Satish Selvanathan ’09
THE TURNAROUND ARTIST
SATISH SELVANATHAN HAS has a knack for a dramatic turnaround. During his time at Columbia Business School, he enrolled in a class on turnaround management and promptly fell in love with it. “That’s the only thing I’ve done since I left,” he says.
Today, Selvanathan channels this passion into his fourth-generation family business, Goodhope Asia Holdings, where — as executive director, based in Malaysia — he has been responsible for the turnaround of its businesses in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Selvanathan is among the first generation in his family to have studied and worked outside of Southeast Asia. After spending the first 16 years of his life in Sri Lanka, Selvanathan graduated from Oxford University, earned his MBA from Columbia Business School, and worked in private equity, management consulting, and investment banking in New York and London.
Upon joining the family business in 2018, Selvanathan brought with him an acute understanding of the negative reputation in the West surrounding the palm oil industry — a significant portion of Goodhope’s business. He’d noticed that when he mentioned his ties to the palm oil industry, roughly half of the responses he received were characterized by curiosity and thoughtful questions; the other half, horror and avoidance of the topic. He wanted to do what he could to start to shift entrenched perspectives on — and practices within — palm oil production, the longtime lightning rod of the edible oils industry.
“About 240 million tons of oil are produced every year, of which 80 million is palm oil,” Selvanathan says. “That’s a third of the market! We have to have this conversation.”
In his role overseeing the turnaround of Goodhope’s business, Selvanathan prioritized improvements to its sustainability practices. He has pushed for investments to improve the efficiency of the company’s mills, to achieve full traceability of its agricultural raw material and to capture methane from effluent ponds on its properties, which can then partially replace diesel generators as a power source on remote sites. He hopes that within the next few years, this process can help bring the company’s diesel use down by 70 to 80 percent.
The investments in sustainability are good from a business perspective, too, he emphasizes. “I’m not going to pretend that this is done entirely for altruistic purposes,” Selvanathan says. For one thing, the investments in decarbonizing will translate into lower energy costs long term, and improved sustainability credentials enable price premiums. But beyond that, they mean that Goodhope’s palm oil companies are honing a competitive strength: Although the companies aren’t poised to compete on size or scale, they do compete on sustainability.
“I don’t think there’s a choice that needs to be made between doing well and doing good,” Selvanathan says. “I think you can do both. And in fact, I will go as far to say that you can do better by doing good.”
Taking these steps in turning around the business led Selvanathan to consider other areas where his turnaround skills might be needed. This led him to the environmental conservation space.
In June 2019, Selvanathan co-founded, with Ben Goldsmith, a nonprofit called the Lanka Environment Fund. The organization has spent over $500,000 (including institutional grants) to support environmental conservation work in Sri Lanka, Selvanathan’s first home and one of the world’s 35 biodiversity hotspots. The grants have funded marine and terrestrial conservation, improvements in waste management, and responsible tourism initiatives.
“I felt that this was an opportunity for me to inject commercial rigor into how conservation was being done,” Selvanathan says.
In co-designing the nonprofit, he emphasized a need to conceive of specific environmental targets, define clear steps to get there, and measure outcomes. In other words, he was seeking to bring a turnaround not only to ecosystems that needed healing, but to the world of philanthropy, too.
“It’s very easy to spend money,” he says. “It’s less easy to spend money effectively.”