In this deeply personal episode of The Huddle Leadership Podcast, host Kate Russell welcomes Richard Miller, founder of Tough Wolf Detailing. Richard's story is one of profound transformation, from successful marketing director to mental health crisis to building a business model designed to help others reclaim their self-worth through meaningful work.
With over 35 years of entrepreneurial experience spanning marketing, recruitment, entertainment, and television, Richard takes us through his journey from running a thriving creative agency to losing everything—his business, his home, his financial security, and nearly his life. His transparent account of mental breakdown and recovery reveals the devastating impact of financial crisis on mental health, and more importantly, how creative outlets and purpose-driven work can become pathways back to self-belief.
Now running Tough Wolf Detailing, Richard has transformed his personal experience into an innovative business model that combines traditional detailing services with a vision to provide employment opportunities, mentorship, and support for people recovering from mental health challenges. Through his planned franchise model with no fees and built-in mental health support systems, Richard demonstrates how entrepreneurship can become a force for social good without sacrificing commercial viability.
Key Takeaways
Vulnerability is leadership strength: Richard's willingness to share his mental health struggles openly demonstrates that authentic leadership doesn't come from perfection—it comes from being real. When leaders acknowledge their humanity, they create permission for others to do the same.
Soul-destroying isn't just rhetoric: The loss of reputation, confidence, and self-worth that accompanies financial and business failure can be literally life-threatening. Richard's experience of having suicidal thoughts for the first time at age 50 highlights how severe the psychological impact of business failure can be.
Creative outlets provide recovery pathways: Richard's decision to detail and flip a car wasn't just about making money—it became a therapeutic process that allowed him to achieve something tangible without excessive mental burden. The physical work and visible transformation provided a sense of accomplishment that rebuilt confidence.
Don't punish people for bad days: Richard's planned business model includes support for operators who simply can't face a job some days, with backup systems to cover work without creating a spiral of shame and self-punishment. This approach recognises that mental health recovery isn't linear.
Self-belief determines capability: Despite decades of marketing expertise and proven skills, Richard couldn't pitch himself for work because he felt unworthy. The gap between actual capability and perceived capability becomes the defining limitation for people experiencing depression and anxiety.
You soon find out who your friends are: Crisis reveals character—both your own and others'. Some of Richard's closest friends actively made him feel like a failure during his most vulnerable period, demonstrating how stigma around business failure compounds mental health challenges.
Choose responsibility over victimhood: While Richard's crisis was triggered by helping a family member, he reclaimed power by recognising his choice to stay in that situation. Taking responsibility—even for circumstances created by others—returns a sense of control.
Customer validation rebuilds self-worth: The extreme positive feedback Richard receives from detailing work—including customers crying with joy—provides the external validation that helps counter internal negative narratives. Doing excellent work becomes both cause and effect of recovery.
Hustling is a survival skill: Richard's ability to find money when rent was due, to start businesses from age 14, and to navigate extreme financial pressure came from a fundamental hustler mentality—the determination to make things happen regardless of circumstances.
Lead yourself out of darkness: Richard wanted to model for his adult children that when life strips everything away, no one else will solve it for you. Self-leadership in crisis means taking whatever action is possible, even when it feels impossible.
Everyone's in sales: Richard emphasises that his marketing and sales skills weren't optional extras—they were survival tools. Understanding how to position and sell a product (or yourself) becomes critical when starting from zero.
Purpose creates resilience: Richard's personal mission—to live life PACKED (Purpose, Adventure, Credibility, Kindness)—provides a daily framework for decisions and actions. When every action needs to tick one of those boxes, the mission becomes an accountability tool.
Combine profit with social impact: Tough Wolf operates as a for-profit enterprise, not a charity, while still providing meaningful support for vulnerable people. Richard's transparency about needing to earn money while helping others models sustainable social entrepreneurship.
Mental health support needs practical solutions: Richard's observation that government mental health systems offer vague guidance like "volunteer at Salvos" instead of leveraging people's actual skills reflects a fundamental disconnect in recovery support systems.
