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Henry Gordon-Smith talks with Jason Barnard about green ventures.
Henry Gordon-Smith, founder and CEO of Agritecture, shares with Jason Barnard how he turned a personal blog into a global consulting firm focused on climate-smart agriculture. He explains that his early blogging efforts built his personal brand and authority in the sector, helping attract clients who were drawn to his innovative, sometimes controversial insights.
Henry reflects on the evolution of his business, from accepting any client to focusing on premium partnerships and launching a SaaS tool for broader impact. He emphasizes the importance of aligning with the right clients, pricing based on value, and learning from mistakes during the scaling process. A key part of their strategy includes offering pro bono work and free educational content, enabling global access to urban agriculture knowledge while maintaining a triple bottom line: environmental, social, and economic impact.
Henry also shared with Jason Barnard the leadership and cultural balance required in his team—blending visionary thinking with conservative execution. He encourages calculated experimentation while managing skepticism from his left-brain-heavy team of scientists, engineers, and economists.
What you’ll learn from Henry Gordon-Smith
- 00:00 Henry Gordon-Smith and Jason Barnard
- 02:21 What Shows up on the Brand SERP for Henry Gordon-Smith When Jason Barnard Searched His Name?
- 03:18 Why is the Personal Brand of Henry Gordon-Smith Important to His Business?
- 03:32 What Reputation Did Henry Gordon-Smith Gain That Has Influenced His Business Since 2011?
- 04:22 How Did the Blog Play a Role in Building a Positive Reputation and Growing the Business?
- 04:30 What Advice Did the Mom of Henry Gordon-Smith Give Him About Branding Himself?
- 05:20 What Mindset or Approach Can You Adopt to Effectively Build Your Reputation?
- 05:45 How Did Taking the Blog Offline Through Workshops Help Improve Understanding of the Customer?
- 06:19 What Realization Led Henry Gordon-Smith to Decide to Start a Company Instead of Joining One?
- 06:30 Who Did Henry Gordon-Smith Hire to Help Build His Agritecture Consultancy?
- 07:01 What Changes Led to the Shift of Agriculture Away From Local Communities in the Developed World?
- 07:52 What Challenges Does Climate Change Pose to Traditional Food Production and Supply Chains?
- 08:05 What Social and Global Factors Have Contributed to the Weakening of the Food System?
- 08:33 How is Technology Helping to Strengthen the Food System in the Face of Modern Challenges?
- 08:51 How Can a Company Measure Its Impact to Ensure It Makes a Meaningful Difference Globally?
- 09:21 How Can a Business in a Niche Sector Manage Growth Carefully Amidst Industry UPS and Downs?
- 10:07 What Solution Was Developed to Help Maintain Impact and Make Farm Planning More Accessible?
- 11:07 What Does the Triple Bottom Line Mean in the Context of Sustainability and Business?
- 12:19 What Role Does Sharing Knowledge and Serving Premium Clients Play in the Triple Bottom Line?
- 12:40 How Can a Digital Company Evaluate and Reduce Its Environmental Footprint?
- 13:35 Why is it Important for Companies to Measure More Than Just Profit When Assessing Their Impact?
- 14:55 How Did the Company Evolve From Accepting Any Client to Offering a Premium Self-Service SAAS Model?
- 15:25 How Did Learning, Observing, and Experimenting Help Uncover What Clients Truly Needed and Valued?
- 16:13 What Role Did Early Clients Play in Refining Pricing, Methodologies, and the Company Structure?
- 17:08 How Did Attracting the Right Clients Help Leverage the Company Portfolio and Deliver Quality?
- 18:13 How Can a Leader Manage a Team’s Nervousness and Help Them Overcome It?
- 19:15 How Can a Leader Manage Conflicts and Different Perspectives Within a Company Culture?
- 20:23 What Message Can a Company Communicate to Remain Accessible and Guide Potential Clients?
