Successful Until It Wasn't, with Peter Hutton

Episode QB·07 · 11 Aug 2026 · 62 min

A special edition of Before the Weekend, recorded in Brisbane. Peter Schravemade sits down with Peter Hutton, who built Hutton & Hutton from his dining table into a three-office, thirty-person Brisbane agency turning over $200 million a year - and then watched around 70 per cent of its revenue walk out the door in eight weeks. The first resignation arrived in the first week of December, a month after the opening party for a new heritage-listed head office. A second office followed six weeks later. Recruiters stopped returning calls. By his own account he spent that year asleep under his desk most afternoons, and signed the liquidation paperwork on the sixth of January with something close to relief. Hutton has since taken the business apart structurally and found six things that went wrong. They became his book, Keep 100% Of What You Earn, and he is unusually direct about all of them: the termination clause he wrote himself, the red flags he chose not to act on, the lease he should not have signed, the third office he opened too early, and the ceiling he hit as a manager of people. The conversation also covers what the industry does to its own - the rumour that circulated in New Farm, the creditor who built a website asking if anyone knew where Peter Hutton was hiding, and the envelope of white powder that put his family on a footpath for six hours while a hazmat team worked. His argument, borrowed from a wartime statistician, is that the industry studies the wrong businesses. The aircraft that came home taught the analysts nothing. It was the ones that didn't that showed them where to put the armour.

Full transcript

Peter Schravemade (00:05)

G'day folks. My name is Peter Schravemade. This is another episode of Before the Weekend, our podcast, which talks about a lot of things to do with real estate matters.

Today I am joined by yet another Peter. We've had a bit of a laugh about that. There seems to be an excess of Peters in the industry, but as I'd say about Peter Hutton, I think we're better for it. Welcome to the Before the Weekend podcast.

Peter Hutton (00:29)

Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to seeing what we talk about.

Peter Schravemade (00:35)

For those of you listening, Peter's come in blind. We've had no more than a thirty-second to one-minute discussion about this. So if this goes awry, you can blame Peter One - or am I Peter Two? I don't know. We'll fight about that later.

I became aware of you through a mutual friend, and I've been following your LinkedIn profile. There are certain things I've come to understand, not from knowing you, but from doing a brief profile check. Obviously you were part of Hutton & Hutton, which was in my opinion at the time a successful real estate agency. Is that the way you'd phrase it?

Peter Hutton (01:16)

Mine too. It was very successful until it wasn't. That line is my line these days. It was successful until it wasn't.

It grew from just Karen and me sitting at the dining table at home - my wife Karen. I'd had some time between another agency where we'd sold the rent roll and closed down, and we'd moved to Byron Bay. We were talking earlier about success and failure: the first trip to Byron was a bit of a failure. We lasted a year and came back to Brisbane.

Long story short, I ended up working for Peter Hanscomb, the CEO of Belle Property - and that's another Peter. In the early days of Belle, when they had about forty offices, my task was to help grow Queensland, but also to coach the team and help Peter with the IP of Belle Property, which I did.

Slowly but surely I got the hankering to get back into real estate. One day over a coffee, Karen and I decided, let's open an agency. We thought, well, let's call ourselves Hutton & Hutton, given that we're both Huttons - married. So that's how we started, and we grew it from that start over a ten-year period to three offices.

As I said, from our account it was successful and profitable and growing. We had plans to open two more offices over twelve months, and I'd started talking to people about that. And then, very quickly, it all unravelled.

Peter Schravemade (03:14)

Before we get into that, one question I have for you as somebody who has worked with his wife on and off for the past twenty years - longer, actually; she'll correct me on that and I'll get into trouble for it later. How is it working with your wife?

Peter Hutton (03:30)

It's tremendous. You have your moments. On our morning walks back in the day we'd be talking about business, and we'd get to a point where one of us would turn to the other and say, let's stop talking about work. We've got all day to talk about work - let's just enjoy the morning. So you've got to learn to switch off.

We really started working together around 2001. So a long time. And now Karen still does copywriting for real estate agents. She's been doing that for a long time, and she writes for some really top agents.

Even with AI now, a lot of people say, you've just got AI. But it's chalk and cheese when you see a human write proper copy and AI write copy. It's like grey copy versus colourful copy, if you know what I mean.

Peter Schravemade (04:33)

There are a lot of questions I have for you, but at the crux of it: how long ago was it that Hutton & Hutton fell over?

Peter Hutton (04:42)

The further I get from that point, the more I have to try to remember the dates.

In the middle of 2022 I signed a lease on a 300-square-metre heritage-listed building on Brookes Street, around the corner from Place on James Street in Fortitude Valley. The great thing about that, in my mind, was that if you were travelling from the western suburbs to Fortitude Valley you had to go down Brookes Street, so you'd see our beautiful two-storey Federation brick building on its lawn, with our signage out the front, which I'd spent a lot of money on.

