Matt Fourie
Senior Enterprise Leader, Siemens Digital Industries Software
A professional hunter's son who quit at thirteen for surfboards and motorbikes and got it all back at thirty in a country where a rifle is not a luxury. Hunts to shoot, admits it cheerfully, and reads a refusal in the field exactly the way he reads one in a boardroom: you were seen, heard, or winded, and the animal has not gone ten miles.
- Enterprise Account Leadership
- Automotive Manufacturing Software
- Manufacturing Engineering
- Career Reinvention
- Long Range Hunting
About Matt Fourie
What Matt built
Matt runs the General Motors business at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Siemens' largest automotive customer and strategic partner. He got there without a college degree and without a network. His first business was two mango trees in the family yard in South Africa: he and his older brother picked the fruit and sold buckets of it to the women heading for the train station at half past five in the morning. Matt hated mornings, so he set two prices. A dollar if you knock on my window, seventy-five cents if you knock on my brother's. He has worked continuously since he was about seven. In his mid-twenties he was running a large electroplating company in South Africa, punching well above his weight, until the owner's financial decisions took the whole thing down with him. He moved to the United States at 30 and started over at the bottom, on the theory that he knew what he was worth and could afford to be humble about the timing. What he carries into every opportunity now is what he calls his baseball card: his own wins and his own hit rate, written down, ready to present, because nothing gets handed to anyone.
Matt in the field
His father was a professional hunter and game farm manager, and for a year or two the family lived on a game property in the far north of South Africa near the Zimbabwe border. Matt was in the back of the truck from the time he was small. Then, somewhere around thirteen, he stopped: the family moved to the coast and it was surfing and girls and motorbikes, and in any case South African gun laws put a rifle almost out of reach. Hunting only came back when he moved to the States and realised he could walk into a store, buy a rifle for under three hundred dollars, and put half a year of meat in the freezer. He shoots a Gunwerks Nexus and admires what Aaron Davidson has done in Cody bringing stocks and barrels in house, which appeals to the manufacturing engineer in him. He is running a 6.5 PRC and has a .470 Nitro Express double on the list. In 2024 he went back to a family friend's place in Limpopo, Greater Kuduland Safaris, 55,000 acres the Knotts have run since 1974, and finally had the successful hunt that had eluded him as a kid.
Why this conversation matters
Matt calls South Africa a hustle country, and he means it as a description of physics rather than a compliment. If you are not working the hardest, you do not come second, you come last, and there is no in between. That produces a particular kind of person, and the interesting question is what happens when you drop that person into a market where the pressure is off. The answer, in his case, is a man who says out loud that he will not play a game he cannot win, who runs every large decision through four filters (integrity, quality, staff wellbeing and cost) before he will put it in front of a customer, and who will pass the ball entirely rather than sell someone a solution that will not work, because his name is the only thing he is actually carrying. His definition of success has almost nothing to do with revenue: alignment with Christ, a family pointed the same way, generational opportunity that might not be money at all, and a wife who still loves you at the end of it. The line he got from a mentor and has not put down since is that rich people have money and wealthy people have time.
“I'm not going to play if I don't win.”
Matt Fourie on The Hunt for Success
Sam McGough's full conversation with Matt, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Matt Fourie
The ideas Matt left on the table in episode 17.
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Two windows, two prices.
He was about seven, the mangoes were free because they grew in the yard, and the women buying them by the bucket came past at half past five in the morning. Matt hated mornings. So he told them a dollar if you knock on my window, seventy-five cents if you knock on my brother's. He calls it his first introduction to work, to building a business structure, and to hustling.
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No degree, no network, so start at the bottom again.
He had done well young in South Africa and was proud of it, and none of it transferred. Coming to the States was a leveling exercise: no college degree, no contacts, African experience, in a part of the country where knowing somebody is how you get in anywhere. What carried was knowing what he was worth, knowing he could solve problems, and having the humility to wait a little. He also keeps what he calls a baseball card, his own wins and his own hit rate written down, because nothing gets handed to anyone.
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I'm not going to play if I don't win.
His kids hate the line. It is also why very few of his deals collapse: he is honest with himself about which opportunities are real before he commits to them, and then sets the thing up to succeed. Where the friction lives is speed. Pressure in sales is almost always time, and what he asks of a team is a hundred percent for a hundred percent of the time, which he acknowledges is a lot to ask of people.
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Don't pursue if you're not ready.
The electroplating job was a make-it opportunity and he chased the money into it in his mid-twenties without the experience to hold it. When it went down he sent five hundred resumes into a dead market and heard nothing back. His version of the lesson is a hike: you have watched enough Steven Rinella to think you can do it, and then you are at mile six with a fifty-five-pound pack, a twelve-pound rifle, boots you never broke in, and no way home but through. You will hurt yourself or somebody else.