This episode was recorded live on video June 10th 2025
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://agfundernews.com/plenty-has-an-opportunity-to-succeed-say-some-vertical-farming-experts-what-happens-next
https://foodinstitute.com/ag-com/experts-huge-opportunities-exist-in-tech-enabled-ag/
https://livingarchitecturemonitor.com/articles/smart-agriculture-smarter-cities-w21
Henry Gordon-Smith
Transcript from Henry Gordon-Smith with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. Green Ventures
[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: From the triple bottom line, sharing it with society for me is very important. Making some money for the company so that we can all have a decent life is very important. The environment thing, I can’t see how we affect that.
[00:00:15] Henry Gordon-Smith: Maybe your company is similar to ours. I’m not so sure, but we’re a very digital company. I actually no longer have a physical office ourselves, so you know, because my team members are not commuting to work. Our environmental footprint is primarily through our air travel and what we do is we offset the carbon footprint for our air travel a little bit more every year. So that’s basically the minimum that we can do.
[00:00:40] Henry Gordon-Smith: So I think it’s great what you’re doing, but I encourage you to maybe think, do we have a carbon footprint? What is it? So that’s really where it begins is just by asking the question and looking for the data and starting to set a first goal. And there’s no pressure to do something that isn’t comfortable for your business or doesn’t make sense, but it really is about that starting point and that intention. As in business, it’s all about that intention and the data behind it.
[00:01:05] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives, and gets them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world.
[00:01:22] Narrator: How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes their legacy? A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.
[00:01:34] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m Jason Barnard. And I’m here today with a quick hello and we’re good to go.
[00:01:42] Jason Barnard: Welcome to the show, Henry Gordon-Smith.
[00:01:46] Henry Gordon-Smith: Thanks Jason for having me.
[00:01:49] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. We’re going to talk about Green Ventures and in particular, your journey from a blog to the company you are now running. And how you are running the company worldwide, big businesses, small businesses, all around agrithecture as we can see written there on your shirt.
[00:02:08] Jason Barnard: Anybody listening, on just the audio version, we have Henry Gordon-Smith sitting in front of us with a huge word Agritecture on his t-shirt. So we start off with the Brand SERP. I Googled your name and your name is a little bit original, let’s say. So you come up top, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, three videos.
[00:02:33] Jason Barnard: You’re obviously out there promoting your Personal Brand, getting out there, talking about your company, and this is what I would call a basic traditional blue link result with some multimedia in those videos. And at Kalicube®, what we try to do is or what we do in fact, is help people move from this position where they’re obviously out there building their Personal Brand to make it look something more like that with the pictures, the images, the associated other people, making it look richer, more attractive, and make the person look much more like an authority in their field.
[00:03:11] Jason Barnard: So that’s where we’re coming from at Kalicube®. Do you feel your Personal Brand is important to your business?
[00:03:18] Henry Gordon-Smith: I think a lot of people hire us because of me, frankly. I’ve got an amazing team behind me but because I started as a blogger in college and I presented some ideas that were quite innovative, some that were controversial, I predicted sort of the rise and fall of different types of agriculture technologies, which is what we work on.
[00:03:37] Henry Gordon-Smith: That reputation has really lent itself since 2011 to drive the majority of our business. So I think brand image is critical, and I think digital marketing is critical to our DNA. We continue to blog, and I would say the majority of our clients come from our website.
[00:03:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah. And so there are a couple of things there.
[00:03:56] Jason Barnard: Number one is you said the word, reputation and I think there’s a negative connotation about that because we talk about Online Reputation Management. You are talking about positive reputation and managing your reputation proactively. And the second is the story of your blog. You started your blog, you were saying things that people weren’t necessarily saying, it was original, it was a little bit, against the grain, and then you built a business. Tell me that part.
[00:04:22] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, so the blog was really an opportunity for me to research a topic that I was interested in and put it out there and build a Personal Brand. My mom is also a very talented consultant and brand expert as well.
[00:04:34] Henry Gordon-Smith: She’s done a good job, and she always said to me, if you’re not branding yourself, someone else is. So there’s really no reason not to brand yourself. And not to take control over that.