We fitted it out and moved in around July, August, September, and we had our opening party in November. All three offices attended with all the staff - about thirty Hutton & Hutton team members who worked in the business locally, and we had some remote as well. It was a big party, maybe a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy people.

And then in the first week of December the first resignation notice came through, from the principal of one of our offices.

Unfortunately, the contract I'd drawn up - thinking I knew a thing or two about contracts and law - I'd used a lawyer to check it over and help me with it, but he didn't have a lot of knowledge around that kind of commercial law. He was a friend. And it had a thirty-day no-dispute termination clause: one party could terminate for whatever reason. That's what he chose to do. There wasn't a dispute. We were actually getting on like a house on fire and things were going very, very well.

So he resigned, didn't say why, just said there was another opportunity he wanted to pursue, and later explained why. And then, within six weeks of that, the second office resigned. So we lost about seventy per cent of our revenue over an eight-week period.

Which was a massive hit. Think about your corner fruit and veg shop. If they lost seventy per cent of their clients over a six-week period, they'd just close the door straight away. There's no way you can keep going when you lose that much revenue.

We kept going, but then our team at the Brookes Street office all freaked out. Every headhunter in Brisbane was calling them. My daughter Paris, who worked with us, got called. She got an offer fifty thousand dollars more than I was paying her. I told her she should take it - there's no future here now. And she wouldn't take it, out of love for her mother and father, and loyalty.

We battled on for a year. In that period we said, if we can bring in at least a small nucleus of a team, and I got back on the tools, we'll make a fist of it, we'll get going, we'll rebuild. We just couldn't recruit. Nobody would touch us with a barge pole, because the word had got out. The recruiters wouldn't help. They saw us as dead men walking, and I could see that too.

I'll tell you a thing or two about depression at that point, if you're interested.

Peter Schravemade (08:53)

Well, let's get to that. I do have questions around it.

Do you think - everyone looks back on periods where the world considers you a failure, or on things you've done wrong. Are there things you'd have done differently? Is it about the contract, that you wouldn't have had a thirty-day release in there? Are there other things you could have done that in retrospect you'd do differently now?

Peter Hutton (09:22)

Totally. In fact, I wrote a book this year, which I published, called Keep 100% Of What You Earn. I wrote the book first, and then I thought, this isn't honest. If anybody reads this book they're going to say, why should I even believe Peter Hutton? Because his business had failed.

And it's true. So I went back and spent months and months peeling the whole business back again in my head. I'd done that for two years anyway, but this time I really went: okay, from a structural point of view, what went wrong? Where did I go wrong as a principal, as a founder, as CEO of the business?

I actually found six things.

One of them was the contract. That was one.

Red flags. There were red flags I ignored, with people, that I could have acted on sooner - legally sooner, and just from a leadership point of view sooner. There were definitely red flags.

I made a big mistake in thinking optimism outweighs risk mitigation. I'm an optimistic person. I'm a very creative person - behind me is art that I've painted. I've been an artist for thirty years, won a big award, and sold about eighty paintings last year. I'm a creator. I just keep creating. So I'm very optimistic in my ability to learn and create something and keep rolling forward.

But that's all very well. That takes you so far, as I learned. Like anybody, you can do a job and you can do it well, and it doesn't matter how highly skilled you are - there is a ceiling to your experience, your knowledge, your skill set, your ability. There's a ceiling for everybody. Some people haven't found it yet. Maybe Elon Musk hasn't found his. But for most human beings there is a ceiling, and I found mine.

Once the business got to three offices, I was perpetually stressed with people. Everybody just stressed me out. There's a thinking process we all do, and I have my own particular style of thinking that works for me, and I can think through a problem - but I can't think through other people's problems. There comes a point where I can't hold their hands through that problem. They're on their own. I think that's partly where the wheels started falling off, too.

But there were things like that optimism meaning I opted into a big lease when I shouldn't have. I should have paused at the other office a bit longer. One of the things I learned was to really build up my own base first, before the other two offices. I spent a lot of time helping the other two build up their businesses. And the third office I should probably have delayed a little.

In fact, it's hilarious - I just laugh at myself, because there was a meeting I had before I opened that third office where I said to that person that ordinarily I shouldn't be doing this, because we haven't known each other long enough. I had this rule: walk first with somebody before you run, and you get to know what they're like at walking, as a metaphor. And I hadn't done that with this person long enough.

Not that they were bad or anything. They were excellent, like all my people. They were pretty much excellent agents. That was the other issue. When you're small and you build up a brand that gets profile quickly, and can compete relatively well with Place and Ray White - I often was up against Matt Lancashire or Sarah Hackett or somebody - that's a pretty good thing. But you also end up in the spotlight. People know you're around. Recruiters know you're around. And the growth people in these larger businesses, where they have a role as the person to grow those businesses, target good people. Our people were targeted, and one of our people in particular was targeted.

He didn't go easily, but they just kept going back and back and back. From my understanding, they got to a point where it was: here's some more, here's some more, here's another reason, here's another reason. And sooner or later that reason came around.

