JENNIFER CHRISTIE
JENNIFER CHRISTIE WORKS hard for what she wants, and the company that employs her responds to her energy and drive. Growing up on a dairy farm and actively involved in 4-H Club in the Georgian Bay community of Tara, Christie knew early that she wanted to be a Guelph Aggie, as agriculture students dub themselves.
“That’s what I knew, and that’s what I was interested in and passionate about,” she says. Opportunities at the University of Guelph to meet the enthusiastic alumni of the Ontario Agricultural College showed her the depth of the industry, which ranges from food and animal sciences to environmental economics, veterinary technology, rural planning and crop/turfgrass science, even landscape design.
Agriculture is booming, Christie says, and nowhere is the business more diverse than in Ontario. For example, the core business of her employer, John Deere Canada, is agriculture, but it’s also involved in construction and forestry.
In seven years, Christie moved from sales promotion co-ordinator to advertising and promotions supervisor and, most recently, territory manager. She provides business support, including marketing and sales planning, inventory management and training, for dealers from Highway 400 in Toronto west to Chatham and north to Georgian Bay.
“It’s all relationships,” Christie says in explaining a job that keeps her on the road most of the year. “We’re more than suppliers. Although they are independent business people, dealers are partners with us.”
Asked about her personal strengths, Christie includes the strong network she developed by being solution-oriented and approachable. “Though a subconscious activity in many ways, networking has been a carefully planned effort,” she says. “I never want to miss the chance to meet someone interesting, if only for the opportunity to talk and learn from them.”
When she joined the company in 2006 after graduating in commerce and agriculture business, she expected to stay five years. Now it could be 10 years, perhaps more. She appreciates John Deere’s practice of hiring young people and developing them rather than filling mid-level positions by hiring externally.
As a multinational, it could send an employee almost anywhere in the world to work. Christie was impressed by congratulatory notes she received from all parts of the globe after a story about her women’s network award appeared in the corporate >>
>> newsletter. “It was one of the coolest things about the award,” she says, as was the fact her managers talked up her award with John Deere’s senior leadership. For the last 18 months, Christie has spent four days a month at Western University’s Ivey School of Business Bay Street campus, working toward an executive MBA. “The Ivey brand was attractive and I wanted to learn from classmates,” she says. “I was the only agriculture person, but it was a good opportunity to interact with students in fields like business and law. Their case methodology is excellent.”
In January, as a final class project, Christie and her study group spent two weeks in India, meeting a client with whom they’d worked and also visiting business hubs like Mumbai. Her last assignment was submitted a week later.
Christie seems to thrive on self-imposed pressure, perhaps because she knows she can tame it with a visit to Tara, where her two brothers are also farmers: “There’s no place I’d rather unwind than on the seat of a tractor or in the barn,” she says.