Paul Spain:
Mike Casey, great to have you on the New Zealand Business Podcast.

Mike Casey:
Thank you for coming down. It’s a pleasure to have you fly all the way from the other end of the country down here to little old Cromwell. It’s quite the privilege. Thank you.

Paul Spain:
Oh, loving it. It’s a stunning, stunning day here. Incredible part of the world to be, to be hanging out like to start with, hearing a little bit about your upbringing. Where were you born?

Mike Casey:
So Wellington. Spent my whole life in Wellington actually. Went to Wellington College, Victoria University, Computer science degree.

Paul Spain:
What was it like for you growing up in Wellington? What was your childhood like? If you kind of look back and see the connections to the things that you’ve done later in life and business and so on, you know, what connections can you see to your entrepreneurial bent, to your technology interests?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, I would say, I would say that, you know, I’d probably say grew up in a lower middle class family like, you know, reasonably well looked after and loved, which was, which was obviously hugely important but always had that taste for wanting to, you know, go a bit further in life I think. Mum worked hard, she was a bureaucrat in Wellington. Dad was an entrepreneur that struggled from one startup to the next. But I also taught me so much about being a startup founder myself and yeah, so by the time I went to university I realized computer science was where it was at because I really wanted to be an entrepreneur and not answer.

Paul Spain:
So you weren’t put off that from, you know, what were the things that your dad did in terms of his businesses?

Mike Casey:
So he ended up selling his business only a few years ago now. It was a technology like a SaaS product for accommodation providers here in New Zealand. Ccom. Yeah, before that he went through a series of different ventures that, you know, that, that, that with varying levels of success as many entrepreneurs really do. But I don’t know, like, I just always looked at him as a kid as just how passionate he was about all this kind of stuff. Mum and dad split up when I was like 6 years old. That’s cause Mum, you know, I think wanted the stable income that my entrepreneurial father couldn’t necessarily provide, you know, but also my, you know, later on in life my dad is an ACT Party candidate. My mum’s a big supporter of the Green Party so you can see why they’re both happily married, remarried now and I got the benefits of both of those worlds right.

Mike Casey:
Like I, you know, largely brought up by my mum in a very stable and loving environment and got to see my dad do amazing things with with business. And so, yeah, I feel like I was very, very fortunate to, you know, grow up in a, in a household where we didn’t necessarily have a huge amount of money, but way more money than other people in New Zealand. So being very grateful for that and sort of realizing, you know, there was a bit of taste to see where we could go and where we could take it. And ultimately the entrepreneurial spirit led me in the path that I’ve been down, which I’m very proud of.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And the sorts of things that you, you did at school, were there things there that, when you look at them, were helpful? Did you do things that were kind of leadership wise, sport wise, or, you know, were you very academic?

Mike Casey:
No, I was thick as two planks, mate, let’s be honest. No, terrible academic, very top of, well, middle of the bell curve in almost all sporting endeavors. You know, like, really, really good at being mediocre at a lot of things. You know, enjoyed my sport, enjoyed my mates at school. I don’t think there was anything in particular. Like, I always knew that I was gonna be an entrepreneur. Always knew. And so I think the only thing was the flavour of entrepreneur that I was gonna be and obviously went down the computer science path when I realised that you can make really valuable businesses with bugger all capital.

Mike Casey:
And that was what led me down that path of realizing that was the pathway forward. And that was in the early 2000s. Right. I finished well in college in 2001, started my computer science degree in 2002. By 2006, you know, founded the company that went on to sell in 2019.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, so, so coming out of university, what, what did you, what did you, what did you do? Because.

Mike Casey:
Went into the WESTPAC graduate program.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Mike Casey:
Because, you know, to some extent people in my life were advising me, stable job, do the business later, you know.

Paul Spain:
And did you learn some, some valuable lessons from being in, in an environment, you know, like that of a large organization with varying structures and so on, or do you think.

Mike Casey:
Sure, I learned that this is not for me. And I remember one of my direct lines at the time, I was having a bitch about something, being stupid, you know, some process or something like that. And he goes, see those things on the windows there? They’re blinds, not bars. Feel free to leave any time. And I was like, it’s really sage advice. And so it wasn’t long until after that where, you know, I met my. The great thing about it is the co founders that I founded that business with, I met at Westpac and you know, we decided that this is something that we wanted to do. We were all graduates.

Mike Casey:
We didn’t think that, you know, we’d been exposed to all the opportunities available when we left university, that ultimately there had to be a better solution out there for, you know, advertising graduate opportunities to students so they didn’t miss out on things. And we decided to do that. We found it at New Zealand in, I think 2006 and by the time it was 2008 we realised that there was a lot more money in graduate programs in Australia, so moved a lot

Paul Spain:
more people too, right?

Mike Casey:
A lot more people, a lot more students, a lot more corporates, a lot more positions. So we moved over to Sydney and gave it a good crack there and it worked really well, thankfully.

Paul Spain:
So the similarity between New Zealand and Australia, how close was that? Cause sometimes, yeah, something will start in New Zealand, it’ll be clear there’s a global opportunity. Sometimes it’s like, well, maybe there’s an opportunity in Australia. But obviously that translated very well.

Mike Casey:
Oh, I mean, I love Australia, I love Australians. They’re very, very welcoming of us. I think. Like the one way that I describe it, like, no one, unless you’re from Christchurch, no one asks you what school you went to, right? Unless you’re from Christchurch, Sydney, everyone asks you what school you went to. Like, it’s hugely important for social hierarchy and stuff like that. So as a joker from New Zealand, they’re just like, oh yeah, is that a good school, was it? Oh, it’s the best school, yeah. Okay, great. You know, you’re in the club then, you know, like.

Mike Casey:
And so that was quite power. And then, you know, in 2008 when we moved over there, the tech startup scene was just becoming a big thing. So I knew so many of my mates over there did so well in the technology startup scene in Sydney and you know, we were kind of like the OG kind of crew over there, I think. And I ended up founding a co working space called Fishburners, which ended up being absolutely massive over in Sydney, where we just collected as many entrepreneurs as we could and put them all together in one room and just, you know, learned off each other. A big, big fan of the saying, you are what your friends are, so make your friends successful and you’ll successful as well.

Paul Spain:
And so how, how did you can connect with that group and manage to, you know, make, make that work? Because as you say, being around the right people, you know, can, can completely, you know, transform the trajectory of someone’s life.