But I think one of the big lessons for me personally is that you're only defeated when you say you're defeated. And I listened to everybody else about how we were defeated. Everybody was saying we were defeated, in the start of 2023. And I bought into that. That's where the stress and the depression really kicked in, because I felt it.

By one o'clock in the afternoon I could not keep my eyes open. I was mentally exhausted. So I'd lock the door of my office - I had a private office, and I had a two-hundred-year-old French desk, made in Paris, that I'd collected. A beautiful desk. People used to laugh and say it was Napoleon's desk. I told my kids it was Napoleon's desk and they believed me. But I used to sleep underneath that desk, in that year, at one o'clock in the afternoon, for at least an hour, sometimes two hours, from mental exhaustion.

And that's because I thought I was defeated.

Twelve months later - within that year I'd drawn a line in the sand. We said if we get to the sixth of January and these things haven't happened, I'd call the liquidators and tell them to send over the paperwork. Which they did, that day, and I signed it. And the relief was incredibly huge. I can't tell you how much lifted off me in that moment. For a moment.

Peter Schravemade (16:34)

How important would you place - one of my observations in and around the industry, and it could be property technology, where I delve quite a lot, but I've seen this happen and it's not local to Australia, it's in America as well, it's in almost every property circle - how important is it for the largest stakeholder, whether that's the CEO, the principal, whoever it may be of a real estate office, to surround themselves with people who can take the slack off that principal or CEO at various times?

I understand the buck stops with the CEO. But you raised Elon Musk before. Elon Musk can surround himself with some of the smartest people in the world, and I believe he does. He'd be an excellent example of somebody who has carved out: this is my expertise, and this is where I'm going at it.

One of the things I've noticed when things fall over is that generally we've been taken away from the area of operation we do best in, and forced into being something that sits outside what's comfortable, at least. Is that a real thing? Would you say that happened in this instance?

Peter Hutton (17:57)

It's a great question. It did happen at Hutton & Hutton. To me. As I was saying earlier about hitting that ceiling.

I'm really good at creating the vision, and I'm really good at seeing patterns and seeing opportunity. I'm also very good at taking action and putting structure in place - particularly good at that, I think. It's why people have said to me over the years, people outside Hutton & Hutton in different businesses, they've looked at my business and gone: wow, you had so many assets in that business, so much structure and procedure manuals and things that actually work.

But what I wasn't good at was managing people. It's not my thing. I get frustrated with people. I have high expectations. Super high expectations, only because when you decide you're going to do something, I don't want to do it half-arsed. I want to do it really, really well, and I hold myself accountable to that. If we've got a procedure in place, I follow those procedures. I'm very OCD about it. I can learn out of a procedure and learn a better one - I don't get stuck, I'm not fixated, because I'm creative. That's the other benefit of that. But I'm very good at following a procedure.

It's why I've been - I hate saying it, it sounds like a brag - an extremely good salesperson my whole life. Well before I was in real estate, I was selling wool all around the world. I went from sweeping floors in the wool industry at an early age to running a hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar business by the time I was about twenty-eight, travelling the world business class to New York, London, Tokyo, Paris. Clients in Russia, Germany, selling wool mostly over the phone to these people, many containers of wool.

In the best year, when I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, I worked for Dalgety International Trading and I made them a million dollars net profit - just my trades alone. That's equivalent to many hundreds of millions of dollars of turnover today. I'm talking about 1993. A million bucks was a lot of money, for one individual. And I did it with relatively no risk.

I can sell. I was very good at recruiting because I can sell. I can sell a vision, I can explain a problem and articulate how to move through that problem. And outside of that, we were talking about our creative streaks - probably my greatest strength is that I'm a wordsmith. I'm very good at writing. I'm good at talking, explaining things. I'd be happy just to do that.

But when it comes to people, not great. Maybe I don't know, maybe I'm a bit on the spectrum or something.

Peter Schravemade (21:23)

Well, who knows? In all the people I've met, Pete, we're not all good at everything. And I think part of failing at something is actually learning the lesson from it and going, if that was ever to happen again, this is what I'd do. So we'll come to your takeaways.

What I want to ask - I don't particularly want to dwell at great length on the mental health issue. I actually think we're in a society today where it's not a bad word. I grew up in a family where to have a mental health episode could actually have been attributed to some kind of "you're not strong enough in Jesus". Which is almost next level: it's not just that you don't want to say it, but that you're not holy enough if it happens. That was really the environment I got into.

But life wasn't like that. I see people all the time who are struggling. One of the issues I have, and I've spoken to other people about this - I don't know you very well, but I'm going to guess you went through the wringer on this one - the issue I have is: what's the best approach for people around you when they see you drowning?

Peter Hutton (22:52)

Man. They've got to reach out to you.

Peter Schravemade (22:55)

Is it just a case of reaching out, though? Is it phone calls, forcing themselves into your life? What would have changed the outcome for you?

