From uni dropout to business mogul – Mike Halligan’s remarkable ride

If there’s one man who can spot a gap in a market a mile off, it’s Mike Halligan. The serial entrepreneur loves building brands that deliver solutions to consumer problems and he’s been founding businesses since the age of 17. He’s now the co-founder of Scratch, Australia’s fastest-growing direct-to-consumer dog food company, and has become a master of online sales and the digital business landscape. Not bad for a uni dropout.

Mike’s entrepreneurial career is nothing short of astounding. With an eagle eye for identifying early gaps in new markets, he’s built multiple successful enterprises that have helped businesses of all kinds embrace the digital landscape.

After growing up watching his father run his own business from home, Mike’s first foray into business was selling leather Macbook covers as a teen. While the business ultimately took a nosedive, the experience sparked an interest in startups, and Mike soon began an entrepreneurial degree at RMIT.

While Mike says his university study gave him a strong grounding in business operations, he eventually dropped out to focus full-time on his rapidly growing side hustle, Engage Marketing. Then, as businesses began to explore the brand-new world of online marketing, Mike spotted the opportunity to expand his entrepreneurial offering – launching a blog and website development business, The Blog Designer. This naturally led to his next venture, the Online Store Guys – building eCommerce websites for businesses just as the era of online selling took off.

This ability to spot the next big thing for his clients has been the backbone of Mike’s career.

“When you’re a consultant, basically people are paying you to learn,” says Mike. “And that took on another world for me. It started out as marketing consulting and all the things that small businesses trying to grow wanted. Then it turned into more of the digital stuff as blogging, content marketing and SEO became popular. I learned about strategies that were making businesses really do well, or where they were seeing opportunities. Looking back now, it’s a thing I started when I was 19 years old, but it’s so instrumental in the start of Scratch today, in my mid-thirties.”

These brand-building businesses were just the start. After years in online and eCommerce ventures, Mike saw his next opportunity in apps, creating one of the first health tech apps in the market, BodyWise. Though according to Mike, the app ultimately “died a long slow death” as larger tech companies saturated the global health app market, he admits he learned plenty – particularly about the power of online subscription models and using data to inform business direction.

Listen to Mike Halligan on the First Act podcast:

Fixing dog food from scratch

Mike’s latest business venture is the industry-disrupting subscription pet food service, Scratch. While it may seem a step out of his digital consultancy comfort zone, Mike explains, it was simply yet another market gap he was itching to fill.

“At the time, I had two sick dogs, so I was taking a critical lens into what they were eating. The more I researched pet food, the more I realised there were a lot of vague claims going on,” Mike reveals. “The pet food industry is worth nearly $3 billion a year in Australia, with over 80 per cent of dog food owned by two massive multinationals, yet labelling standards in dog food are unregulated and unbelievably murky. They don’t disclose a lot of things that you need to know to work out if something’s healthy for your dog to eat daily.

“Dogs and dog owners don’t get put first, so I got a little bit pissed off,” he admits. “I figured there are more people like me who are wanting to research their dog’s food, much like they do their own, so I wanted to create a brand for the new generation of dog owners coming through.”

Scratch has been a phenomenal success with dog owners across Australia, with over 25,000 customers now bypassing supermarkets and choosing Scratch for their dog’s dry food. Mike says that success always comes from solving a consumer problem.

“We focused on a transparency-based dog food company that’s about solving a consumer problem. Right from the get-go, we tailored Scratch around a direct-to-consumer subscription model so we could run an efficient business. We weren’t selling in retailers, so we didn’t have all those margins and I could put more money into buying better ingredients. And on a labelling basis, we show every single ingredient and what percentage of it we include, so you can make those decisions just like you can for your own health. It resonated with a lot of dog owners and hopefully made a lot of dogs a lot healthier.”

Lessons learned from success and failure

So, how does Mike spot these market gaps and build successful businesses with such uncanny ability? He says it’s about rolling with the times and learning as you go.

“It has all come from that instinct of knowing where an opportunity lies and Googling what’s available. People were needing blogs but there were no blog designers out there. It all sounds so logical now, but there was this time, 10 or 15 years ago, when these jobs were not there.

“You also learn that as you get from 1,000 to 5,000 to 20,000, you’re learning different problems. And as you scale and as the industry evolves, there’s always things to be learning and focusing on and improving.”

Burnout is the enemy of ideas

Mike’s final piece of advice for business owners is to look after your own mental health to stay on track.

“It’s hard to force energy, and if you burnout, you burnout. One thing I did do well was look after myself when I was burnt out or needed to focus on other parts of my life, which then allowed me to make the most of the ideas when they did come up,” Mike says. “I didn’t have the ego of my self-perception being wrapped up in the startup.

“When I finished BodyWise and sold The Blog Designers, I took six months and was just a kid in his early twenties, snowboarding and drinking and eating way too much food for a bit. I got a job for a couple of years, learned some great stuff, got my finances in a better place, and recovered some energy. And then when I had the energy to be receptive to ideas again, I noticed that there was an opportunity to make a better dog food.

“If I’d forced my way into thinking ‘I need to always be working on an idea’, I would have made a lot of crap ideas and never got around to Scratch, which is going reasonably well now. So, listen to yourself. Don’t think that you always need to be working on the hustle and some big idea – because you need to be in a place to be able to execute things well when they do come up.”

Want to hear more about the ‘fake business’ Mike started at age 8, or take a deeper dive into each of his business ventures? Listen to the full First Act ep now.

Join us every second Tuesday for a brand new episode of First Act, because every story has a beginning.

Listen and subscribe now: