"Serving, teaching and coaching others was always something I was passionate about"
In the early 1980s, I was teaching in the Agribusiness Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I had nine beautiful children and a tenth on the way. A family like that doesn't raise itself on a professor's salary. So I rolled up my sleeves and built a consulting practice. And honestly? It turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
Here's the thing. The classroom and the boardroom weren't two separate lives. They were the same life. I spent my weeks working with the companies that feed this country and my quarters teaching the young people who would one day run them. Strategic Management. Leadership. Marketing. And what made it special was that every lesson came fresh off the Central Valley floor. Real companies. Real decisions. Real stakes. My students didn't just learn how business works. They heard what happened last week.
The consulting worked the same way. I didn't hand someone a plan and walk out the door. That's not how I'm built. I stayed. I listened. I pushed when they needed pushing. I walked beside them while they figured it out. And they kept calling back. Not for a year or two. For decades. To this day, senior leaders across American agriculture will tell you they had Jack Herlihy at Cal Poly. And that it stayed with them.
The Herlihy Group was built on something I believe in deeply. Show up. Tell the truth. Do the work. And always, always care more about their outcome than your invoice.
My son Matthew joined the firm in 1995. For over twenty years we worked side by side, in the same rooms, with the same clients. He took the lead in 2016 and I retired in 2019 knowing the firm wasn't just in good hands. It was in the right hands. And if I know this family, there's more to come.
I started with a classroom and a family to feed. God provided the rest. Every bit of it.
God Bless,
Jack Herlihy