Peter Hutton (23:07)

I have a very good friend. My wife and I have a very good friend, Shelly. She was on the Olympic committee, she worked with one of the world's biggest business management consultancy groups - a very, very intelligent woman. But she went through something incredibly, shockingly hard herself during those business years.

And she had the wherewithal. On my worst day, Karen called Shelly, and Shelly really helped me. I owe her a debt of gratitude.

What I did learn, and what is a bit disappointing, is that your closest friends don't know what to do. And it's not because they're not good people. They just don't know what to do.

Their first instinct, I think, is to say nothing, because they don't want to highlight the fact that you're going through something. They don't actually know how bad it is. That's the truth of it. So a lot of my closest friends have said zero, and act like everything's normal.

Once you build something you're really proud of and you love, and you put a lot of energy into it and a lot of money into it - all your money, like we did. In the early days we spent a lot of money. My commissions were up around the one-million mark, and I was taking a very small amount for myself; the rest stayed in the business, just to keep growing it, injecting training and technology and all of that and building.

When you go through that kind of loss, you lose who you are. You forget who you are. There's so much cortisol in your body that you just don't think straight. And you do need somebody outside of it to help you start thinking straight. I did have that, fortunately.

My wife was as much affected as I was. She was affected differently. And we're now at about six hundred and twenty-four days since that event. It has definitely got way better. And why it's got better is because it's definition. It's how you define something. It's the meaning you place on it, the meaning you place on yourself. I just changed the meaning and the definition. It's a bit of a trick of the mind. But also I found a different purpose. I found something else to go on to.

So now I just go: well, that was a creation that fell apart. You're a muso - you can write a piece of music and it can fall apart and be no good. You can spend a week, a month on it thinking it's going to be something, and it's not. I'm the same. I paint. I could be painting, and it's getting really good, and next minute it's getting really bad, and next minute it's completely beyond saving.

As a creative you learn to let go, and to take what you can from that experience into the next thing. But when you build a big business, it's hard to just go, okay, I'm letting go of that and going on to the next thing. It doesn't really work as neatly as that. But it can.

Peter Schravemade (26:55)

There are a few questions out of that. One of the things I've come to accept about being a musician, particularly in the performance aspect - and I actually think this is different for visual art, you might be able to tell me - is that there is an acceptance that you are going to make a mistake in a performance.

Peter Hutton (27:15)

A mistake in a performance. You're right.

Peter Schravemade (27:17)

Pretty much even the best musos do it. And it's not the mistake that counts, it's how you recover from it.

A lot of the people who went through university with me as musicians, the perfectionist side of that really struggled, because a mistake in a performance could be catastrophic. But those who were watching were never necessarily judging you on that. They'd notice it - a lot of these people were way better at that given instrument than I was, they would notice it - but that's not what they were looking for.

It makes me wonder how much of the pressure you felt is the expectation you think others place on you, as opposed to your own expectation. Or is it a combination of both?

Peter Hutton (28:05)

Primarily it was my own view of myself. I'm sixty-three now. It's obviously easier to recover when you're younger, because you've got time on your hands. But you get to sixty-three - and for me it was just after sixty - and it's like, wow, I'm really screwed.

Peter Schravemade (28:32)

You have to go and rebuild all of that, in all that time.

Peter Hutton (28:34)

How do I - that took me ten years. How do I rebuild all of that in ten years with no money down? And then I'll be seventy. The truth is your energy levels change as you get older, you operate differently. But at the end of the day I've gone, well, I've got a life to live. I can't be worried about how long things are going to take me. You just keep going.

I will say this about that idea of perfection and how it really does people over. People have said to me that I'm a perfectionist, and I accept where they're coming from, but I'm not a perfectionist. I have a different view on perfection. Perfection is where you have a vision in your mind of what is perfect and you can't get there, and it stops you, because you go: there's no point, because if that's perfect and I'm here, I can't get to there.

I'm more into executing at a high level as best I can. That's all I'm interested in. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it really well. If there's no possibility of being able to do it well, I either go and learn how to do it, or choose something I feel I can do.

I'm writing another book at the moment, Peter, and I won't get into what it is, but it's a fictional book. I've never written a fictional book. It's a completely different beast. I've written lots and lots of non-fiction about real estate and on sales. So I've had many a time doing this, going, I can't do this, this is beyond my experience.

But what I keep coming back to is: stop looking at the mountain complete. Stop worrying about that. I'm just looking at one sentence at a time. I just need to get one sentence right. Get that down, and then move to the next sentence. And then the next sentence.

Slowly but surely - I only started writing this book a week ago and I've put down about six thousand words already, and the first five thousand have already had one edit, so I've tidied it up to a point where a professional editor will be able to move it forward a lot quicker. And I'm like, okay, maybe I can do this. I'm just digging forward.

