When Angus Street became the chief executive of AuctionsPlus in 2018, it was Australia’s largest online platform for selling livestock, with about 30 staff and annual sales of about $800 million.
Four years later, the company has more than doubled its workforce and has just racked up $3.5 billion worth of sales in the 2021-22 financial year.
So what’s driving the rise of AuctionsPlus?
Rain and the pandemic
“In 2020 we had the perfect storm,” Mr Street said.
“It had started raining on the eastern seaboard [after years of drought] and then Scott Morrison comes out on a Sunday and says COVID-19 is in Australia and we’re going into a full lockdown.
“Within two weeks of that, we were in for the ride of our life and we’re now just starting to catch our breath.”
Mr Street said Friday, March 27, 2020 was “burnt into his brain”.
Prior to that Friday, he said the business had received an email from Microsoft Azure to say it was prioritising essential services during the pandemic and AuctionPlus’s bandwidth may be affected.
“We had 30,000 head of cattle booked in for that Friday, we previously did about 5,000 head … so we were nervous,” he said.
“We kicked off at 9am and by the second auction we had around 5,500 people logged on and the system was getting shaky.
“At 11am we got hit by another tidal wave of users and the system just buckled under the sheer volume of listings, buyers, bids, and just numbers we’d never seen before.”
He said the team got bombarded with phone calls and were in crisis-management mode with “frantic coding in the background” to keep auctions running.
“It was a horrible, tough day, but we got through it. We got through a massive hurdle and the business had changed in a day,” he said.
“In literally four hours the business was never going to be the same again.”
Record numbers
In the 2020-21 financial year, AuctionsPlus did a record $2.35 billion worth of sales, but that increased even further in 2021-22 with gross sales rising 49 per cent to $3.5 billion.
Volumes of commercial cattle, sheep and goat listings all increased.
Machinery-clearing sales went up 63 per cent and stud sheep sales increased 48 per cent.
“That’s been one of the biggest drivers for us, the number of special [stud] sales and individual auctions has grown exponentially — and what drove that was COVID,” Mr Street said.
“Borders were shut but businesses still needed to run their sales.”
He said the company was not taking the growth for granted and had re-invested a lot back into the platform.
“We’ve done a $2.5 million upgrade to our bidding client, which essentially means we can now have over 1 million people on the platform, bidding on 1 million lots and the platform is stable,” he said.
“So we’ve built a platform that can scale if we need to and building new tools and services onto that platform which we hope will give more value back to our user base.”
Look long, play short
It’s common to hear chief executives talk about how important people are to a business, but Mr Street’s philosophy seems to be winning praise within the nation’s livestock sector.
He said the company’s catchphrase was “look long, play short” and his mentality around staff was simple.
“If you look after your people, the people look after the customers, and then the customers look after the business.”
Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
He said in terms of hiring staff he looks for three characteristics: humility, determination and passion.
“I think if you can find people who have those three characteristics they end up affecting change, as opposed to being effected by it,” he said.
In trying to find the right people, Mr Street asks the same question at the end of each job interview — you can find out what that is via this ABC Rural podcast.