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When Michael Nitschke inherited his family’s real estate business at 30, it was drowning in debt and weeks from collapse. Instead of walking away, he leaned into crisis, proving that survival demands vulnerability, courage, and relentless decision-making.
At 30 years old, Michael Nitschke was confronted with a reality no young professional expects: stepping into the role of CEO after the sudden loss of both parents. The inheritance he received was not wealth or security, but a family business teetering on the brink of collapse.
For 12 years, Nitschke had thrived as a sales agent, closing deals and building relationships, but he had never led an organisation. When his father passed, he suddenly found himself at the helm of First National Nitschke, a company millions of dollars in debt and only weeks from financial ruin. It was a moment where failure felt almost inevitable.
“Look, I knew the odds were stacked against me – most people would have seen a failing business and walked away,” Nitschke recalled to REB. “But I chose to see opportunity. What if this was exactly where I was meant to be?”
That mindset, anchoring himself in gratitude and possibility, became the foundation for a gruelling turnaround effort. For Nitschke, survival required not just business acumen, which he was still rapidly developing, but also the resilience to carry the weight of family legacy and community expectations.
“The hardest decisions all came in the first few weeks,” he admitted. “I had to make two team members redundant within days of taking over – people who’d been with the family business for years. I closed our second office and handed the lease to our biggest competitor, essentially giving them a foothold in our market. I sublet part of our main office to generate immediate cash flow.”
These measures were massive, and they came at a personal cost. But for Nitschke, leadership meant taking accountability even for circumstances he didn’t create.
“But the toughest part wasn’t the operational cuts – it was facing creditors, landlords, and team members to take full accountability for decisions I didn’t make. I apologised for a mess I didn’t create because leadership means owning the situation you inherit, not just the one you build.”
In the months that followed, Nitschke leaned on authenticity rather than the illusion of certainty. He quickly discovered that showing strength did not mean hiding weakness. Instead, it meant embracing vulnerability as a powerful counterpart to resilience.
“I learned that vulnerability and strength aren’t opposites – they’re partners,” he explained.
“Some days I didn’t get the outcomes I desperately needed, and I had to be OK with that while staying relentlessly focused on progress. I adopted a ‘better before bigger’ philosophy, celebrating small wins because momentum matters more than magnitude when you’re rebuilding.”
That philosophy extended beyond operations into culture. Accepting compliments, owning mistakes with “extreme accountability”, and leading through curiosity became his blueprint. Having little experience as a business leader, he approached every challenge as a student.
“My curiosity became my superpower. Because I knew so little about running a business, I could ask the questions that experienced leaders might be too proud to ask. I consumed every book and podcast I could find, learning in public rather than pretending I had all the answers.”
Three years later, Nitschke had not only pulled the company back from collapse but transformed it into one of Adelaide’s strongest independent real estate agencies. His story is as much about strategy as it is about resilience: a reminder that survival is rarely about a single heroic decision, but instead about relentless, often unglamorous, persistence.
For today’s principals and directors navigating a volatile market, his advice cuts to the essence of leadership in crisis: the discipline of decision-making.
“Master the art of decision-making – both the speed and the pause,” he urges. “As a leader, you need to be curious about every aspect of your business, asking the right questions to uncover what’s working and what’s broken.”
But curiosity, he warned, has its dangers.
“Once you start seeing opportunities everywhere, you’ll want to act on everything immediately. Don’t. Slow down your decision-making process. Engage stakeholders, debate scenarios, stress-test your ideas. You’ll always have more ideas than you have capacity to execute well, and momentum can make bad ideas feel urgent.”
The businesses that survive, Nitschke argued, are not the ones that chase every opportunity, but the ones that execute selectively and with precision.
“Remember, there’s an abundance of opportunity – you don’t need to chase every single one. The businesses that survive and thrive are the ones that execute fewer things exceptionally well.”
For leaders staring down their own survival moments, whether caused by financial strain, market downturns, or personal crises, it’s critical to remember that leadership in crisis does not come from inherited wisdom or untouchable confidence. It comes from extreme accountability, the willingness to learn out loud, and the refusal to let fear of failure dictate the future.
“That possibility – the story we could write together – was bigger than my fear of failure,” he reflected. “I held onto the vision of what we could become, not what we were in that moment.”
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