Today you’re going to hear the story of Heath Raftery from Newie Ventures. Newie Ventures is an engineering agency. They build solutions to their client’s problems. Basically, their customers come to them with an idea, and Heath and his team go to work figuring out how to build it. In the last 12 months alone Newie Ventures’ client base has tripled and its headcount has more than doubled. But as Heath says although those numbers sound impressive in reality things have moved very carefully and very deliberately.
Let’s go back to Day One, where this story begins…
Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:00 Adam Spencer: You're listening to a DayOne.fm show. 0:05 Heath Raftery: What drives you to make bold moves, to build something that didn't exist before, to live, lead, and choose life with intention? Welcome to Perspective X. I'm Pauline Fatowi, and this is not your typical business podcast. Each episode, I get to speak to extraordinary entrepreneurs and leading innovators to unpack what truly fuels their journey. Not just the wins, but the inner work, the overlooked decisions, the mindset shifts, and the personal moments that sparked something bigger. This show is about the ripple effect of choice, the kind of deep accountability that lets us respond to life rather than react to it. Because when you realize everything is temporary, and you are the creator of your own experience, you start to play the game differently. So if you're curious about how people build meaning alongside success, how they evolve through challenges and shape the world with intention, this is your invitation to listen in. Perspective X, where we go beyond the highlight reel and into the moments that changed everything. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. 1:22 Speaker C: No, I had absolutely no conception that there was a market even involved. No, no, I just thought there was, uh, there was people there that would pay me to do things that, that I was good at. 1:33 Adam Spencer: Hi, I'm Adam Spencer and welcome to Day One, the show that goes back to the very beginning to share the story of some of Australia's most incredible regional startups and entrepreneurs. Today you're going to hear the story of Heath Raftery from Nui Ventures. Nui Ventures is an engineering agency. They build solutions to their clients' problems. Basically, their customers come to them with an idea and Heath and his team go to work figuring out how to build it. In the last 12 months alone, Nui Ventures' client base has tripled and its headcount has more than doubled. But as Heath states, although those numbers sound impressive, in reality, things have moved very carefully and very deliberately. That little snippet you heard at the start just there was Heath speaking about his adventures as a kid making money. Putting his skills to use around computers, he thought, "I'm good at this, other people might need help." And as Heath told me— 2:34 Speaker C: I did take it upon myself to put up an ad down at the local Bilo and say, "If your printer's not working, I'll come help you." Not realizing that had anything to do with an entrepreneur. I had no real idea or anything. I just wanted to play with computers and fix stuff. 2:51 Adam Spencer: So how did Heath go from that little kid putting up an ad to fix printers to the co-founder of Nui Ventures, an engineering firm that, as Heath states, our mission is to turn ideas into products? We will get to that, but for now, let's go back to day one where this story begins. 3:10 Speaker C: Yeah, so this is me There was certainly no lightbulb moment. There was no streak of light that, where it came to me. It was a long process of weighing up options and thinking about where I wanted to take my career and those things that I thought that I could make a career out of. 3:35 Adam Spencer: I wanted to figure out what the motivation was behind Heath deciding to move away from working for someone else to going out on his own and starting Nui Ventures. Often we think entrepreneurship is this big aha moment where something just clicks into place. 3:52 Speaker C: It'd be nice if there was something poetic about it. It's a germ of an idea, it was an itch that needed scratching and eventually it got scratched. I was working for a product development company that largely services mining and heavy industry as a product development, research and development engineer. 