Mike Casey:
Just got on the tins with them. Yeah, you know, it’s as simple as that, really. I mean, you know, one of the unhealthy aspects of it was the amount of social capital that was tied up in drinking at the time. But, you know, I was in my early 20s and that was a really fun thing to do. So went to the pub a lot, went to all the drinks and the meetups of the, you know, entrepreneurs that were there at the time. Started hanging out with a few of them. You just slowly integrate your way in. When they realize you’re, you know, you’re not some prick from New Zealand, you’re actually a pretty decent dude.

Mike Casey:
And, yeah, sort of just grew it from there. But some of the advice that I got from those people was hugely important for shaping the business that we created and the entrepreneur that I became. And I think even realizing things like, you know, so much of entrepreneurship is lucky. Right place, right time. Yes. You’ve got to be in it to win it.

Paul Spain:
You’ve got to make your own luck too. You’ve got to make your own luck as well. Right. If you’re not there, you’re not going to have the luck.

Mike Casey:
I think that’s what I was saying. If you roll the dice enough times, your numbers will come up or Fortune favors the brave is another really good, I think, entrepreneurial, you’ve got to be brave to capitalise on the fortune.

Paul Spain:
Not every player is going to work out, though. And some you can roll the dice for 20 years and you might not land it. Right. But if you’re not there, you’ve got zero chance.

Mike Casey:
Exactly. There’s entrepreneurs in Sydney that I really, I thought they were incredible entrepreneurs that were never successful, never got an accident, floundered around, you know, and unfortunately, you know, didn’t. Didn’t have the success that they dreamed of. And other people that I just thought were absolute dropkicks that sold their businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars. So, you know, it goes. It goes all sorts of ways. But, yes, I think the number one thing is you have to be in it to win it. I’m so glad that I was in it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Now I want to hear a little bit more about Fishburners.

Mike Casey:
Right. Yep.

Paul Spain:
Was that something that, for you, the main benefit was, you know, the people you connected with and so on, or was that actually a viable and a good, you know, good business over, over, over time? And how did that play out?

Mike Casey:
Everything I’ve done has been by accident. Getting the job at Westpac and meeting my co founders is like, okay, this is, you Know, fortune favours the brave, I guess, Right. When it came starting to Fishburners, we were renting, subletting. Our business was subletting off a much larger technology business that got acquired and shut down. And they were like one day they were just not there anymore and we were left with our little desks in our little room. Landlord comes in and goes, well, you can take over the lease if you want. This is how much it costs. Or you can get out.

Mike Casey:
We’re like, ouch. Well, we can’t afford this giant office space, so what are we going to do? And, you know, we just had the idea, well, let’s go down to IKEA and buy a whole bunch of desks and then start like renting the desks out at a hundred dollars, I think it was 100 bucks a month. You know, it’s that cheap at the time. And if we fill this office full of 18 people, then we’ll be able to make rent. So that’s kind of what we decided to do.

Paul Spain:
And we went and negotiated some sort of flexible terms. So you weren’t immediately committing to a

Mike Casey:
piece or anything, right? I think we did commit knowing full well if we just walk away if our business folded, you know, like, whatever.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it wasn’t tied back to you.

Mike Casey:
It wasn’t tied back to us or anything, but it was successful. It’s. People craved it. This is before co working was even a thing. And all of a sudden people were in there.

Paul Spain:
And what year were you kind of talking at that point?

Mike Casey:
2008. Yeah, yeah, 2009 maybe. The problem was, is that we hadn’t thought about all of the things that come with running a co working space. Like, was there a cleaner? No. Have we budgeted for a cleaner? No. You know, there was about a thousand different keys cut to the office. I was like, this is probably a bit of a security risk. And it’s like, who’s going to actually chase the rent when someone doesn’t pay it and all this kind of stuff anyway.

Mike Casey:
Just telling the story about how successful this had been, but not successful enough in the right way, like, you know, the growing pains associated with this. And found another entrepreneur in Sydney who was like, well, I’ll just take out a bigger lease for you and give you enough funding to get a receptionist and a cleaner and stuff. And you just sort out the pricing model and pay me back when you’re ready. So that happened. And so all of a sudden Fishburners became actually a formalized sort of entity. It was a not for profit because we didn’t, we were. The value for us wasn’t in the real estate, the value was in surrounding ourselves with awesome people.

Paul Spain:
Great.

Mike Casey:
And then that led to another thing and then Google was sponsoring it and Optus was sponsoring it and the New South Wales government was sponsoring it and then ended up being, you know, a whole thing in the middle of the central city across multiple floors that would have, by the time we’d finished up, housed thousands upon thousands of startups. It was a really cool experience.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I guess you would have heard lots and lots of stories and lots would have come out of that and you certainly wouldn’t have known up front. And even afterwards you won’t know of all of the conversations and all of the things that actually helped facilitate it. Right. Like there’s something pretty special about getting people together and able to nudge each other along and help each other out.

Mike Casey:
Oh, totally. And I’m just like totally fond of the experience, the relationships that I’ve still got with so many founders. Like there’s some pretty, pretty successful founders out there that would pick up the phone if I called them right now, you know, like, and that is awesome experience, but they weren’t successful when I knew them, you know, and so that’s really powerful, you know, and they’ve been really supportive of what I’ve been doing here now with my new business on farm and sort of blown away by what we’ve been able to achieve and the coverage that we’ve managed to get. But yeah, I don’t know, it all comes back to. There’s something really special about, you know, fighting in the same trench alongside good people. In the case of co working and entrepreneurship, you were never really fighting the same fight but you were fighting it together and that was quite cool.

Paul Spain:
You’ve been in business, you’re in business, but the non profit side is, you know, has, has been part of the picture for you, you know, now more, more, more than once. Anything that, that stands out from, from that, that, that time there with fish burners that, you know, that really sticks with you.

Mike Casey:
I think the non profit thing, like, you know, you saw big co working spaces come in and then scale up massively and then go bust and all of that kind of stuff. And for me the not for profit was a way of cementing to people so that they would trust it, that this is actually something that is about community. It was, it was much more garage band rather than Taylor Swift, if, you know, if that makes sense. Like we were just trying to create a good environment for other entrepreneurs. And, you know, people look back at it now and they’re like, oh, wow, you’ve done such, you did such an amazing thing for the Sydney startup scene. It’s like, yeah, but I didn’t intend to do that. Like, it kind of grew awesomely because it was so community focused. It was focused on the actual people involved.

Mike Casey:
Now when it comes to what I’m doing in the energy space, it’s again, it’s about focusing on the people and what’s best for our people. So that’s where the charitable kind of not for profit angle I think comes from in a big way. And for me, now I’m in a position where I’ve made more than enough money for my wife and my family, you know, to be comfortable. We own a nice cherry farm in Central Otago. We’re doing okay. So now how do you maximize your impact? How does this becomes more about impact and legacy than it becomes about money making? And when I was in my early 20s, my entrepreneurship was all about how do I get rich, how do I become financially free? Now that I’m in my early 40s, it’s how do I have impact? How do we make New Zealand a better place? And I think the whole journey with Fishburners was very much, much the same. Along the way. It was, well, you know, how can we give back? How can we help foster a good community? How can we benefit from that community? So that’s kind of where that came from.

Mike Casey:
And I didn’t want to ever make money out of the co working space because then I wouldn’t be focusing on what was really important, which was my own startup that needed to be successful.

Paul Spain:
And how easy was it to bring others into the Fishburners story? You know, you talked about others supporting it, whether it was at a government level or businesses that wanted to support it. Was that something that just happened quite naturally and organically?

Mike Casey:
I think so. And organically. But also you’ve got to be very generous with your attribution. Like, if you draw a circle around your territory and like guard it with a spear, people aren’t going to come in. But when, you know, when you let people come in and use the space for their own benefit, like it would grow, you know, quite awesomely, quite quickly. So I’d say that’s probably the number one thing. It’s just, you know, like when you, when you’re wanting something to grow and when you want to have impacts, you invite people into your circle. You don’t try and protect your patch.

Mike Casey:
And so, you know, I’ve been, I’ve always been known as a founder of Fishburners, but there’s dozens of other founders of Fishburners. You know, I, the people that put money into Fishburners early on are the ones that ultimately probably made it more successful than I did. You know, I’ll always be a co founder of GradConnection shared with three other guys. You know, my now where I am running the Cherry Orchard here in Central Otago, I’m a co founder with my business partner who is an old high school mate. You know, you bring people in and you’re always very inviting, you know, and bringing people in and I think the more and more people that you can help surf the wave, the better off society is. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now let’s delve more into the GradConnection story.

Mike Casey:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
So you moved to Sydney. What happened then? What was the thing that made it really work for you in the Australian market?

Mike Casey:
Well, the first lesson I learned is as an, as an engineer, I thought, you know what, I’m going to build this product that everyone’s going to want. So I built this product and then we tried to sell it, no one wanted it. And it made me realize, how did

Paul Spain:
you try and sell it?

Mike Casey:
Just to have set up meetings. I’ve created this new product. I think it’s going to be great. Come in and it’s like, oh, no, no, no, not really.

Paul Spain:
So you was, who were you selling to at that point?

Mike Casey:
This was corporates, this was hr, people who ran graduate programs.

Paul Spain:
Right. So you, you were looking for them to like buy a subscription.

Mike Casey:
It was, it was like a pool of CVs of graduates. Right. And it was like, you could go in, you can search, you can find the ones you want, you can invite them to apply or something. Yeah, I can’t even remember is that long ago exactly what the product was. But I went, well, the, the thing that I had completely underestimated is that was not the way the culture worked. The culture worked. It’s a graduate would apply and then they would get their pool of candidates and then they would go through their process and that was, you know, the way that it would work. And so I went in there and I tried to sell this product and was like, nah, nah, that’s not, don’t want that, that’s not interesting.

Mike Casey:
And I was like, why did I spend all this time developing this bloody product when I could have just gone and spoken to the potential customers in the first place? So then I was like, we just made up a product that we hadn’t built yet and was like, went in and tried to sell that and oh my gosh, people started buying it.

Paul Spain:
Everyone wanted it. So initially you didn’t have that product market fit. Then you heard from the market what you wanted, what they wanted and then when you offered that back to them, there was immediate interest.

Mike Casey:
And then what made us successful entrepreneurs was promising the earth and somehow delivering on those promises. Right. So it became oh yeah, well we’re launching this on the 1st of March in line with when the graduate application season opens up. You’d like to be one of the first on our, you know, on our new website which is just like an advertising job board style platform. And what we’ll do is, you know, it provides an awesome calculator so a graduate can come in and they can say what they’re looking for and then we’ll tell them what the best, the highest matched employer is. So if you offer free parking for example, we’ll add that into the list and all these kinds of things. They loved it. And so yeah, we then worked as hard as we could to launch that on the 1st of March 2009.

Mike Casey:
And I think we might have had 20 employers that signed up at 1500 bucks each. By the time we sold it in 2019, the average employer was probably paying 20 something thousand dollars to advertise on our website. And we had this is sort of

Paul Spain:
a monthly type of commitment.

Mike Casey:
No, annual, annual. So the, the thing about graduate programs is they were annual at, you know. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So but what the biggest, the biggest selling point was was that the information would be up on the site all year round and they could toggle applications on and off whenever you liked. Because ultimately what was happening was that people were missing out on that information because they didn’t show up to the crisphere at the right time or they, you know, for whatever reason missed the magazine or the job, the seek job bought out at the time. So we were like, no, your, your employer brand is going to be up there all year round. You’re going to talk about your values and what you do and all that kind of stuff. And then you can vary your content whenever you like.

Mike Casey:
And by the way, you’ll, you know, you can turn applications on and off whenever you like. And that was really the thing that started to get that over the line, you know. Kevin Rudd, favorite Australian prime minister of all time only because he made a rule that a certain portion of Australian government spend had to be on small businesses with I think staff below 20. And so we became a tick box for a lot of businesses that were, you know, looking to a lot of government departments to advertise their graduate programs. And that’s really what seeded a lot of our early stage success. Right.

Paul Spain:
So that’s, that’s a bit of the luck piece.

Mike Casey:
Absolutely. Right place, right time. Fortune favors the brave. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now walking, walking forward to selling. What did that look like? How did that come about? Was that something where you went out to the market? Was it something where you were, you were getting interest from multiple entities, or was it just the one opportunity that came up?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, it got really interesting because when you’re creating a, as a reasonably fresh graduate, creating a graduate job board, you think this is the most relevant thing in the world. Right. And in our earliest to late 20s, amazing time, you know, parties on campus, all of these kinds of things. It was fun, right? Get into your early 30s. And I’d, I literally fell out of love with my startup five years before I sold it. Right. And ouch. But the problem is all your chips are in the middle of the table, right? There’s no liquidity event on the horizon.

Mike Casey:
It’s very hard to sell. You know, you’ve got three founders that, you know, the other thing is we started the business when we were what, 23? Sold it when we were 33, 34. You know, there’s a lot of growing up, a lot of relationship change during that time. And so we started to get to the point where we all wanted different things in business and there was a bit of friction associated with that as well. And you know, lucky for us, right place, right time, fortunate again, seek came along and decided that we were valuable because they didn’t have access to, you know, the people that were looking at getting their first professional job. That was what we, that was the part of the market that we controlled. And to be fair to Seek, they were a really, really good acquirer that, you know, offered a really fair price. But, you know, also we were a startup and they were a publicly listed entity.

Mike Casey:
So to get all the ducks in a row and get everything up to a point took 18 months.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Mike Casey:
Right, 18 months. And all sorts of carry pretty taxing on you. Hugely taxing at a time where there was, we were experiencing friction amongst the co founders and a couple of times, you know, like for those accountants that are in the, you know, listening on, basically we had to convert from cash accounting to gap accounting and that seemed to magically shove half the revenue back a year and half the revenue 40 years. So the year that they were buying our business didn’t make us look like we were very successful at all.

Paul Spain:
Oh, dear.

Mike Casey:
And so there was. The sale and purchase agreement was taken off the table at the 11th hour and put back on. Nothing nefarious, just part of that acquisition process in the way that it went down, you know, and we shopped around to see if there was some other buyers out there. There are a couple of other buyers out there, but nothing like as creditable and as, I think, compassionate and open to buying our business as what seek was. And so I think, you know, at the end of the day, they were very, very good acquirers of our business. Very responsible. They weren’t there to, you know, try and screw us over, which I think in a lot of cases, a lot of business transactions that can happen. So that was super valuable to have that happen as well.

Mike Casey:
But that’s why I was 10 kilos heavier than I am now when I sold my business, right? You see the first term sheet and you start spending that money in your head, you start planning things, and all of a sudden it gets taken away and then it’s half as much as it was and all these kinds of things. It was a really stressful, tricky time. And I think that’s the other part when we’re taught as young entrepreneurs, it’s like, oh, imagine the day that you sell your business. It’s going to be a massive party and it’s going to be so anticlimactic, like by the end of you, like, oh, thank Christ that’s over, you know, because you’d just been through the wringer to get, get, get out the other side there. And so it wasn’t. And so the whole building of the Cherry Orchard was really my celebration of that success rather than the sale of the previous business. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Wow. And, you know, where were you at in terms of family and so on at that time? Because these things can take a, you know, can have a huge impact on family. You know, I think you mentioned earlier around, you know, alcohol being part of the story, you know, you know, these things aren’t. Aren’t unique. Right. Obviously the particular situation is, but the sort of pressures that it creates, you know, catching up with someone last week and, yeah, he was. He was sort of walking through, you know, me through a little bit of his story over dinner, and it was like, you know, basically, you know, he was making this comment because he’s like, no, I don’t drink anymore. But there was this time in my life where it was, you know, drugs Drugs and alcohol were what was fueling things, you know, how did all that fit together for you?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, so I mean, I think the first thing is to how appreciative I am of my wife. Like we moved over in 2008 for me to start a technology startup. She went over there, she’s an accountant, she got a good job, she supported me for four or five years. As my girlfriend, I think my in laws were like, what the hell are you doing with this dead dude? Like, you know, but she stuck with me. And so on the other side, selling the business and having her get the reward from that is, you know, super important. But also, you know, we had two young kids in Sydney and that’s when I think priorities, you know, started to change in a big way. Why we wanted to move back to Aotearoa, why, you know, we were struggling a little bit with some co founder friction and things like that. The most stressful time week of my life.

Mike Casey:
My boy, my second child, my little boy was born and three days later we signed that sale and purchase agreement finally. You know, like it was, it was hectic, right? And I, you know, I’m not gonna lie to you, like I was using alcohol to sort of moderate thinking and everything a little bit. Like I’m not, I, I still enjoy a beer every now and then. I think one of the great things about moving to rural New Zealand is you can’t drink because then you can’t get home. So you immediately change and you know, like I, I, I’ve just completely moved away from it now where now I enjoy a beer after a mountain bike ride or you know, a couple of beers down at the pub, very frequently, very rarely with some old mates and stuff like that, you know, and I just think that, you know, from a, from a family perspective, we were very lucky that we sold the business when we did. And I think from an outcome perspective it was too. We sold the business in 2019, moved back here and three months later we planted trees in the ground and the world shut down.

Paul Spain:
So you were able to effectively just, you know, step out. You weren’t locked into a, you know.

Mike Casey:
No. So X years needing to be sometimes like earnouts are burnouts.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Mike Casey:
And the interesting thing here is, you know, we were, I was going to have an earn out like the rest of my co founders, but the moment that we signed the sale and purchase agreement, I was on paternity leave because we got bought by a private, you know, a publicly listed company that had, you know, parental leave policies. So I Was like, okay, well we’ll go on paternal leave because that’s what was required. And I took an extended, the extended auction. And by the time I, you know, that was up. I really didn’t want to go back. I’d kind of moved on psychologically. And they were like, yeah, we’re running the business fine, we don’t really want you back. So it was like the perfect we don’t exit.

Mike Casey:
Well, it’s just like, you know, a lot of the time when you buy businesses, you need to founders to stay on.

Paul Spain:
That’s it.

Mike Casey:
I was not around when that transition,

Paul Spain:
when it was happening. Yeah.

Mike Casey:
And it turns out it didn’t need to be.

Paul Spain:
They’d figured it out by then.

Mike Casey:
Again, incredibly fortunate. You know, I know a number of founders at the moment of my friends that are going through exits that are really struggling because you kind of lose your soul in exchange for money. And that, that only goes so far. And you know, it’s a willpower is a muscle and like any muscle, it fatigues quite quickly when you use it too much. So.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we’re here, you know, right on the, the orchard. So tell us about, you know, moving back to New Zealand and, and the story of electric chairs.

Mike Casey:
I mean, move all again, kind of unplanned and kind of by accident. I love the idea of farming, but moved back to New Zealand. My wife really wanted to come home and I kind of really wanted to move to this area because I love the skiing and the outdoors and that kind of stuff. So that was the compromise. Moved to Cromwell specifically. We’re looking for houses in Queenstown, Wanaka, that kind of thing, and found a farm 30 minutes south of Wanaka for the same price as a four bedroom home in Wanaka. So that was, you know, my wife’s not an accountant who just loves bargains and once she saw this place and the value for money, she was just like, we’re not, we’re buying this place, aren’t we? You know, I didn’t really have much

Paul Spain:
of a say, but I mean, incredible getting here. And then you get here, we’re looking up this, there’s snow on the mountains, there’s, you know, stunning in the other direction with like Dunstan and so on. I mean, must have been pretty, pretty, pretty hard to say anything other than, yeah, this is a great idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Casey:
I mean the only thing was it was the ideal house that came with nine hectares of land. And so as an entrepreneur I was like, well, this is an opportunity. What are we going to do with it and through, you know, a little bit of analysis, realized what was good to grow here. You know, as I said before, like a child that always was fascinated by farming. So 9,300 cherisheries later, we were, we were on our journey and the new chapter had kind of begun. And this is a, this is my creative outlet now of, you know, when, when I was in my early 20s, a technology startup was ideal. And now I’m in my early 40s with three, three young children, you know, and my wife living here. And a farm is ideal.

Mike Casey:
You know, it’s still business, it’s still amazing. There’s still so much to innovate on and do differently, as you know, that’s why you’re here. It just, this is my creative outlet and I’m just super excited about how successful we’re going to make it. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Yeah, I guess, yeah. When you look at it, you know, next to, I guess, a traditional, you know, tech startup type business, yes, there’s a, there’s, you know, a lot of tech, you know, involved in, well, anything these days. But you look at the tech startup world and, you know, it’s intense, crazy hours, no guarantees around outcomes. How different is that to the farm? It must be sort of, you know, night and day. You must have been able to spreadsheet out and figure out a lot of things before you started. You know, there’s no hunting.

Mike Casey:
And then you realize how fickle farming is and how markets, markets and weather are both there to screw you over. Right. It is different. Like, I think the, the big thing here is you could see how other people had done it and there was a much clearer path in front. Do I miss the hockey stick opportunity? Sometimes. But would I go after it again? I don’t think so. You know, now that I’m in the position that I’m in, I think, I think with all entrepreneurship, the key thing is not the hockey stick growth, but it’s how proud you are of the business that you are running. You know, you are, your business is part of your identity.

Mike Casey:
And when you’re in love with your business, it’s just amazing what you can achieve. Right. And when you’re not in love with your business, it can be very depressing and all consuming. So, yeah, I just, I don’t know, like, I feel like my. I’m so glad that I did a technology startup and I never want to do one again. You know, I think. And that’s just me acknowledging the fact that I’m at the next stage of my life now, which is, you know, having impact in different ways.

Paul Spain:
So looking at the orchard, looking at the farm, what are the things that you can be most relaxed about versus the, you know, where the, where the variables are? And was there, you know, much surprise to that as you, as you got into the realities of it? Right, Because I mean, it’s so different to the text.

Mike Casey:
The chap that’s just down there, he’s my business partner. His name’s Ewan. You know, he ultimately is the one that does the majority of the farming. So when we started 9,300 baby cherry trees, there’s a lot of work to train those trees and the way they need to be trained in order to be productive. But now we’re at full production. It got to the point where, you know, the orchard didn’t need two full time staff and so he stayed on, he’s become the orchard manager looking after that. I just become, you know, his, his, his really at harvest, you know, pick up all the jobs and do everything that I need, he needs to, he needs done, you know, at that really critical time in harvest. But for the majority of the year, he’s the one that’s doing the tree maintenance and making sure that this orchard runs, you know, like absolute clockwork.

Mike Casey:
And that’s allowed me to go out and do this new thing which is Rewiring Aotearoa and taking what we’ve learned here on the farm and applying that to the whole country.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. What’s the total output on an annual basis here?

Mike Casey:
Output in terms of cherry volume, money. What do you.

Paul Spain:
I guess both.

Mike Casey:
Yeah. So in a good year we will make about 80 tons of export cherries, which is about 8 million cherries. This season just been, was not a good year and I think we were about 55 tonnes or about 55 million cherries. Prices on the market were good. Damage to the cherries due to rain and cold weather and all that kind of stuff was pretty bad. So we just broke even this, this, this season, which is, you know, unfortunate enough to pay the loans down, not enough to get a return on investment, but the year prior, you know, amazing. And so that, that’s what it goes through. But you know, like in total, all up a really rounded figure, probably about 5 million bucks is what we’ve invested in getting this farm off the ground.

Mike Casey:
And you know, we probably make about, in a good season, $300,000 worth of profit a year off our cherries and about, you know, a bit more off the, a bit less. But you know, off the. Off the electricity from our solar system. So you can sort of see it’s, you know, it’s that standard 10% kind of yield, I think, would be the way that I would describe it.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Mike Casey:
8%, 10%, that kind of thing. Yep.

Paul Spain:
And how much variability is there? You know, you. You talked about, was it 55 tonnes?

Mike Casey:
Yep.

Paul Spain:
This last season, how. I guess you probably haven’t been here long enough to sort of see the complete sort of peaks and troughs. In terms of what that can.

Mike Casey:
Yeah, the season prior, I had, I think, 80. I can’t remember exactly offhand. 80 ton, 85 ton, something like that. And that was about the optimum amount. Like, when it comes to growing produce, it’s not just the tonnes, though. Like the size of the cherry ultimately gets a better price.

Paul Spain:
Big cherry. Right.

Mike Casey:
You want to be sherry. Yeah. So those 30 to 32 mil cherries, you might be making 25, 30, 40 bucks a kilo, depending on the market.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Mike Casey:
You know, those 20, 28, 26s and 24s might be more like 10, $12 a kilo. So it’s really important that you, you know, you get really good at growing good, big firm cherries that are tasty and that’s when the money really starts to roll in. And that is a talent. It’s talent, it’s discipline and it’s luck. And the luck is the weather in particular.

Paul Spain:
And there’s other variabilities, like the different varieties that give you a length of season and, you know, depending on, you know, when different fruit are sort of, you know, maturing as to then where that fits in with international markets. Maybe walk us a little bit.

Mike Casey:
Yeah. So, I mean, most of our cherries go overseas to Southeast Asia, China, and one of the big cherry buying times is Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year. They like to make it difficult and shift that date every year. You know, we’ve got it much easier here with Christmas, as we know exactly what date it’s going to fall every year. But, you know, it can be late February or it can be late January and that just completely shifts things around. So you have different varieties, different tastes. They’re all amazing and their differences, actually. But you’ll always have one variety that was best timed for that sort of lunar New Year period.

Mike Casey:
So, yeah, that’s sort of, sort of the big thing. But the other thing, like, you know, going fully electric and then marketing, you know, the electric cherries brand has opened up all these new customers within New Zealand that now order over mail order, which is hugely awesome for us because we basically sell at export prices, but we don’t have to pay to ship the cherries to Taiwan or Beijing or Shanghai or wherever it might be. So we actually make more money selling to New Zealanders as a result of that. And that’s awesome as well. Every energy nerd and climate nerd in the country now buys electric cherries because of the metaphor of what it kind of shows and does. And as a result, we’re, you know, we’re more secure with. With potentially more profit, which is super exciting.

Paul Spain:
I love that and I love the innovation in terms of the approach that you’ve taken to that. Maybe you can walk listeners through, you know, what are the options that you’ve put up on your website? And, you know, how does that actually live out across the orchard where you’ve got the signs of, you know, a family that’s, you know, sponsoring a particular part of the orchard.

Mike Casey:
You want to.

Paul Spain:
You.

Mike Casey:
We call it adopt a cherry tree. Your whnau can literally buy a cherry tree, you know, in our orchard for a period of time. So we have people adopting them for five years, 10 years, one year, whatever it might be. And yeah, that entitles you to the one tree shares worth of cherries that come out of the. Out of the orchard every year. So it’s about six kilos, and that six kilos will be put in a box and sent straight to your whnau. There’s a lot of cherries really good for parties, really good for festive occasions, really good for the summer holiday period, really good to share around with other people in your community. And I think, you know, we’ve got 9,300 cherry trees and I think 400, 500 of them have been adopted out.

Mike Casey:
And if you don’t want to commit to 6 kilos of cherries on an annual subscription, the other thing is essentially just buying cherries by the box, you know, directly from us during. During season. And that’s been really good for us as well. So, yeah, we sell. We sell at the same gate return as what we get overseas, but we don’t have to put them on jumbo jets and fly them to the other side of the world to get that, to realise that price. And that’s been really powerful for making us more profitable and has given people the opportunity to support our business as well, which has been cool.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well, I mean, it’s interesting. I’ve got a friend who’s from down this way and he come down to visit his family, brought some fruit back and you know, I, I had some cherries at home and he’s like, Paul, those are rubbish. You know, you’re buying the bottom of the barrel cherries from, from your local supermarket. Here’s what real cherries are like. And I think as kiwis, we, we don’t always, you know, recognize that the best is going, is going, is going offshore. Correct? And then, you know, we, we’re getting that, we’re getting the leftovers because there’s not a big enough market and demand and probably even just awareness, right. I mean, I think we’ve seen in, you know, a bunch of areas where there now is a bit more premium, you know, product available in our supermarkets and so on. But often you actually just won’t, you won’t see what’s going off the shore offshore.

Mike Casey:
Central Otago, best stone fruit in the world.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Mike Casey:
Hawke’s Bay. Best pit fruit in the world. Right? And all of that heads overseas. You know, I’ll tell it to you from a farmer’s perspective. So you understand how like, how it works is that we pick all our cherries, they get down to the pack house and they’re graded into, they’re graded by a machine into. Are they really good cherries or are they not, you know, are they seconds? Essentially, the really good cherries are the ones that we want to sell at a high price. Do the New Zealand supermarkets want to buy them at that high price? No, they don’t. So they head overseas.

Mike Casey:
What New Zealand supermarkets like to do is buy the not so good ones at a low price and then sell them to you at a high price. So this is where buying direct from the farmer, whether it’s your leg of lamb or your cherries or your apples or whatever it might be, is so important because that is how you get the best produce, right? It’s the same as walking down to the farmer’s market and buying direct from the farmer. Right? People who do that know what they’re, what they get. And it’s just like when you see a New Zealander try a Central Otago cherry for the first time, it’s like they cry, you know, it’s that good. And the smiles and the, and the cherry juice dripping down the, the kids faces, it’s just like, it’s, it’s absolutely magical. Which is actually probably, you know, one of the other key reasons I got into cherries is they bring joy to the world in ways that no other food does.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Great, great fruit. Great choice. Now what can you, what can you sort of, you know, tell us in, in short, around the, the electric journey and how that’s, you know, come together and, you know, it’s become such an important part of, of what you, you know, do that you’re now as electric as. As electric cherries. Right?

Mike Casey:
Yeah. I mean, the whole thing started. We had to buy a lot of machines to run a productive, you know, farm and economic unit of cherries. And how did it start? Like, first thing was get having to fix an old diesel pump that came with the orchard that kept breaking down and one day getting sunburned because we’re out in the sun all day fixing this bloody pump that just wouldn’t start and realizing this is a bit dumb. Shouldn’t we, you know, buy a new pump and run it off the sun rather than off, you know, fuel source from the other side of the world? That led to, you know, putting solar on the roof because our energy bill went down because we weren’t paying so much in diesel, but our electricity bill went up, so that made solar economical. Then it led to buying, you know, orchard utility vehicles, which are really souped off. Golf carts. We run flat land, 25 km of cherry trees.

Mike Casey:
It’s really good for honing around and, you know, in golf carts. The golf guys had already solved this problem for us. Buying golf carts and putting new off road tires on them and lifting the suspension was a really good way to go. Then it became electric chainsaws and electric cars and stuff because we could run off energy that we could create ourselves. And then we bought too many electric machines and we didn’t have. We weren’t making enough energy anymore, you know, so we had to go and put more solar in. And then we bought electric frost fighting fans and then, you know, electric scissor lifts and mowers and all that kind of stuff. And then the final thing, the thing that we’re running this whole podcast, powering the whole podcast off right now, is this electric tractor behind me.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Thanks for the juice.

Mike Casey:
Not at all. It’s free from the sun of Central Otago. Thank the sun up there for this. The beautiful power that we get. Yeah. But ultimately that was the final piece of the puzzle. And so when I started this whole thing, I didn’t really plan to go fully electric, but the economics and the doing the numbers and then the passion for trying to solve these problems kind of always led us down that electric path. And by the time we got to 2022, it’s like the last piece that we need is the electric tractor.

