Out of the Fire: Loadrite's Story
Twelve months into the job, Loadrite's general manager Hayden Bullock found himself living through a cycle he thought he'd already escaped. He'd been burned out by a previous role once before, and was determined not to let a job consume him again. Instead, 80 to 90% of his day was disappearing into firefighting, much of it caused by customers whose complaints his own team dismissed as their fault. Business Growth School and Point16 gave Hayden the process and the confidence to break that cycle, flipping his time from 80% chaos to 80% growth, structure and planning.
The Challenge
Loadrite has spent over 40 years supplying weighing solutions that operators across waste, quarrying and mining industries rely on to know exactly how much they're carrying.
Before Hayden came on board, Loadrite ran the way too many small businesses do: built around individuals who each held their own piece of the puzzle, with a lack of shared strategy or process holding it together. When someone walked out the door, so did their knowledge, and because of the concentration of knowledge around individuals, growth could only ever reach a certain point before the whole thing seized up.
Hayden was brought in specifically to change this, and 18 months in, he was well into the hardest part of the job: a team of long-term staff holding onto "this is how we've always done it”. Hayden was seen as an outsider turning up with ideas nobody had asked for, and challenged by a team who had spent years quietly normalising problems rather than fixing them.
Two occasions stood out to Hayden, and they stuck with him for a reason. Customers had got frustrated enough to bypass his team entirely and demand the general manager personally, and their concerns, in his own words, were "completely valid." When he brought those same concerns back to the people meant to be fixing them, they were shrugged off as "just another moaning customer," the problem quietly relabelled as somebody else's fault.
Customers rarely complain twice. They just leave, take their business and spend elsewhere.
The frustrations and pressure didn't stay in the office. "In that environment of chaos and issues and problems, it begins to consume you and it's extremely frustrating," Hayden says.
"You get home at the end of the day and the day's just disappeared and you don't even know what you've done today. It's just been a day of fixing problems. You're exhausted by the end of the day, you've been doing nothing but deal with problems, and then you've got to go back and do it all again tomorrow."
If Loadrite had kept running the business this way, there would have been nothing left to come back to.
The Approach
Hayden had sat through his share of corporate training courses and expected the same thing from Business Growth School: post-it notes on a wall, a group hug, and walking out with a shiny poster and not much more than he went in with.
Instead he walked out with practical knowledge he could start using in the business the next day. Process mapping was the clear turning point: the cohort pulled Loadrite's operations apart from point of sale through to cash received, drawing attention to the gaps and identifying opportunities alongside both experts and peers. The session was uncomfortable. "Exposing the business's problems so openly in a group wasn't what I walked in here to do," Hayden says, "but it reframed every problem as something fixable rather than something to put up with."
The biggest shift came on the final day. Instead of leaving with a folder of good ideas and nowhere to put them, the afternoon was spent collating and refining everything the cohort had learned into a single growth strategy. Hayden could take it straight back to his team and start working on it the following week. Bringing that strategy back made the learning real, giving Hayden a clear plan for what to do the next day and the next month to grow Loadrite.
The Result
Business Growth School was the reset Loadrite needed. Hayden had come into a team moulded to "this is how we've always done it," a mindset that had waved off customer complaints as somebody else's problem, and it gave him the tools and frameworks to shape a different direction. For the first time, Loadrite had everyone working from the same page instead of everyone doing their own thing, moved from siloed to cohesive, with a shared vision that gave the whole team a reason for the changes, rather than just a list of them to follow.
"I came into a reasonably dysfunctional group of individuals," Hayden says. "Coming out of Business Growth School with a strategy, I've been able to turn that into a shared vision and bring everyone together to work together."
"Business Growth School gave me the confidence to not be afraid to have those hard discussions with people. I came out of it with a framework around how to have those discussions, when to have them, and what to discuss."
Hayden, General Manager, Loadrite
Aside from the wider strategy, one of the biggest shifts Hayden noticed day to day is his time. Previously, 90% of his day went to chaos and putting out fires. Now he has the time and clarity to focus on where the business is heading and the work he was actually brought in to do. It has changed him as a leader too: bolder, more decisive, and no longer afraid of the hard or challenging conversations he used to put off.
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