When M Resources founder Matt Latimore describes his business journey, he likens it to an 800-metre running race: he’s halfway through, he’s run hard, but it’s time to “kick into another gear”.It’s an apt metaphor from the Rich Lister and former champion middle-distance runner, who excelled at the distance considered one of the toughest races to run, thanks to the need to combine both sprinting prowess and endurance.That endurance was something the 53-year-old coal trader has had to tap into throughout his career, but never more so than in 2016 when a critical trade financing relationship collapsed and his business was struggling to survive.“It was like the 400-metre mark in an 800-metre race where you don’t think you can keep going, but you find another leg to keep running on,” he tells The Australian Financial Review.
Keep running he did. This year, the Brisbane entrepreneur whose company trades, markets and invests in coal and other resources (but is perhaps better known for his love of Ferraris to his 1 million-strong Instagram following), debuted on the Financial Review Rich List with an estimated net worth of $748 million.
Latimore was born and raised in NSW, growing up in the town of Wingham in the Manning Valley, inland from Taree.
His family’s connection to the land dates back generations. Latimore’s great-great-grandfather was a beef grazier who owned 12,000 hectares around the town of Gloucester. His father was a dairy farmer in Burrell Creek, near Wingham, before starting a range of businesses in the town spanning transport, retail, petrol and services.
A sporty kid, Latimore was ranked top four in Australia for the 800 metres during his youth, and would often win medals for NSW at national competitions.
Wingham was only a 30-minute drive from the beach and on Wednesday afternoons he and his classmates would jump on a bus and go surfing at Saltwater or Old Bar.
“I loved it, and my mum and dad still live there,” Latimore says.
“I was focused on sport totally until I was about 16 … My mum and dad had ambitions [for me to go to the Olympics]. Then the last couple of years I pivoted to studying very hard.
“Wingham was a wonderful place to grow up, but there isn’t a lot of industry in the area, so I decided to put in the hard [work] for my last two years of high school.”When he was 18, Latimore moved to Brisbane to study international business at Griffith University. A language was a compulsory part of the degree, and Latimore chose Japanese. It would set off a series of events that would ultimately take him to the Rich List.