Mike Casey:
The trees are growing up now we need a tractor. We can’t get, get buy it without a tractor anymore. And all of a sudden, you know, there was a tractor on the market in San Francisco.

Paul Spain:
It wasn’t exactly on the market. You had to twist some arms to get it.

Mike Casey:
It was, yeah, it was on the US market. It definitely wasn’t on the New Zealand market. And then on the other side of that now, you know, we’ve had our fair share of issues with electric technology because we’re living on the bleeding edge. But I love it. I love being an entrepreneur and living on the bleeding edge and solving problems and demonstrating to others what can be done. You know, that comes with problems like the fact that the tractor still goes, but the company that makes it doesn’t. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Buying from a Silicon Valley startup, you, you have those risks but, but it’s put you, it’s put you in this, this position where you’re really differentiated from others. There’s, you know, a lot of attention on, on, you know, what you’re doing. How, how does it, you know, stack up for you, numbers wise? I think you mentioned, was it 120k to.

Mike Casey:
Oh yeah, establish your, to run through the numbers super quickly to buy 21 electric machines rather than the diesel machines. We spent about $420,000 more on capital, which was a really like no bank would bank us because they all thought we were over capitalizing in a cherry farm spending another $420,000. It’s a lot of money considering, you know, the total thing probably costs 4 or 5 million to sit up. Right. So, but the operational savings on that was so significant that it was like a 13 year payback period, including the cost of finance on machines that we expect to last 20 years now.

Paul Spain:
Right. And more reliable being electric, just like you were talking about with your diesel pump and that going wrong. When you’re on electric, these things are lower maintenance and high reliability.

Mike Casey:
So pumps and things like that. 100% for tractors, maybe, maybe not quite living on the burning edge. There’s things that go wrong, but you know, that’s part of the journey there. But that was $400,000 including the cost of finances, say 5.5%. Right. But the savings meant that I could pay it off in 13 years now that the bloody Iran war has happened. The savings, it’s just mental, like how fast that’s going to affect the payback period on going down this path. So that’s been interesting.

Mike Casey:
And also, you know, when we include, we’ve got a couple of government grants Demonstration grants for the tractor to import that from San Francisco and the frost fighting fans from South Africa. And so those government grants brought it down to about eight years. So from that perspective alone, totally worth it for our business to go ahead and do this. Especially since we started with a blank canvas and we needed to buy the machines anyway. When you run a fully electric orchard, you use a lot of electricity, a lot. And so that’s what makes solar really, really viable. The complete capital return on investment for those solar panels in the field out there is five and a half years. Right.

Mike Casey:
Because we are saving all this money by not buying power from somebody else from an electricity landlord. And we’re pushing all this power back to the grid and earning a good profit from it now. So that’s $120,000 worth of solar panels. That makes $30,000 worth of electricity a year. If you then look at the fact that you’re saving all this money by not buying it at 30 cents a kilowatt hour instead of generating at 7 cents a kilowatt hour, which is what the amortized rate works out to be. When you cost of finance in this region, in this region in particular, it’s just the savings is huge. Right. And so the thing here is, you know, a lot of people haven’t really paired that up yet when it’s like, well, if you run solar, you want to run electric machines so you can use the energy that you can create yourself.

Mike Casey:
And it’s like the sum of all of this is, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Right. Like it’s, it’s huge. The way that it works together now is quite phenomenal. And as our staff now, it’s quite incredible. All our staff that work here have all got electric vehicles because they can charge on the farm for free, you know, so it’s a new, it’s a really good employment perk that we can do that costs us nothing that sets us apart. Especially during these times where, you know, the cost of traveling and driving around this country is so, so, so high at the moment. So super powerful.

Mike Casey:
In fact, in the last two weeks we’ve seen, you know, one guy buy the new electric four wheel drive ute, the Radara. And there’s a polestar around here as well.

Paul Spain:
We saw that earlier. I think it’s left here.

Mike Casey:
Yeah, yeah. They’re charging our cars there for free. So we’ve got. Our business has created two new electric cars in the New Zealand market just by being electric. And that’s awesome.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Now how do you look at before we finish up on electric cherries because I’m keen to delve into what that’s inspired in terms of leading to the formation of Rewiring Aotearoa as a non profit. How do you look at from a business success perspective?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, I mean for now, like, I mean I don’t want to expand this any further. This all shed is my family’s asset, it’s my business partner’s family’s asset. We’re now how do we make, you know, the revenue will probably have a top line amount that we’re going to be able to get that might vary year to year. So now it’s all about how do we run this really efficiently as a family business that returns us good dividends every year like any good investment should. And then the rest of this now is about that’s an asset over the side. We’ve got some investments in other things, other startups, which is pretty cool. And now the other part of it is, well what do we do? How do we expand impact without expanding risk? And so that’s what I’m all about now is telling people the story and doing the numbers on the rest of New Zealand and getting them on the journey, which is what Rewiring Aotearoa is all about.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. So, yeah, so it’s, it’s sharing what works, how that’s good for New Zealand, even breaking that down to numbers so folks can come in into your website and actually work out well, you know, should they be generating their own power

Mike Casey:
versus Yeah, I mean I think like, and it’s that it’s education, it’s marketing, it is policy. So telling the government what needs to happen and getting them excited about what could happen if they enact the right policy. It’s from fighting the incumbents, it’s representing New Zealanders against the energy system. You know, like we get shafted at the moment quite frankly by the rules and the regulations that exist that stop us from being paid fairly for this kind of stuff. And we’ll get.

Paul Spain:
So if you’re selling back, back to the grid for most, most Kiwis, it’s not necessarily a great transaction.

Mike Casey:
It’s not a true reflection of the value of the power and the contribution that you’re making. Yeah, so we have to fight for that. We also have to fight for the equity piece which is, you know, you and I are on our journey somewhere along the way and we can afford to do this. Most of the people that are listening to this show can probably afford to do this or their parents can afford to do this or, you know, and so that’s really powerful. What do we do about all the New Zealanders that can’t afford to do this, that could benefit so massively from it being done? So those are all, you know, parts of what we’re, you know, really, really trying to work on. And I think, like, if we use the analogy of fish burners, you know, it’s like New Zealand is now one large co working space, right? We’re all doing different businesses, but what can we all do together? What is in the New Zealand’s best interests, you know, is something that I’m really, really passionate about. This is moving beyond politics. This is no longer left versus right.