[00:04:44] Jason Barnard: I like your mother because if you are not branding yourself, Google and AI are branding you that.
[00:04:51] Henry Gordon-Smith: Exactly.
[00:04:52] Jason Barnard: Sorry. Carry on about your company. I love that. That’s why you have to say hello to your mother.
[00:04:57] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah, you can use that. You can use that quote. So anyway, I was using it really to get a job in the sector. I was a college student and it was both an exploration for me, what I was interested in, and a way to put myself out there.
[00:05:10] Henry Gordon-Smith: It was really helpful as well because when you think about networking when you’re a young person and you’re going out to events and trying to meet people, you’re often just asking for things. Hey, can you introduce me? Hey, do you have an internship? Instead, I was able to give because I was doing something, so I focused my network on giving instead of taking.
[00:05:26] Henry Gordon-Smith: So I would go to people. I said, Hey, I think you’re so interesting. Can I interview you? It was really a gift to them. And then it made me very memorable. Oh, Henry’s the blogger about urban agriculture. Henry’s the blogger about Agritech. And so my reputation grew as a result of that sort of giving and constant promotion of the fact that we were a blog is what we did.
[00:05:45] Henry Gordon-Smith: Now over time I started doing some workshops. I took the blog in person to try to meet my community in person and this allowed me to understand my customer a lot better than I could digitally. It complimented the analytics that I was getting. That created a customer profile of people who were very passionate and motivated to get involved in the future of agriculture, but lacked the experience.
[00:06:06] Henry Gordon-Smith: Most new entrants to agriculture have zero years of experience. Many of them have very little experience, so their likelihood to succeed is very low. So there became this sort of need that was formulating over years. Now I started the blog in 2011, but in 2014 I started getting these consulting requests from the website and suddenly this light bulb went off and I said, maybe I don’t need to join a company.
[00:06:29] Henry Gordon-Smith: Maybe I can start a company. So I started hiring experts around agronomy, engineering, economics, market research to build up architecture consulting. And we launched the world’s first global consultancy focused on this topic. Which is particularly focused on climate smart agriculture and, let’s say, more novel ways of growing food closer to consumers using less land, less water, and no pesticides.
[00:06:54] Jason Barnard: Yeah, and it’s a huge market.
[00:06:56] Jason Barnard: You told me before the show that agriculture is the biggest employer in the world.
[00:07:01] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah. I think agriculture used to be something that everyone did. Look a century ago, a vast percentage of our population did it over time because of the Green Revolution, certain technological advancements in genetics and fertilizer, we were able to basically move agriculture from our communities in the developed world and move it over to other parts, which were able to produce more food.
[00:07:25] Henry Gordon-Smith: And we were able to import that and supply chain technology allowed that. But what happened was there was a decline in the knowledge related to agriculture, the connection to the food system but despite that, agriculture still is the largest employer globally. It’s so important obviously to our human needs and to the stability of everything we depend on. Our economy, our politics, our civil society, all depend on the fact that we have enough food and water for that food.
[00:07:52] Henry Gordon-Smith: So in the face of climate change being one of the main obstacles, the climates necessary to grow food are at threat. So the typical weather conditions to grow food affordably are at threat. Supply chains are weakened. We’ve seen that through various shocks like COVID or the invasion of Ukraine. And then we also have issues of a lack of young people going into agriculture.
[00:08:13] Henry Gordon-Smith: Most farmers are having their children move to cities where they can make more money and have different jobs. Certainly very few parents raise their kids to say, you should be a farmer. They’re saying you should be a lawyer, or a digital marketing expert, or an AI expert, whatever. And so that has now weakened the overall food system and made it more fragile. There’s a need for technology which can step in to manage some of those labor challenges and climate challenges. And that’s what we focus on.
[00:08:42] Jason Barnard: And do you feel like your company is a tiny drop in the ocean and the ocean is so big that you feel you’re not making a real difference?
[00:08:51] Henry Gordon-Smith: I think we track our impact in a number of ways. It’s very important to me as a sort of social and environmental entrepreneur to look at the triple bottom line of our impact across the environment, economics, and society. From a client perspective, we’ve worked with 300 clients in 60 countries.
