The transition began when long-time Director Tense Venneri moved from Mildura to take on the Head of Growth role at Barry Plant Head Office.
Rather than simply replacing one leader with another, the move prompted the Mildura team to look more broadly at how the business was structured and what it would need for its next phase.
Matt Mason stepped into the Managing Director role, with fellow Director Brenton Love taking a greater role in leading the sales team.
For Matt, it was an opportunity to look at the business with fresh eyes.
“Tense had been such a big part of this business for a long time, so his move was always going to create change,” Matt said.
“But it also made us look at how we were operating, where responsibility sat and where we needed more expertise. We didn’t want to just keep doing things the way they had always been done.”
One of the most significant changes was the appointment of chartered accountant Danica Leng as Finance Manager, bringing greater financial oversight into the business.
Previously, many of those responsibilities had been spread across the existing leadership team. As the business grew, Matt believed it warranted dedicated expertise.
“For a business our size, we reached the point where financial management needed to be somebody’s actual job rather than something managed alongside everything else,” he said.
“Having Danica overseeing our financial operations and trust accounting has given us much better visibility across the business and allowed the leadership team to spend more time leading their respective areas.”
The shift has not only been about bringing new people into senior roles.
Team member Dominic Mezzatesta has taken responsibility for Barry Plant Mildura’s social media, moving a function that had previously been outsourced into the office.
It is a relatively small operational change, but Matt believes it represents something bigger happening within the team.
“Dom understands our people and our community because he’s part of it,” Matt said.
“What he has been producing has been better for us than what we were previously outsourcing, and it has given him the opportunity to take ownership of an area of the business and make it his own.”
The office has also changed its property management systems, moving to a cloud-based platform and reviewing processes that had developed over many years.
Matt said the leadership transition provided a natural opportunity to question some long-held ways of working.
“When a business has been around for 35 years, there are inevitably things you do because that’s the way they’ve always been done,” he said.
“This gave us a reason to ask whether those things still made sense.”
The changes came during a period of significant personnel movement, including the departure of several experienced team members and the arrival of younger staff.
Rather than trying to recreate the previous team, Matt and Brenton focused on building a different structure around the people they had.
That approach has coincided with what Matt describes as Barry Plant Mildura’s strongest financial year in its 35-year history during FY2025-26, including record sales and listings and six individual record months.
For Matt, however, those numbers matter because of what they suggest about the transition.
“If you had told me at the beginning of the year that we would change leadership, lose some very experienced people, bring new people in, change our systems and still have our best year, I probably would have wondered how all of that was going to happen at once,” he said.
“The result has given us confidence that we’ve got the structure right and, more importantly, that people within the business are capable of taking on more responsibility.”
Barry Plant CEO Lisa Pennell said Mildura’s experience showed that leadership succession did not have to mean simply replacing one person with another.
“Tense’s move to Head Office created a significant change for a business he had helped lead for many years,” Lisa said.
“What Matt and Brenton have done well is use that change to reconsider how the business operates and where responsibility sits.
“We’ve seen Danica bring specialist financial expertise into the business, Dominic take ownership of social media and younger members of the team step into greater responsibility. The record result is a very positive outcome, but the more interesting part is how the business has evolved to achieve it.”
Matt said the past 12 months had changed his view of succession within a business.
“It’s easy to think succession means finding someone else to do the job the previous person did,” he said.
“What we’ve learnt is that it can be an opportunity to redistribute responsibility, bring in expertise where you need it and give people already within the business room to step up.
“We’re still Barry Plant Mildura. We’ve just changed the way we run the place.”