The blue ocean of regional Australia
I spend a lot of time thinking about why regional markets work differently to metro ones, and there is a perspective that isn’t given enough thought: it’s not because regional Australia is behind but rather because the people building careers and businesses here are playing a completely different game.
Metro markets are crowded, in every sense. Careers are crowded, capital is crowded, attention is crowded. Everyone is looking at the same opportunities, chasing the same headlines, competing for the same handful of trophy roles or trophy deals. Regional markets don’t work like that. There’s less noise, fewer people willing to do the unglamorous work of actually understanding value before everyone else catches on, and a lot more room for someone genuinely willing to put the time and effort in. That’s a blue ocean, in the truest sense - not because the opportunity isn’t there, but because a lot of people aren’t looking.
It’s a pattern that shows up wherever you look closely enough. The people who choose regional paths, in any industry, are usually choosing discomfort over social legibility. Corporate life, the well-worn career ladder - all of it comes with a kind of external validation that regional and especically entrepreneurial paths don’t offer in the same way. That trade-off is exactly why so few people make the choice, and exactly why the ones who do tend to find more room to build something genuinely their own.
Agriculture is arguably the clearest example of this. It doesn’t run on quarterly targets or headline cycles. The people making decisions in that sector are usually deciding about their own livelihoods, their own land, their own family’s future, which means the change they drive tends to be real, considered, and genuinely meant. You don’t get many industries where the decision-makers are this close to the consequences of their own decisions. That proximity produces a different calibre of changemaker, people who aren’t chasing trend cycles, but are building something they intend to still be standing behind in twenty years.
Commercial property (an industry I work in) tells a similar story, just with a different asset class. Reshoring is bringing manufacturing back onto Australian soil, and a lot of that activity is landing in regional hubs rather than capital cities, simply because that’s where the land, the freight access and the room to grow actually exist. A striking amount of the best commercial activity under the $20 million mark happens off-market entirely, which says something important about how this game is actually won - not through headlines or listings pages, but through relationships, local knowledge, and the kind of trust that only gets built by being genuinely present in a market over time. That’s true of property. It’s just as true of any career or business built regionally.
It’s the thread that connects agriculture, regional commercial property, and the broader story of regional Australia’s businesses and operators more generally: the biggest opportunities are usually sitting with people who aren’t chasing something sexy. If you’re willing to do the work of genuinely understanding a market and the people in it, you find value that a headline-driven approach will always miss.
There’s a trade-off, and it’s not honest to pretend otherwise. Regional paths carry real risk, a thinner networks to lean on, longer timelines to prove out, less certainty than a well-worn metro or corporate path offers. And, slightly more consideration required to land your ideas properly. But that risk is exactly why the reward is bigger for the people willing to sit in the discomfort of it. Bigger, more obvious markets have had their inefficiencies competed away. Regional ones haven’t, yet. Every marginal improvement, a sharper read on an opportunity, a relationship built with the right person, a willingness to show up consistently where others won’t has outsized impact here, precisely because so few people are doing that work well.
None of this is an underdog story, and it shouldn’t be framed as one. It’s simply where a lot of the country’s most interesting decisions, careers and businesses are actually being built, by people with more skin in the game than most headline writers ever bother to notice. The regions aren’t necessarily waiting to catch up. They’re where a different kind of advantage is softly being built, for anyone willing to look.
Read this on Tess’s substack: https://substack.com/@tesscolquhoun