4:11 Adam Spencer: In Heath's case, over time he was becoming unsatisfied with where he was. 4:17 Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it was different stuff, but the way I describe it these days is that I was comfortably useless. I wasn't challenged. I was paid well, but I wasn't achieving. We could never finish or excel or delight the customer within that environment. We moved things from one side of the desk to the other until we were told to move them back to the other side of the desk. I didn't think that was a particularly exciting utilisation of my skills. Yeah, I was looking for application of my abilities, basically. I was looking to achieve more. And this is a common longing of people who have access to the world's information and think, "Gee, I really should be setting the world on fire," right? It's a common feeling, I think, that For me, it wasn't— certainly I learned a lot of things at uni, but I never let my schooling interfere with my education. I've always been a fan of lifelong learning, and that's what I've always wanted for my career, is to continue to learn. 5:29 Adam Spencer: Among other things, it was that core belief of lifelong learning that helped to push Heath towards deciding to look for a bigger challenge. Nui Ventures, although not with that name at the time, had began to form in Heath's mind. But how was Heath going to get started? 5:47 Speaker C: Step 1 was to get a couple other people on board. 5:50 Speaker D: Yeah. 5:51 Speaker C: Because, yeah, I didn't want to do this alone, and I always need to bounce ideas off people, and I need to get out of my head too. And so I needed other people around, and I was fortunate that the first 2 people I approached were sold, really keen. They had similar ideas of their own and they wanted to be part of something new and exciting. So that helped. And then number 2 was to do it on the side for a little bit. So a lot of people say, you know, you can't do anything worthwhile unless you're 100% focused on it, and that's probably true, but that's also terribly risky. 6:30 Adam Spencer: And so at this point, this is what was going through Heath's mind. 6:34 Speaker C: So yeah, have a feel, have a go on the side, see what you can put together. And it wasn't until we had collected enough evidence that we could sustain ourselves in the future that I made the jump. We were probably pretty fortunate in that our requirements were very meager. We didn't, our rent was really low, our overheads were really low, and we hadn't accumulated a lot of debt. Outgoings. And so, by the time we had our first customer, income was great, could sustain us. And then, during the period of that first customer, the second one came knocking on the door. And so, there was a fairly nice transition from the first to the second, which really helped bootstrap things. 7:26 Adam Spencer: One of my biggest questions that I like to ask everyone is, How did you get your first customer? 7:32 Speaker C: So the first customer didn't come about until after I had quit my job. 7:37 Adam Spencer: Okay. 7:38 Speaker C: And to be honest with you, our first paying customer, money in the bank, was my ex-employee. 7:46 Speaker D: Okay. 7:47 Speaker C: Which I've subsequently heard is pretty common. It was basically, there was a job that my ex-employer had on from an external customer. Who requested I be part of it because I've been involved in the past and it made sense to outsource it to this new entity. 8:08 Adam Spencer: Nui Ventures is up and running now. First customer acquired, a lot of Nui Ventures clients were coming in via word of mouth. Things were going well for Heath and the team and I asked Heath if there were any people that were really influential and helpful in getting Nui Ventures to where it is today. 8:26 Speaker C: There's probably quite a few, but one that comes to mind is Gunilla Burrows. 8:31 Speaker E: I'm Gunilla Burrows. I'm chair of 1804. 8:34 Speaker C: She has an underappreciated selflessness in building networks and ecosystems so that other people can prosper. And I think lots and lots of people benefit from that. But lots and lots of people don't identify that as the source of their benefits. 8:58 Adam Spencer: We'll hear more about this in a minute, but just to give you some context, Heath and Gunilla first really met at an event that 1804 put on quite regularly, and still do, called the Innovators Lunch. 9:11 Speaker E: I mean, he was a great founder in the fact that he had had so much great experience already through his own career. And then he had this real passion for not only the technology, but for doing something good. And, you know, so he fitted perfectly into the— to what ATMO4 was trying to do. And then, of course, his area that he was interested in was in the smart city space and the Internet of Things. Mm-hmm. Area. And look, he's been going from strength to strength, and I really can't keep up with everything that he and Newie Ventures is doing, but it's just wonderful to see them grow. 10:01 Adam Spencer: Heath and his team currently work out of 1804, a startup hub that focuses on smart city and clean tech, and I wanted to learn about how they settled on 1804. 