Mike Casey:
This is New Zealand people’s interests versus the vested interests of people that are not the New Zealand people, you know, and, you know, whether that’s big, you know, big, big corporates that are in New Zealand or whether that’s overseas energy companies, whatever that might be, representing what’s best for New Zealand people is ultimately what I care really deeply about now and probably am in a fortunate enough position where I have enough security to have the time to care deeply about that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s fantastic for our listeners. What would be, I guess, your biggest, you know, tip of something that listeners could sort of put into action in terms of how they, how they, you know, operate or lead in business today. And then maybe we’ll, we’ll come to sort of recommendations on, you know, from an electrification perspective. But from your journey, you’ve got so many lessons and so on.

Mike Casey:
I mean, if we look at, you know, what’s the thing that I’m most happy about that I ever did was to quit my job and start a company. Right? So the first thing is anyone who’s looking at starting a company now, it’s Friday that we’re recording this, resign on Monday, get in there, give it a crack, get it done. All those opportunities will open. Fortune will favor the brave the moment that you’re in a position where you’re actually doing this. So that’s my number one piece of advice, is just commit and go in and get it done. And there will always be the opportunity on the other side. If things don’t work out, there’ll be new opportunities that come about. And especially if you’re young, if you’re in your early 20s, you might have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, but you might not be married yet, you might not have a mortgage, you might not have children.

Mike Casey:
Now is 100% the time to do it. As it gets older and you’re married and you have kids, it’s substantially harder. There’s more commitments, more responsibilities, that kind of thing. So that would be the number one thing as you’re building a business. My favorite saying in entrepreneurship of all time is you can’t trip a centipede. The more customers that you have, the better off you are. The more investors you have, the better off you are. If you behold them, it’s very easy to trip a one legged man, isn’t it? So making sure that you’re building a business that is scalable and something that can be used by a lot of people is also super important.

Mike Casey:
And I just think this, it’s often romanticized, building startups and selling startups and exiting and being wealthy and all that kind of thing. None of this is an overnight success and don’t trick yourself into thinking it is. And I think, you know, in startup world in particular, mental health issues are a real problem. And that’s because we always look at all the people that are doing well and never really look at the people that maybe aren’t doing so well. And you know, there’s a lot of businesses that will never succeed and a lot of entrepreneurs that will never quite get to that glamorous exit that everybody like, thinks about. But there’s so much that can be learned along the way, you know, And I just think, look after yourself, realize that it’s not all roses on the other side, you know, And I just cannot get over how much of a lesson that I went through, a journey that I went to, to now beat in the position that I’m in. I’m very thankful for the position that I’m in. But you know, that journey was hard work, real hard work, and it was combined with a lot of luck.

Mike Casey:
And that’s the other thing I want to stress, you know, those, those people out there that would say, oh, I worked hard to be where I am, don’t understand the realities of the situation. Yes, you worked hard, but you also had a lot of luck.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And there’s a reality that it’s also not for everyone. So there is that weighing up that everyone needs to do. If you, if you’re going to make that commitment and quit the, quit the job of kind of, you know, listen through the podcast, look at the hardest stuff people have to deal with because you’ve got to commit to that. Because as you say, this is something that takes a. Oh, and I could

Mike Casey:
not have done this without the discipline of my wife and she is not an entrepreneur at all. You know, like, and I think that’s super important to acknowledge and understand as well that our relationship works in our business and our success has worked because our skills complement each other and our thinking complements each other. We would be bankrupt 30 times over if I was the one in charge of the money. But you know, at the same time, she freely admits that we’d probably be living in a three bedroom house in suburban Wellington if I wasn’t in charge of the, the risk taking. So, you know, it goes both ways. And yeah, there are plenty of people out there that might be interested in entrepreneurship and tech that might not want to be in a position to start a technology startup. Katie Pie, that is absolutely fine. Like it’s your journey and you’re on it and you’re the one at the wheel and you get to steer it in the direction you want it to go.

Paul Spain:
Right? Yeah, yep. And, and for those who are, who are interested in, you know, using solar or, or other New Zealand generated energy, what is your, your general recommendation to, to, you know, business owners?

Mike Casey:
Yeah, for business owners it’s like there’s machines that you’re going to have control over, there’s machines that you’re not going to have control over, especially if you’re renting the property. But just doing the sums is super important. You’ll be shocked, I think, at how much money you are leaving on the table by not electrifying and not running off New Zealand made energy and not putting solar on the roof. And especially if you’re a CFO or an accountant and you’re listening to this, make sure you do the numbers. Because I think it’s a discipline that is. Energy economics is a discipline that’s missing from finance in a big way at the moment that we need to really get on top of. Because when you do it you’re like, wow, even the amateurised cost, this is just an absolute no brainer. And so, yeah, that’s where I would land.

Mike Casey:
You know, negotiating with the landlord. Putting solar on the roof is an expense that they will have to pay, but you can contribute towards that and still save the money by not buying it from an electricity landlord. Right.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, we’ve all got to pay for power.

Mike Casey:
We’ve all got to pay for power

Paul Spain:
in one way or another.

Mike Casey:
And I think that’s the other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, people are like, oh, the capital expense is too high, I’m not going to do it at the moment. They neglect to Think about if you don’t do it, the opportunity cost is continuing to pay their electricity or their energy landlord for as long as you’re not doing it.

Paul Spain:
It. Yeah.

Mike Casey:
And that is a substantial amount of money. When you add it up, you’re going to run that business for the next 10 years. It’s almost certain you’re better off in electric machines. You don’t have to do it all at once. The next time a machine breaks, make sure you replace it with the electric option. If you’re a restaurant owner, when the gas cooktop gives way, put an electric induction cooktop in the stead. Yes. There’s a bit of change involved with doing that, but you’re not going to be gassing your staff for a start.

Mike Casey:
That’s a really good thing. It’s going to be a lot cooler and more comfortable to cook in the kitchen, and it’s going to save you a lot of money. You know, like, that’s powerful.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Excellent. Well, Mike, Casey, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a real privilege to come out here to electric chairs and thank

Mike Casey:
you for coming down. As you know, I love to talk and I love to talk about myself, and you’ve given me a great opportunity to do that. So thank you for those that are, you know, still listening. Thanks, Abs.

Paul Spain:
Okay, Cheers, Mike.

Mike Casey:
Talk soon.

Paul Spain:
Ciao.