Better Business Series: Mitch Highett from Bullseye Ag (Episode✌️ of ✌️)

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Better Business series! In this episode, we return with Mitch from Bullseye Ag. If you missed Mitch’s first episode, make sure you go back and give it a listen!!

This time, we continue to learn from Mitch and his experience in building a business, which sometimes meant removing himself from the business entirely. Mitch shares the lessons he's learned and things he would perhaps do differently if he had his time again... 

Here’s an excerpt from Oli and Mitch’s conversation:

Oli - “If you roll back six or so years, and you're just starting again, what would be some of the learnings and things that you'd incorporate?”

Mitch:

“You wonder whether, if you didn't do some things just to survive, if you'd be in the same place that you would be now.

Some of the advice that' I’ve had from the start would be hire people early, but I look back at it and there's no way my finances would have been able to support that.

So I think when you're in the business, you know what the business needs, you know the requirements that are going to take you to the next level.

You've got that side of your brain saying, ‘That's a risky move… That's really, really risky’…

As long as you can measure it. And you can say, ‘Look, it is a risk… But it's also a risk not to’ and balance that out a little bit.

And that's why I've had times where I've stepped in and out of the business in terms of a full time capacity versus part time, is that I was willing to go take that leap. Because I needed a bit of a security blanket, and I just needed to have a known quantum that was going to come in so that if this fell apart, the whole business wasn't going to fall apart.

And you can get that security from whether it be your life partner, a business partner, parents that are happy to support you to take it, anything that exists where you can go, if this falls apart, I've got something.

So that would be my big thing is that don't be afraid of the risk. But make sure you go in there knowing that there is one and how to mitigate it as much as possible.

I probably could have done more within kind of the first three years than I did. I think I was quite scared for the first three years. And we've then just gone boom.

And I look back and go, ‘I should have just done this ages ago’. But like I said, would we have been in the financial position or had the work if I didn't? I just don't know.

And every now and then just take ten... There was a fair whack of a couple of years there where I was up at five in the morning and I would not be home till ten o'clock at night, six days a week, for about two and a half years.

I was sharing my time in Bullseye Ag with my time doing other jobs that I was employed to do. And you could really say like, by the end of it, I was never there. I was always just thinking about something else or too tired to care. And that cost me, you know, that costs relationships that costs certain things.

And so every now and then it's just taking that breath, knowing when you're really struggling and then listen to those people that are around you.”

Images supplied by Mitchell Highett.

Sponsor: The Better Business series is supported by the Farm Business Resilience Program through the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.