FEATURE Moshie

Supporting more profitable and sustainable

At Moshie, we work closely with businesses across Australia’s horticulture industry to improve business performance, control costs, increase productivity, and strengthen long-term sustainability. Our goal is simple — to help business owners achieve both their business and personal goals.

Words Bruce Yelland, Founder, Moshie

AS an ex-farmer myself, I understand that every business has its own unique challenges, pressures and pain points. My role is not to tell you what you should be doing. It’s to listen, observe, and take the time to genuinely understand the current context of your business.

But before I explain how we work, I’d like to share a very personal story.

Why Moshie was created

Moshie was born from one of the toughest experiences of my life.

In the late 1990s, after expanding our farming operations, making more than a few poor business decisions, and then experiencing three consecutive years of severe drought, my family was sold up by one of the “Big Four” banks.

We lost many millions of dollars. We lost everything our family had built over five generations. We almost lost control of Australia’s oldest Hereford stud, Glentrevor Herefords, established in 1882.

Watching our parents walk off our farms in their mid-60s — bankrupt and defeated — is something that will stay with me forever. I was facing the same reality myself, only 40 years younger.

For many years, I carried a deep sense of shame and embarrassment about what happened to our family and our farms. Eventually, however, I realised the experience was also an incredible gift — albeit an extraordinarily expensive one. It forced me to rebuild my confidence, rethink my direction, and develop a much deeper understanding of business, people, and resilience.

Ten years later, after rediscovering my place in the world, I established Moshie with the intention of developing a holistic approach to business improvement — one focused on helping business owners avoid the devastating losses my family experienced.

Fifteen years on, I’m proud to say we’ve now worked with more than 500 businesses across Australia and New Zealand. Together, we’ve identified and implemented simple but highly effective business improvements that generate millions of dollars in additional value each year, while also improving life-work balance for business owners, their families, and their teams.

Our approach

We know primary production can be an incredibly tough and lonely industry at times, and asking for support is never easy.

We also don’t profess to be experts who have all the answers.

Our simple, but effective approach is practical and collaborative. We work alongside business owners and their teams to understand current challenges, identify pain points, and uncover opportunities for improvement across all areas of the operation.

The key is getting the basics in place and ensuring they work consistently and efficiently.

We don’t judge. We listen, observe, and focus on what will create meaningful impact.

Example 1: Improving packing shed productivity

Last year, I was asked to undertake a business diagnostic for a vegetable grower whose profits were declining at a concerning rate.

While revenue remained relatively stable, operating costs continued to rise, reducing margins and placing increasing pressure on the business financially.

I spent two days on-site speaking with the owner and key team members before working through the packing shed process step-by-step to better understand how the operation functioned day to day. What I found was a hardworking team — but one that was being limited by inefficient processes.

At the bagging end of the packing line, by repositioning a couple of staff members, and improving workflow, we were able to increase 200 gram bagging rates from approximately 10 bags per minute to 25 bags per minute through a series of simple process adjustments.

This reduced labour costs per bag from 35 cents down to 14 cents — a saving of 21 cents per bag.

We then improved 500 gram bagging rates from 5 bags per minute to 15 bags per minute, reducing labour costs from 70 cents per bag to 23 cents per bag — a saving of 47 cents per bag, or 96 cents per kilogram of product sold. When these improvements were extrapolated across annual production volumes, the estimated labour saving exceeded $80,000 per year.

The total cost of these improvements was approximately $5,000.

One of the biggest misconceptions in business improvement is that major gains require major investment. In reality, many of the most valuable improvements are low-cost adjustments to systems, processes, communication, and team productivity.

The key is getting the basics in place and ensuring they work consistently and efficiently.

Example 2: Increasing Nursery Propagation Output

More recently, I was approached by a nursery owner wanting to improve the efficiency of their propagation team.

After reviewing the business and understanding the existing workflow, I asked the team leader to begin tracking the daily output rates of all team members.

The data revealed significant variation in productivity across the team.

Experienced team members were consistently achieving rates of more than 3,000 per day, while newer staff were averaging rates closer to 750 per day. Across the team, the average output sat at approximately 1,700 units per person per day.

After discussing the findings with the owner and second-in-charge, we agreed the opportunity wasn’t to push harder — it was to improve training, coaching, and capability development so newer team members could consistently achieve a minimum of 2,000 units per day.

This would lift the overall team average to approximately 2,500 units per person per day.

When projected across a full year, we calculated the business could produce an additional $900,000 worth of saleable product without increasing labour costs.

The total investment required to implement the improvement program — including training, development, and my involvement — was estimated at approximately $15,000 over three months.

Final thoughts

The majority of Business improvement doesn’t require major capital investment or dramatic change.

The greatest opportunities come from taking the time to properly understand your operation, identifying inefficiencies, improving communication, and enabling teams to perform productively.

At Moshie, that’s exactly what we help businesses do. We guarantee it!

We guarantee a minimum 5:1 return on investment ratio. Meaning for every $1 invested in Moshie support, we guarantee $5 back in total value and identified improvements.