10:12 Speaker C: It was all via the Innovators Lunch, which was a meetup that had just started around the time that the idea for Nui Ventures was forming. And so I would sneak out of work to go to the Innovators Lunch and discover this world of people who were trying to make things wonderful, doing, putting the hard yards in to create the world that they saw for themselves. And yeah, that was very inspirational and that was basically run by 1804. 10:40 Adam Spencer: So between being behind Innovators Lunch, being one of Heath's lecturers at uni, and sitting on the board of 1804 where Heath's office is located, Gunilla seems to have been very instrumental in getting Nui Ventures, or helping Nui Ventures get to where it is today. 11:02 Speaker C: Yep, that was our leg in the door from when we were 3 people that no one had ever heard of, we stood on the coattails of the Board of 1804 and Andrew Meares and Gunilla Burrows and used that enormous leverage to represent ourselves as more authoritative than we could do just off our own backs. We've had a wonderful past 8 months or so of of defining what it is that makes us valuable, and we've come out of that feeling very positive about our mission, actually. And our mission is simply turning ideas into products, and that is exciting, and that is really valuable to our customer base. 11:51 Adam Spencer: Heath is getting really clear on why Nui Ventures exists, and this is a good 3 years into the business, and as wonderful as the way things are going for NewEVentures and the team, Heath is still very focused on the business and building something that isn't reliant on any one person. 12:07 Speaker C: At our end of financial year celebration that we had with our staff recently, that my goals for the next 12 months are to build resilience into the company to ensure that it's not reliant on one individual person, that your bus factor, as they call it, goes up from 1 or 2 to a few more so that it is self-sustaining. 12:29 Adam Spencer: And the next step in doing that is putting the right people in the right places. 12:34 Speaker C: We're in the process of recruiting, so we're building out our engineering team, and the plan after that, once we've got sufficient capability in the engineering team, is that we appoint a managing director. Who oversees operations. And at that point, we'd be a team of, say, 8 full-timers. And that's my immediate goal, is to be an organization of that size that can give great attention to our clients and follow through on what makes New Ventures great. 13:12 Adam Spencer: The theme of people comes up again and again throughout these interviews. That I'm fortunate enough to be able to conduct. 13:19 Speaker C: It's something that the Nui Ventures journey has allowed me to do, is discover just how vibrant people are who are building businesses and involved in entrepreneurial stories and innovation journeys and whatnot. 13:40 Adam Spencer: As I mentioned near the beginning of this episode, One of the main things that I wanted to know was why go into business at all? What is the motivation behind that decision? 13:51 Speaker C: So for me, it was to be responsible for the work that I was doing. I didn't want to be— have— I've always liked being the— being in charge of my own destiny. Being independent, being resilient, and to have an organization dictate my career wasn't good enough for me. So I wanted to be responsible. So if I'm working on boring jobs, that's my fault. If I'm not changing the world, moving the dial the way I'm supposed to be, that I feel I should be, then it's my fault. So I wanted wanted that responsibility. 14:36 Adam Spencer: From those early days helping people fix their printers and computers to the continuing quest to always be learning and challenging himself, and then bringing in two friends to help to launch Nui Ventures and having amazing people around him like Gunilla Burrows and Andrew Mears of 1804, to where we are today. Building a solid business that aims to give Nui Ventures clients the attention to detail that they deserve. Heath's journey is a remarkable one and in my mind serves to reiterate the importance of the people we surround ourselves with and the relationships that we have. Speaking about relationships, Heath credits his parents with a couple of lessons that were essential in his business journey. 