I think that's the key in real estate as well. In Brisbane you look at the Matt Lancashires and you go, man, I'm never going to be like that guy, that guy is amazing. Or all the others that are fantastic out there - I say Matt because he was local to me, but there are so many great real estate agents around. You can easily compare yourself. Or if you're a small business owner, compare yourself to a Place or a Ray White and go, I'll never get there.

But that's not the point. The point is to go: what am I capable of? What can I test, and how can I execute as best I can and deliver something that people want? And don't make it about yourself so much.

Peter Schravemade (32:02)

One of the reasons I reached out to you was a result of your LinkedIn post.

The first time I became aware of, let's say, the plight of real estate businesses was in America. After my career at BoxBrownie I got an offer to go and work for a company in the US. It was actually quite a lot of money, and it was very tempting to go and do it.

One of the things their business was founded on was the statistic over in the US that seventy-six per cent of new real estate businesses would fail. That was a pretty defined stat - they had great stats on that over there. Seventy-six per cent of new real estate businesses would fail. So what are we talking? A twenty-four per cent success rate, which is super low. And not a lot of us realise that.

I don't know if that stat translates directly here to Australia, because the way the real estate market works in the US is very different. But one of the things that company realised is that quite a lot of real estate agents were excellent at selling, but when it came to running the business and everything that goes with that, they were not necessarily wonderful.

So this company would run the business for them while they continued on in their pattern of selling. Yes, they'd have final say. It would almost be like: this is your GM running your business, and you are the CEO, and you have everything there, and you just pay a fee for this general manager to be in there. It was an excellent business model, and the stats this particular company had were excellent. They had a very, very low fall-over rate among people who actively engaged them.

So, long way around: when I saw your LinkedIn post, which spoke about the fact that in Australia - and I think it is a fact - we don't talk about the businesses who didn't make it. We don't actually learn from that. And you'll notice I don't use the word failure. A lot of us do. We talk about failure. But the businesses who didn't make it.

Off air I spoke to you about the fact that my entire life has been built on mistakes and what I've learned from them. My venture into the property technology industry, my time in the hotel franchises, my time in real estate was built from that. Mate, I've even worked for four people who've been bankrupt before, and helped forge them successful careers further down the track. So I tend to be the antithesis of that. I have a very strong belief that if we learn from those mistakes, we move forward.

What are you doing now, and how are you positioning yourself to help the industry moving forward from that? What would you say to people who are in similar scenarios?

Peter Hutton (35:12)

Well, if they've gone bankrupt - are you talking about if they've gone bankrupt, or -

Peter Schravemade (35:18)

They could be in the throes of it. Let's deal with the ones we can save first, Pete.

Peter Hutton (35:22)

Yeah. Well, firstly, you said we should learn from these collapses, from when things don't work, and I totally agree with that.

In World War Two, when the planes used to fly home across the Channel to England, the ones that made it home - they'd start riveting up the holes and putting extra metal onto the planes to stop shrapnel and stuff going through them. And it wasn't really working. They were still losing the same number of planes.

Somebody consulted a mathematician, and he said, well, you're looking at it all the wrong way. He said: the planes that come home tell you nothing. It's the planes that don't come home -

Peter Schravemade (36:13)

Didn't come home. Yeah.

Peter Hutton (36:14)

- teach you everything.

And so they changed their thinking. They went: well, why aren't they coming home? Where is the shrapnel landing? And they worked that out. Then, on the planes they were manufacturing and repairing, they used that prediction model and put extra plates of armour there. And that reduced the number of planes they lost.

They didn't study the successful ones at all. They studied the failures. That was the guide.

I would say this to anybody running a small business now, a real estate agency: yes, keep learning from the successful ones. Go to AREC, because that's all going to be about the success. But you will learn a lot more talking to somebody who's actually crashed and burned. You will learn a lot more - especially if they're open about it and they've got clarity about it.

And that's not always the case, either. If somebody had asked me two years ago about that, I probably wouldn't have had the clarity. But I do now. I think that's the trick: to seek out not just the successful models to learn from and emulate - not copy, emulate - but also the ones that didn't succeed. And why didn't they succeed?

Especially the ones that had a larger mission. If somebody just set out to be a two-person business and it didn't succeed, and they never wanted to go past that, that might not be a great one to learn from. But if somebody set out like me, to set up three or four offices, and got so far but didn't go beyond that - what happened, what I came up against, that wall I came up against, is very eye-opening.

And you ask what I'm doing now. Well, I've written a book about how to open up a small independent agency yourself, and the technology to use. I list about ninety pieces of technology, from which you can select about nine and you'll run your agency, no problem. But what I do put in there is a lot about what happened to me, and the decisions I made that eventually caused the catastrophe with H&H.

You can do that. You can find people like me who've gone through this and speak to them, and I'm sure they'll be more than happy to share their experiences.

The other thing is, for me now, I'm still finding my way. I haven't absolutely settled. Karen and I are doing some branding for agencies. We just built an agency for somebody from the ground up, because they knew what happened to me and to our business and they still wanted that knowledge of how we got started. We've done that. But I'm not sure if that's something I'll do forever. Who knows?