[00:09:08] Henry Gordon-Smith: That sounds quite small. But when I’ve calculated the impact, there’s tens of millions of people who have been impacted by the farms that we’ve helped grow or the policies we’ve helped improve. So that’s how we look at that impact. I would love to do more, but again, we’re a niche sort of premium business in this sector and I’m very careful not to grow my business too rapidly in the face of ups and downs of various factors in agriculture.
[00:09:34] Henry Gordon-Smith: Now our blog itself provides so much free knowledge. We’re really talking about millions of people that have benefited from that knowledge. So separate from our actual consulting impact, there’s a lot of free knowledge we give that helps people get to their next step. We’ve also built a software product because as our business grew, we focused more on premium customers.
[00:09:53] Henry Gordon-Smith: While at the beginning we focus more on anybody that would hire us, right? But as you get more mature over 10 years, we work with more specialized and more premium customers that can afford our high-end services that are really the best in class. So we asked ourselves, what can we do to maintain our impact?
[00:10:10] Henry Gordon-Smith: We’ve taken our feasibility study methodology to plan these farms effectively and build a software product. It’s actually the world’s first farm planning software, and it’s got online classes and modeling tools and market research tools and a network of suppliers. So you can now plan these farms on your own.
[00:10:29] Henry Gordon-Smith: And it’s a way for us to respond to the fact to say, as we grow, we want to impact as many as possible. Those are beyond the social impacts we give, which is to give back to the community. We have pro bono clients or discounted clients as part of our impact program. Sometimes women in developing countries that have gotten grants that can’t afford services but need to use those grants effectively.
[00:10:53] Henry Gordon-Smith: We’ve worked with special needs schools to implement these farms in them, and that’s how we think about the triple bottom line across our impact. And we’re always looking to do more, which is why we’re happy to share some of that today.
[00:11:05] Jason Barnard: Could you repeat the triple bottom line?
[00:11:07] Henry Gordon-Smith: Yeah. So I studied sustainability management at Columbia University, one of the leading business and sustainability programs in the world, and one of the first ones.
[00:11:15] Henry Gordon-Smith: And as part of sustainability management, when you’re combining business and sustainability, you need to think about sustainability from a triple bottom line. You know what the bottom line is? It’s how much profit we make, are we in the black? And that’s what every business has to think about.
[00:11:29] Henry Gordon-Smith: And we are a business. Triple bottom line means that at the end of the year, we’re going to look at and measure not just our economic impact, but actually we’re going to continually think about the other bottom lines, the triple. So what is the environment? What are we doing to reduce our impact on the environment or improve the environment?
[00:11:46] Henry Gordon-Smith: The other one is society. What are we doing to impact society and improve that as well?
[00:11:53] Jason Barnard: Okay, because I was very interested in the whole thing. The way you’ve described that because it’s more or less where we’re at Kalicube®. Which is saying, we’ve discovered that a fundamental, fundamentally important truth is that you can control what Google and AI think, understand about you and how they represent you.
[00:12:15] Jason Barnard: And for me, that’s something that everybody should have the opportunity to do. So like you, we share it on the website and then we say, we’ll focus on the premium clients. And from the triple bottom line, sharing it with society for me is very important. Making some money for the company so that we can all have a decent life is very important.
[00:12:36] Jason Barnard: The environment thing, I can’t see how we affect that.
[00:12:40] Henry Gordon-Smith: I think it’s great that you’re already considering this and thinking about how you can help the maximum number of people and provide a variety of services or products to do that. I think on the environment side, maybe your company is similar to ours, I’m not so sure, but we’re a very digital company. I actually no longer have a physical office ourselves, because my team members are not commuting to work, our environmental footprint is primarily through our air travel. And what we do is we offset the carbon footprint for our air travel a little bit more every year. So that’s basically the minimum that we can do.
[00:13:17] Henry Gordon-Smith: So I think it’s great what you’re doing, but I encourage you to maybe think, do we have a carbon footprint? What is it? How can we ask this? Without a physical space or depending on your physical space, that’s going to be probably travel or, commuting from your staff or whatever it is that’s going to be your biggest impact.
[00:13:35] Henry Gordon-Smith: It’s about anything. It’s very similar to your work, right? What gets measured gets done, and I think money companies are not measuring what they’re doing across this triple bottom line, but they’re only looking at one of them. And I think that there are economic opportunities, across all of those as well. You can also improve your economics by looking at all these various data points about your company’s impact and think about how you can improve across impact categories. So that’s really where it begins, is just by asking the question and looking for the data. Starting to set a first goal and there’s no pressure to do something that isn’t comfortable for your business or doesn’t make sense. But it really is about that starting point and that intention, as in business, it’s all about that intention and the data behind it.
[00:14:21] Jason Barnard: Yeah, absolutely. That’s really interesting. I’m now aware that we can do the environmental part. I was thinking about the environmental part very much. Agriculture, growing things, saving?
[00:14:32] Henry Gordon-Smith: No, it doesn’t have to be.
[00:14:33] Henry Gordon-Smith: Our business is focused on the environment, but that doesn’t mean that every business has to be without in order to have an impact on the environment.
[00:14:41] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Can you explain to me the transition that you went through from we’ll take any client who will take us to we can now focus on premium and offer this self-service SaaS.
[00:14:55] Henry Gordon-Smith: I think it goes back to my values and my philosophy that formed as a teenager. When I was learning about philosophers and I studied political science from undergraduate degree as well, I learned about methods of truth.
[00:15:10] Henry Gordon-Smith: How do we understand the truth and, what does that look like? And so I think for me, there’s always a process in my life of coming up with a hypothesis. Maybe it’s based on an idea, maybe it’s based on an intention, and then testing that hypothesis. I think for me it was always about learning, and observing, and giving your full courage to that.
[00:15:31] Henry Gordon-Smith: So when we got requests for consulting, we got some idea what people wanted, and we started to produce the content that might attract more of those as part of that experiment and hypothesis. But we also needed to learn not just what people thought they wanted from us, but what we were good at and what they were willing to pay for and the value of what we were giving to them. There’s a lot of experimentation on how much the service will cost, right? Sometimes you just have to take a bid out there. And I think at the beginning we underbid a lot of the work because we wanted to win it and we wanted to get the experience and get our team confident.
[00:16:06] Henry Gordon-Smith: As any services company or any company knows you need a portfolio, what are the projects you’ve done? What’s your experience? So these early clients helped us build not just our own internal methodologies and our experience and our team culture around executing the work that’s the vast majority of our revenue.
[00:16:23] Henry Gordon-Smith: But it also helped us to really understand the pricing, the methodologies, the structure, everything like that. And also the clients that we don’t want to work with for various reasons. And, so we worked with many schools, nonprofits, but also some high end other consulting firms that needed data from us, other multinationals.
[00:16:44] Henry Gordon-Smith: And we learned through that process that if a deal is too small, often the client wants as much as a big deal does. And so it ends up being a lose-lose situation where they feel unsatisfied. And we feel unsatisfied because we’ve gone far over the hours allocated for the project. ‘Cause we do project-based fees, in order to execute that.
[00:17:08] Henry Gordon-Smith: Nobody wants a lose-lose situation. So instead, you want to attract clients. And we started to attract clients and we were able to leverage our portfolio to get bigger clients that valued our services wanted the quality that we could deliver, and were willing to pay for that so that we could deliver that quality with confidence and without too much anxiety that we are running out of hours or we’re losing our margin.
[00:17:33] Henry Gordon-Smith: And that’s a win-win situation. And that’s always the goal in business.
[00:17:37] Jason Barnard: And the transition to that is you also need to work with…
[00:17:41] Henry Gordon-Smith: a lot of mistakes.
[00:17:42] Henry Gordon-Smith: The transition has a lot of mistakes. The transition is, a lot of my team saying, we can’t do this. This is crazy.