The Xavier syndrome compulsion: Richard identifies his compulsion to help others regardless of personal cost as a pattern (Xavier syndrome). Understanding this tendency helped him recognise both how he got into crisis and how he could channel it productively.
Featured Discussion
Richard's story challenges every comfortable assumption about business success, mental health, and leadership. His trajectory—from running three companies and living a millionaire lifestyle to being unable to afford milk—illustrates how quickly circumstances can unravel when mental health declines and how intertwined financial stress and psychological wellbeing really are.
The catalyst for Richard's crisis was deeply personal: choosing to help a close family member experiencing severe financial difficulty. This decision, made from a place of love and responsibility, ultimately drained his business resources, affected his ability to lead his team, and triggered a cascade of failures. The companies folded. The staff lost their jobs. The mounting debt became insurmountable. The house, cars, and superannuation were all lost.
But the most devastating loss was internal. Richard, who had been successfully self-employed since age 14, who had built and led creative teams, who had won recognition on programs like Gruen, suddenly couldn't bring himself to pitch for work. He felt unworthy. The external validation he'd always received disappeared, and without it, the internal narrative became toxic. Well-meaning friends contributed to this spiral by treating him as a failure rather than someone experiencing temporary difficulty.
The turning point came during a routine medical appointment. Richard casually mentioned to his GP that he'd had thoughts of driving off the road. That admission—his first suicidal thought at age 50—triggered an immediate referral to emergency mental health services and ultimately a two-week stay in a mental health facility.
What Richard observed during that stay fundamentally shaped his current business vision. He saw two types of patients: those who would cycle through the system indefinitely, and those who were there because of specific circumstances outside their control—people like him who had lost careers, businesses, partners, or financial security. These people wanted to recover, wanted to rebuild, but lacked the self-belief and confidence to take action.
The nursing staff couldn't provide concrete pathways. When Richard asked how he could help others once he recovered, he received vague suggestions about volunteering in op shops—work that neither utilised his skills nor provided a sustainable pathway forward for people with professional backgrounds.
Richard recognised that what these people needed was meaningful work that rebuilt confidence incrementally, combined with mentorship from someone who understood their experience. They needed an environment where having a bad day didn't result in catastrophe. They needed to prove to themselves—through concrete achievements—that they were still capable.
His path to this realisation came through an unexpected source: a $2,000 car. During COVID, Richard had watched car renovation shows. In the depths of his crisis, he bought a cheap vehicle, spent time renovating it, and flipped it for profit. The work was physical rather than cerebral, creative without requiring intense strategic thinking, and produced a visible transformation from "wrecking filthy to pristine clean."
That sense of achievement—seeing something tangibly improved through his own effort—proved psychologically powerful. Richard found himself enjoying the work, feeling fulfilled by customer reactions, and gradually rebuilding confidence. He'd found a business model that didn't require him to pitch his marketing expertise (which he couldn't psychologically face) but still allowed him to create something valuable.
Six months into running Tough Wolf Detailing, Richard experienced an epiphany. Why not structure the business to provide the same recovery pathway for others? The franchise model he'd already envisioned could be adapted specifically for people recovering from mental health challenges—no franchise fees, shared revenue after costs, mentorship and support systems built in, and crucially, backup coverage for days when operators simply couldn't face the work.
Kate and Richard explore the profound leadership implications of this model. Most workplaces punish absence or poor performance without understanding the internal battle people face. Richard's approach recognises that someone not showing up for work might be preventing a complete spiral by taking care of themselves that day. The business absorbs the impact rather than compounding the person's shame.
The conversation also addresses how Richard's marketing and creative skills have become tools for his own recovery. Working with a young marketing professional, doing promotional work for his Meatloaf tribute band (Outlight), creating the Tough Wolf brand—all of these activities have given him back his identity as a creative professional, just from a different angle.
Throughout the discussion, Richard maintains remarkable honesty about his ongoing challenges. He's not "recovered" in the sense of being back where he was. He lives in a rental house. He sometimes wonders if there's money for milk. He's still dealing with the mountain of debt. But he's alive, he's building something meaningful, and he's proud of that survival.