Peter Schravemade (39:28)

At the end of this I'll get the details of where people can reach out to you and where they can buy the book, because that would be very important for somebody going through this at that particular time.

One of the things I'm aware of when I speak to people who've been through scenarios where an administrator's been involved is that there tends to be a large feeling of guilt. The guilt is generally around the staff who are left in the lurch, or something to do with the fact that there are people you've let down.

Are there people today who would still say, I've been totally let down by Peter?

Peter Hutton (40:13)

I'm sure there are. It was a little bit different with us, because an opportunity was given to somebody, and they rallied the troops - or the troops followed them, however that happened, I'll never know. What ended up happening was two offices went to that new brand. The whole offices went over. So I didn't have that issue with them, because they all walked over there when they were ready to. They resigned at a time that suited them.

The people who were left in my office - we had many meetings around that time with our team to try to shore up their morale, but it wasn't enough, and so one by one they resigned. They all had their super and everything like that. Nobody missed out in that sense. They'd all been paid.

That just left four of us. My wife Karen. Our youngest daughter Paris, who was our operations manager across our three offices, because we ran a centralised operating system, much like White Fox does today. We were doing that well - now fourteen years ago, we started that. It was something I came up with in my head: that this would be a smart way to do it, have a centralised operating system, why duplicate these resources, just centralise it. It worked particularly well. So Paris ran that.

And then we had one agent, Allie. Such a loyal lady and such a great agent. She stuck with us right up to the end. She did ask me, if something was going to happen, if I knew something was going to happen, to tell her. I could only tell her the day it happened.

And rightfully so, she was upset that I didn't give her notice. I just couldn't give notice, because I hadn't made up my own mind. I was just trying to battle on until I couldn't battle on any further. And that actually happened in a period of a few hours. It wasn't like, in two weeks' time I'm pulling the pin. If I was going to do that, I'd have pulled the pin straight away.

I was living in hope after Christmas that these two people I'd recruited would start. But they didn't. They didn't show. At that point they'd already delayed their start six times over three months. We said, if these two people don't start on the sixth of January - we were, I think effectively at the end of December, technically insolvent. At the end of December I said, we just legally can't keep going. Our accountant told us that. Our lawyers told us that. And at that point I mentally couldn't keep it going either.

So no, everybody was fine. But everybody's going to have their own version. All I know is that before the resignations started there were no complaints. There was nobody coming to me saying we should be doing something differently. If anybody did have an idea, we took it on board pretty quickly. We had a leadership team of the three offices, and Karen, and Paris - the five of us - and we were very quick to respond to any concerns. But those concerns never really happened until it was too late.

Peter Schravemade (43:45)

Do you think there is - well, number one, I'm pretty sure there is a stigma around failure when it comes to real estate offices.

Peter Hutton (43:57)

There totally is. Yeah.

Peter Schravemade (43:59)

So there definitely is. I accept that, and I think all our listeners will agree. There's a stigma around failure.

I feel as though one of the things about real estate agents is that we're very public beasts, however you want to phrase it. We have to be seen publicly. Our pictures are everywhere. People we've never met know who you are, because you've had a for-sale sign with your photo on it. You're likely to be recognised at the supermarket.

There is this thing around real estate agents where their lives are more public than other people's. I'd even go, to an extent, more than some of your radio DJs or show hosts, because they are voices - it's not a visual thing.

Once there is bad news around a particular person, how much does the blood in the water stop any kind of ability to come back? You spoke several times about how, once the principal had gone, it might have been hard to recruit. How much of that do you think plays a part in real estate businesses' lack of success, or an inability to climb back?

Peter Hutton (45:16)

I think it's a pretty big part, because there's going to be a question mark over you. If I opened up an office again - and it's not the reason why I'm not opening one again, but if I did - I'm sure there'd be that challenge of, this happened to you. Especially right now, because it's not that long ago. I'm sure people would be concerned about that to some degree, and it would prevent the better players from joining you. And really that's what it's all about: when you're recruiting, you want to recruit really good agents. So I'm sure that would go against you.

I had a double whammy in that one creditor - I won't mention their name - when I liquidated, he was affected. His business was affected. It was a smaller business, but he was affected.

And he put up a website about me.

It said across the top: Hutton & Hutton in liquidation. And then it said: Do you know where Peter Hutton is? He's on the run and he's in hiding.

Now, the truth is: when we went into liquidation, within a couple of weeks we quickly chose to put a tenant into our home, because we thought that was a smart way to at least bring some cash flow in and keep paying the mortgage. We moved to Karen's mum's place and slept in their spare bedroom for four weeks.

In that time frame - it was pretty awful, obviously - I'd been speaking to a doctor, and there was a recommendation to go and have a break. Go somewhere, have a break. Karen had a little bit of money in her account, and we went, bugger it, let's go to India. We'd been to India a few times before. So we hopped on a plane.