[00:17:49] Henry Gordon-Smith: And me saying, no, we need to do it. We need to learn. It’s years of losing money. It’s deals that surprise you and suddenly you learn you could do something you couldn’t do. It’s taking risks, it’s failing, it’s learning, it’s optimizing.
[00:18:06] Jason Barnard: You said your team would have a tendency to be perhaps nervous.
[00:18:11] Jason Barnard: How did you deal with that?
[00:18:13] Henry Gordon-Smith: If you think about the business I’m describing, there’s a lot of, let’s say, left brain people in the business. There’s farmers who are very practical, very science-based engineers, very practical, very science-based, market research and economists, these are people that are quite different from my right brain. There has always been a healthy battle, I think, within our organization because we try to have a brand of creative but conservative. So our blog content is sometimes futuristic. Sometimes, I wouldn’t say naive, but visionary. While the work we do is creative but conservative.
[00:18:50] Henry Gordon-Smith: So we try to be creative on the business model, the brand, the team structure, maybe some of the crops that they grow. But we’re very conservative when it comes to economics, when it comes to the engineering choices we make. We’re not just putting robots in fires for robot’s sake.
[00:19:06] Henry Gordon-Smith: We’re really thinking about the ROI on those, the performance, the farmer experience. And I think balancing that left brain, right brain is a key part of it. And in any company culture, when you’re getting started and you have different values and different perspectives and experience, you need to manage that culture. So there were conflicts and I think there’s less and less now, but I wouldn’t say they’re totally over. Sometimes there’s a project that I know will be a big portfolio piece for us and is pretty wild. And out there, it’s like a floating farm or it’s a space farm or it’s something like this. And my team members sometimes say, that’s this is crazy.
[00:19:45] Henry Gordon-Smith: This will never be built. And I say that doesn’t matter. The client wants our data and our understanding of the question, and we can talk about that and we can share that we can inspire other people, which will attract them to us to talk about their ideas, whatever they are, however crazy or realistic.
[00:20:01] Henry Gordon-Smith: And in the end it’s about creating that funnel. And that’s why the marketing and the brand and, all of this is so critical because it gives not only the identity that a portfolio will. But it shows us the people and the values and the communication and experience behind the content behind, like who are the people that I’m going to be working with.
[00:20:23] Henry Gordon-Smith: And I think we’re always trying to put a message out there that this is an exciting sector. There’s risks. So two ideas there. Very exciting sector, big opportunity, new technologies, but risky, low margins, need to plan properly, et cetera. And the third message, which is we’re open to talk to you. You can call us, you can email us, you can message on LinkedIn, you can message on Instagram, we will answer your questions.
[00:20:47] Henry Gordon-Smith: We’ll always try to guide you to a next step in the minimum, whether it’s through our free blog content, whether it’s through our events, our webinars, our software, or our consulting services that’s right for you. We always have an answer for anybody that reaches out to us.
[00:21:02] Jason Barnard: I think that’s the perfect ending because that’s exactly where I want to get Kalicube®. What we’re trying to do, and you’ve just expressed it in such a clear way.
[00:21:10] Jason Barnard: I’m going to share that with the team. Thank you so much, Henry. That was really delightful. It was a wonderful conversation and given the differences in our two industries, very surprisingly for me, helpful for Kalicube®.
[00:21:26] Henry Gordon-Smith: Thank you, Jason for having me. It was a nice conversation and it’s really cool what you’re doing.
[00:21:30] Henry Gordon-Smith: I definitely like the overview you did and the checkup on my brand. I like to think my brand is quite strong, but certainly I like the visual of the richer experience on Google that you’re presenting. So I’ll have to check out your offerings for myself.
[00:21:45] Jason Barnard: Thank you very much. There are lots of free offerings on the website if you want to do it yourself.
[00:21:48] Jason Barnard: Thank you so much, Henry. That was brilliant. You get the outro song. A quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Henry.
[00:21:57] Narrator: Your Corporate and Personal Brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube®.
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