Growing an Agricultural Business Professional

JP Regusci was exactly where he wanted to be. The boy who was “born on horseback” had become a man on a motorbike, riding through soybean fields in his home country of Uruguay, monitoring the crops and figuring out the best way to make them grow.

In so many ways, this was the career of his dreams, sprouting from his grandfather’s ranch outside Montevideo, where he grew up wrangling cattle each morning. This was a dream that persisted despite his father’s pleas to become “an accountant or an economist or something,” instead of an agricultural engineer.

And yet, Regusci says now, “I saw constantly some patterns that repeated with the farmers and the growers. They were very good, perhaps, at growing, but not at making business decisions: how they managed their finances, their supply chain, their marketing. So I said, ‘I need to learn business and help them in the future, because I am very connected to the future.’”

In June, upon graduating with an MBA from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, Regusci will take his first steps toward shaping the industry that supports his home country.

After earning an undergraduate degree from Uruguay’s Universidad de la República, Regusci realized he needed a broader education if he really wanted to make a difference. A business degree, particularly from the United States, offered the mix of skills and knowledge he needed. He craved the “go and get it” American mindset. “The U.S. educates leaders,” he says, and the professors are second to none.

So he applied to schools in such better-known U.S. cities as New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Then, when taking the GMAT, he received a message from DU, offering him exactly what he had been looking for: a hands-on, challenge-based program.