I spoke to my lawyer. I spoke to the liquidator. I told them where I was going. I gave them my contact details. Everybody knew how to find me.

But this guy decided he would make an example of me. And it really did affect me - mentally it affected me, but also, I tried to get a job and people had seen it. I was unemployable for a year.

What happened then was we returned home to Australia, we moved to Byron Bay, we updated our address, he had the address, and he served me. That's all he wanted to do was serve me. Then he served me. Then he left the website up for another twelve months.

So you see, when you go through this stuff, you don't know what's going to happen. I never anticipated anybody would do that, because I'd never had a bad relationship with anybody before, and always paid my bills on time - even that creditor, always paid on time. Always.

And in the end he not only got his money back, he got all the interest and all his legal bills paid. And his legal bills were nearly as much as the debt itself. I had no control over that. I paid him out of the sale of my property. He was one of the creditors who got paid first. And then the website came down.

He was just after his money, and he got his money, and I'm glad he did. I had a conversation with him. I said, look, I hope you get your money, it's out of my control, I have no control over it, whatever's mine is yours. And I said: please take the site down, because it's stopping me from getting a job.

Peter Schravemade (49:21)

One of the things that always comes up on this particular podcast is the way other agents respond to other agents' indiscretions.

I'll give you an example. We had a very prominent New South Wales agent - and I won't mention them, I just don't want to give it wind - because I feel like as an industry we're worse off every single time we smash someone into the ground.

But it seems to me to be a leveraging tool for other agents. If you're in the same suburb as somebody else and there's a sign of blood in the water, the other person's wounded, they've done something they shouldn't have done. I followed one a while back where some guy made a comment about gym gear made in China, referring to the quality control mechanism. And one of his competitors stirred up so much Asian racial hatred over his comments that he basically got terminated, I'm not really sure, but he eventually had to leave that area and go and practise in another.

One of the things I wonder is whether we as an industry not only don't help ourselves - because it's our reputation, we wonder why we're in a deficit of trust - but also contribute in a big way to the way the public sees us, because it's almost like we celebrate the failures of others.

How much of your experience is centred around that?

Peter Hutton (50:55)

That was happening to us well before.

Peter Schravemade (50:59)

Before it even fell over.

Peter Hutton (51:01)

Well before. In fact, when we opened up our third office, around that time, a rumour started in New Farm that the Hutton family were a drug-dealing family and were money launderers. And it got around - and New Farm's a small place, right. We found out about it because Karen was at the hairdresser's one day and women were talking about it.

We know who said it. We actually know the agent. I will never take them to task on it, but we know who said it. We know which agency it was. The owner of that agency would be horrified, because I know that owner. But that person just spread that rumour, and it went, and people just accepted it, because real estate agents - you know, they've already got a smell about us, unfortunately.

Now, anybody who knows my family and me knows we'd have to be in a different universe, a parallel universe, an evil parallel universe, for us to be like that. And yet that's what happened.

And then it got perpetuated, because - it was the funniest thing, I'm going to have to write about this one day - we had this tenant who was a con man, who stopped paying his rent. Long story short, we got him out. The marshals went there and got him out, and with the marshal we had to get two security guards and three German shepherds, because he was a gangster. We got him out of this luxury property. All good, all happy.

But within two weeks of him being removed, and him getting very angry at myself and my family, we received an envelope full of white powder that came through to our office. My daughter started to open it, and it was full of white powder. So she called the police. The police arrived, they evacuated us, but we had to sit out on the footpath on the corner of Brunswick Street and Moray Street, New Farm - one of the busiest streets in Brisbane. They closed the whole corner down, and a hazmat team came, and we sat out there on the footpath for six hours. My whole family.

And the police officers were hilarious. At one stage one said, "So I hear you guys are the Hutton family - you're the crime family of New Farm." And we all just laughed.

And it turned out to be cocaine that was sent through the mail.

And somebody - and we think it was that person, did it as a bit of payback, for some reason, I don't know why, we never worked that out. But that's what happened. And then that just perpetuated the whole thing. It went from rumour to, well, there's some truth about it.

But we still listed people who loved their business, and we had great clients. I was dealing with one of Brisbane's best-known architects at the time and selling his apartments in New Farm, and I sold one of his apartments for five point seven million dollars - a record, non-riverfront, no river views. It's a record to this day and I'm proud of that. I have a great relationship with them, and they didn't care. They didn't buy into any of that, because they knew me.

But people - agents can be ruthless. We actually took it as a sign that we were doing the right thing. We just took it as: we're rocking the boat. Here's a little boutique agency that's come from a two-person band working around a kitchen bench to, four years later, having an office and turning over many, many millions of dollars across our three offices. So it was like, happy days, people are upset at us, their competitors.

But I can see it being a terrible thing, because it didn't upset me, it made me laugh. But Peter, that's just me. Another person might have done something terrible to themselves, because of shame and embarrassment.