15:21 Speaker C: My parents have taught me perseverance and stoicism and grit, and I think that's very important. In what I do. They never expected anything, and so I guess that's filtered down to me. 15:45 Adam Spencer: I wanted to finish the Newy Ventures story with a great piece of advice that Heath has for other entrepreneurs. Heath has 3 pieces of advice, and I would probably say ignore the first one he gives you. And you'll find out why right after this short break because there's something that I really want to tell you about. It's a brand new podcast app and I love podcasts. I have to start off by saying this is not a paid advertisement. I'm going to speak about this app simply because I love what they're doing. I love podcasts. I've been listening to podcasts, mostly business and entrepreneurship related podcasts since at least 2011. But something has always bugged me about the podcast app that I use and practically every other podcast app out there. Well, that's about to change. 16:41 Speaker D: Hello, this is Monica. 16:44 Adam Spencer: Hi Monica, it's Adam. 16:45 Speaker D: How you going? 16:45 Speaker C: Oh hey, I'm good. 16:46 Speaker D: How are you? 16:47 Adam Spencer: Monica is one of the co-founders of a brand new app called Curio. 16:51 Speaker D: It's all about following your curiosity. 16:52 Adam Spencer: I love podcasts because I can listen and learn, but some podcasts go for over an hour. For example, the most recent episode of the Tim Ferriss Show goes for around 3 hours, and I love it, but there are really useful bits of information that I just like to bookmark so I can come back to later if I need to and not have to skim through 3 hours of audio to find it again. That's an extreme example, but I think you get my point. So how do we solve that problem? Introducing Curio. 17:24 Speaker D: So, Curio is a podcast app that allows listeners to retain and share the best bits of their favourite podcasts with their network. 17:32 Adam Spencer: I downloaded the app on launch day and I personally love it. I would really love for you to try it out if you're an avid podcast listener like I am. 17:41 Speaker D: If you're, you know, not satisfied with whatever podcast app you currently use, then, you know, what's the harm in giving us a go? And seeing where it takes you. Super easy. We're on iOS at the moment. We've got Android coming out soon, and you just go into the App Store and you look for Curio with two H's on the end, and the symbol is some headphones and this yellow background. It's very easy to find, very easy to go through and download it and be able to figure out how to use the bookmarking and snippeting function. We've really tried to highlight that as easy as possible. 18:15 Adam Spencer: For those of you on iOS, go to the App Store, App Store and search for Curio, that is C-U-R-I-O-H-H, and download the best new podcast app around. 18:28 Speaker C: Well, number one would be probably don't take advice from me. There's plenty of other sources of advice. And number two, very much related to the first one, trust your gut. So take on board advice, but feel free to ignore it if it doesn't apply to your situation. No one else knows your business and your situation like you do. And then number 3 would just be persevere. If there's any quality in an entrepreneur which dictates success across the board, if you average everything out, it's those that stuck at it longer. 19:09 Adam Spencer: I hope you enjoyed listening to Heath's story. If you like this episode, please feel free to check out the show notes for this episode at welcometodayone.com, which has links to everything that was mentioned in today's episode, plus a way to leave a rating for the show wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you enjoy what we are doing, we would really appreciate it if you take a minute to leave a review for the show, as it really helps the show get in front of more people. People that might also enjoy the stories that we are sharing. Next time on Welcome to Day One, James Rabbitt from Broader Learning. I'm James Rabbitt. 19:53 Speaker F: I'm the managing director of Broader Learning. Broader Learning is a company based out of Newcastle that provides interesting and fun STEM learning programs for students. So the idea is that where there are 50 schools in an area all trying to teach quality coding or robotics, for example, learning programs, we have the opportunity to do that 50 times a week instead of them each doing it once a week. And so theoretically we can deliver a better experience, or at the very least an experience that is fairly cost-effective. 20:36 Adam Spencer: Thank you so much for giving this episode of Welcome to Day One your attention. I really appreciate it. This episode was created by me, Adam Spencer. Interviews conducted by me, Adam Spencer. And a big thank you to Heath Raftery from Newie Ventures and Gunilla Burrows from 1804 for their time and willingness to be involved. The script was written by me, Adam Spencer. Music by Lee Rosevere. Full attribution is on our website. And welcome to dayone.com. This episode was produced and mixed by me, Adam Spencer. Thank you for listening and see you next time.