Kate draws out the leadership lesson that often gets missed in mental health discussions: the power of bringing challenges into your sphere of control. Richard could have remained a victim of circumstances created by someone else's actions. Instead, he recognised that while he didn't cause the initial problem, he chose to stay in the situation. That recognition—that he had agency even in his victimhood—returned a sense of power.
Innovation Spotlight: A New Social Enterprise Model
The Tough Wolf franchise concept represents an innovative approach to social entrepreneurship that acknowledges a critical reality: sustainable help requires sustainable economics. Richard explicitly states that Tough Wolf is not a not-for-profit or charity—it's a commercial enterprise that needs to generate income for him personally. But within that for-profit framework, he's building support systems that traditional businesses don't provide.
The model works like this: Operators receive comprehensive training in vehicle detailing, but also ongoing mentorship and psychological support. They don't pay franchise fees or licensing costs. When they accept a job, they pick up a company vehicle stocked with all necessary equipment and products. They perform the work and split the revenue with Tough Wolf after costs are deducted. The split is designed to be equitable, providing meaningful income to operators while covering company overhead and providing profit.
The critical innovation is the support infrastructure. Operators have a mentor they can call when facing a difficult morning—someone who understands the psychological battle of getting out of bed to face work. If an operator absolutely cannot do a scheduled job, the business finds coverage so the customer isn't disappointed and the operator doesn't spiral into self-punishment and catastrophic thinking.
This backup system addresses a fundamental reality of mental health recovery: setbacks aren't failures, they're part of the process. Traditional employment treats the inability to work as a performance issue. Richard's model treats it as a predictable challenge to be managed systemically rather than individually.
Richard is exploring government funding options, including NDIS support, to subsidise training and potentially supplement operator income during their recovery journey. He envisions building an advisory board of professionals from finance, law, and marketing to help structure the venture properly and navigate regulatory requirements.
The model demonstrates something important about leadership: the best solutions often come from lived experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Richard isn't approaching this as an outsider trying to "help" vulnerable people—he's creating the support system he wishes had existed for himself.
Quotable Moments
"It was soul-destroying. I mean that literally—it destroyed my soul."
"I feel really proud to still be alive. No one will ever know or understand the real story unless you've lived it every day and had those intrusive thoughts every minute of every day."
"I chose not to be a victim anymore. Regardless of what their actions are, I'm responsible for being here."
"When you're vulnerable and in a position where someone could tell you anything, you'd believe them because you second-guess and question yourself all the time."
"I couldn't bring myself to pitch myself because I felt I wasn't worthy anymore."
"You soon find out who your friends are. Some of my alleged best friends went out of their way to make me feel like I was a failure."
"Nothing gives me greater pleasure than seeing a car restored. That sense of achievement and sense of purpose made me think, maybe I could do this for a job."
"If they absolutely cannot do the job, we will find someone to do the job so that the customer isn't let down and the operator doesn't feel like his whole world is about to unravel."
"Most people don't have a bad day on purpose."
"I wanted to show my kids that when you need something or want something in life, no one's going to give it to you. You've got to go and get it."
"Live life PACKED: Purpose, Adventure, Credibility, and Kindness every day. If it doesn't tick one of those four boxes, then I'm doing the wrong thing."
"We've literally been at the point where we wonder if we've got enough money to go and buy a bottle of milk. Whereas historically, I would have taken a group of people to a restaurant and put my card over the bar without considering the bill."
"I flipped a car and turned it from a meek sheep into a tough wolf."
"I have a condition called Xavier syndrome—you want to and you just have to help people, regardless of how that might impact yourself."
"When you do the work well, it makes me happy and it makes me fulfilled. I often go above and beyond where I should go for the money because it's more about making the customer happy."
Connect with Richard Miller
This episode contains honest discussion of mental health challenges, including suicidal ideation. If you're struggling, please reach out to support services in your area.
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