Peter Schravemade (55:47)

Yeah. I just get the feeling that sometimes if we didn't unnecessarily shoot arrows, we wouldn't be such a dog-eat-dog industry.

Peter Hutton (55:57)

That's a hundred per cent right.

Peter Schravemade (56:00)

And then I go to some conferences - you've mentioned one of them - where I wouldn't say they encourage that, but it's very much a hustle environment. How am I going to get ahead, how am I going to be the best agent?

And the reality is, the best agents I've ever met are not the guys sitting in front of Lamborghinis showing their Rolex watches, taking photos. They're the practitioners who've been in the industry ten years longer. I think we sometimes miss that. And they're also the people who are unlikely to be throwing stones at you. They're just going to be focusing on their own business.

Peter Hutton (56:35)

That's it. I started real estate in 1994, and it's not like that at all.

In fact, when I started I was thirty, thirty-one years of age, and I was the youngest real estate agent other than one other agent from Ray White, who was my competitor - and he and I became best friends. We're still great friends to this day. Really great friends.

It was not like that back in those days. We all knocked around together, all the different agencies. We all knew each other. We were all polite. We had friends. And even when I had my agency, the principals of the offices in the area, we were all friendly.

But then there are just always some agents. I've copped this before, where I've described their behaviour - not them as a person, but their behaviour - as the behaviour of a shark, where they circle for blood. And I've got into trouble for that.

But it's unnecessary. I don't know how you train that into a person. I think that was trained into me in the wool industry: to be professional, to understand that your competitors could also be your mates. That's what the wool industry was like. We were all mates.

Peter Schravemade (57:55)

There are portions of the real estate industry that operate like that as well. I'd like to think it's a minority bunch who really upset the apple cart. And I think it starts on entry.

We could talk about this for a while, and I'm aware we've gone for a long time. But if you're getting into the industry in an aspect of greed, or you're in it to make money quickly - generally those operators are the ones I've come across. I'm not saying all of them; some of them are just keen to be professional and make money. But there is an element in the industry where it's a dog-eat-dog world. We're happy to tear our competitors down for our own professional gain.

It's really interesting, because you wouldn't see that if you were a cardiac surgeon. You're not going to be throwing a barb at the guy operating in the next room, because together you're saving lives.

Peter Hutton (58:58)

That's right.

Peter Schravemade (58:59)

I think there's a real element of this conversation built around businesses that haven't made it, where we need to be more professional in our approach to the failure of businesses. Because that could be us. We're only one market turn away from that happening. And I think we're going to see a bit of it now.

Actually, Peter, I think the really good operators in this market will do really well. But there are a lot of fly-by-nighters - and probably not the people who'd be interested in this kind of podcast. There are going to be a lot of those who don't make it out of this next phase of the industry, because it's the hard work, it's the consistency you need to keep executing, that makes you who you are and makes you a professional in your business.

Look, I want to round this out. Number one, thank you for jumping on with me today and having a discussion.

Peter Hutton (59:55)

Pleasure.

Peter Schravemade (59:56)

It is rare that we'd get the ability to talk about this, so I genuinely appreciate it.

And there's a couple of things. If you've made it all the way to here and you're listening to this, and you're in a scenario where your mental health is probably not where it should be, and you want to do something about it - can I encourage you?

The industry has an app now. It's called Real Care. You can download it. It's from the Rise Initiative - riseinitiative.org.au. As part of that they'll actually give you free, confidential phone counselling sessions. It's specifically designed to put a stop to mental health issues as they're emerging.

So don't feel that you're on your own. Don't feel that there's nothing you can do about it. Don't feel like there's no one listening. That app is free, and it's available as a freebie from the Rise Initiative, which is one of the really amazing legacy things they've done.

So if you've heard this today and you feel like you're in a scenario like that, don't wait to do something about it, because things don't get any better. The weakest link in your business is the one that could lead to the failure. And if that's you today, you might be just a holiday away from it. You might be a general manager away from doing something about it.

From my other Pete here - I won't say we're twinning, because he's way better looking than I am - but from the two Petes here: do something about it. Don't leave yourself in the lurch. Go and actively do something.

And look, Pete, if people want to read your book, where can they find it? What can they do? Where can they go to get it?

Peter Hutton (1:01:41)

Go to keep100.au - that's "keep", then one, zero, zero, dot AU. Not dot com dot au, just dot au. So keep100.au. Or go to our other website, which is Flornt - F-L-O-R-N-T - flornt.com.au.

Peter Schravemade (1:02:01)

Great. And I'll put those up at the bottom of this podcast when we release it.

But Pete, from me to you: keep doing your thing. Thank you so much for sharing today. And if people want to get in contact with you, I'm guessing they can go to that second website and find you there.

Peter Hutton (1:02:19)

Totally. Yeah.

Peter Schravemade (1:02:20)

Really appreciate your time, mate. What an amazing story. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Peter Hutton (1:02:26)

Thanks, mate. Thanks, Peter.