phase and through the harder discipline of scaling back down when markets shifted.

Since 2015 I’ve done the same work independently for other operations across Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Ohio — grain farms, organic operations and hog production. Most of them called during a stretch of real pressure: reporting had broken down, a lender relationship was fraying, or liquidity had gotten uncomfortably thin.

Nothing you bring me is going to surprise me. Bring the real numbers — the messy ones — and we’ll start there.