Business Beyond the Transaction: How Mitch Toner Turned Anxiety, Connection, and a Man Named Phil into a Community That Changes Lives

There is a moment in Mitch Toner’s story that stops you.

He is twenty-three years old. He has spent seven years building a successful career in IT. He is competent, well-regarded, technically brilliant. And he is sleeping on the floor of his apartment, depressed, anxious, and waiting for Monday so he can feel like a person again.

When even the work stopped giving him that, there was nothing left underneath.

That is where the real story begins. Not the IT career, not the networking events, not the LinkedIn certification. The real story begins on the floor of that apartment, and everything Mitch Toner has built since then has been a response to what he found when he finally asked for help.

The kid who taught himself everything

Mitch was not built for school. He was suspended for absenteeism, which he notes with some dry humour resulted in the school instructing him to stay home even longer. He was not a troublemaker. He simply could not find relevance in what was being taught.

What he found at home was computers. He taught himself IT by tinkering, installing operating systems, pulling hardware apart and putting it back together, downloading files on a USB and seeing what they did. He became fascinated, to an almost obsessive degree, with low latency IP networking. The invisible infrastructure that makes real-time communication possible. The reason a video call is smooth or pixelated, clear or robotic.

By his mid-teens, he was the person his friends called when anything went wrong with their internet. If the game was lagging, they called Mitch. If the Wi-Fi dropped, they called Mitch. He had found his thing, entirely on his own terms, and it had given him a level of competence and confidence that no classroom had managed to produce.

A careers advisor eventually pointed him toward TAFE, where he studied telecommunications and sat his Cisco CCNA exam. He passed with ninety-six percent. The kid who had never submitted a homework assignment in his life had found something worth studying, and he went all in.

The long, slow burnout

By his early twenties, Mitch had worked for a Tier One carrier monitoring national infrastructure, joined a VoIP provider where he managed a network running four hundred simultaneous calls, and built a deep portfolio of technical skills across pre-sales, project delivery, help desk support, and on-call response.

He was very good at his job. He was also, as he would later understand, a dismissive avoidant. Someone who pours everything into work because it provides a sense of purpose that makes it easier to avoid everything else. The work gave him identity. Outside of work, he had almost nothing. A low sense of self-worth, no social life, weekends that felt like emptiness punctuated by sleep.

When the spark at work began to fade, there was nothing to cushion the fall. He was twenty-three, sleeping on the floor, and experiencing what he describes as a double layer of depression: the original unhappiness compounded by the loss of the one thing that had been keeping it at bay.

The psychologist, the lake, and the three-year walk

Mitch made the call to see a psychologist. Not because he believed it would help. Almost the opposite. He walked into that first session, he admits openly, with the intention of proving that he could not be helped. He was there to confirm his own bias.

The psychologist told him to meditate, journal, breathe, and take the pressure off himself. Things Mitch had already encountered in the books he had been reading since he was a teenager. He walked out more frustrated than when he arrived.

He went back anyway. And on the second visit, he told the psychologist exactly that. I already know all of this. Give me a seventy-two point plan. Tell me something new.

The psychologist did not give him a plan. Instead, he offered a reframe that shifted something: it is not a problem unless you think it is a problem. And then he introduced the lake.

Mitch lives near Lake Macquarie in Newcastle. The psychologist said: imagine the lake. It is too large to see all at once. But if you come with me, I will take you to a different point around the edge each time. Over the course of months or years, we will eventually work our way around the whole thing.

That is what they did. Week after week, then fortnightly, for three years. Not trying to fix everything at once. Just walking around the edge, a little further each time, until Mitch felt ready to take the wheel himself.

Parcels, preparation, and the pivot

When Mitch eventually left his last employer, he did not rush toward entrepreneurship. He knew he was carrying significant burnout and did not want to bring that into a business built around relationships.

Instead, he took a job delivering parcels for Australia Post. Waking at five in the morning, sorting two hundred and fifty packages, loading the van, driving around listening to music, taking signatures, and being done by mid-afternoon. A Christmas relief position that he did not need financially but chose intentionally. A completely different physical experience. Something that got him out of his head.

After his shifts, he would come home and quietly build his IT company. Contracts, agreements, distribution network, supply arrangements. Everything in place before he announced the business. By the time he was ready to launch, the supply already existed. He was not scrambling to catch up with demand.

He lives by the six Ps. Private preparation prevents poor performance. In an industry where his clients’ phone systems and internet connections were mission-critical infrastructure, he could not afford to show up half-ready.

The man named Phil Moore

The most important moment in Mitch’s networking story is not a strategy or a framework. It is a gesture.

The first time Mitch walked into a networking event, he was a technician sent along to a business breakfast he did not want to attend. He arrived, got his name tag, was pointed toward a door, and opened it to find a room full of strangers arranged in a loose horseshoe. Nobody saw him. Nobody turned around.

He froze. He was about to leave.

Within three seconds, a man named Phil Moore turned around and gestured with his hands. Come over here. His body language opened up, making room in the circle. He did not put Mitch on the spot. He just asked two simple questions. What is your name? What brings you here today?

That was it. That was the whole thing.

Mitch walked away from that breakfast thinking one thought: I want to be able to do that for someone else one day. Not one day eventually. As a deliberate, intentional goal. He kept going back, week after week, tried different events, different formats, different organisations. He took on leadership roles. He started mentoring newcomers. And eventually he started hosting his own events.

The communities he runs today in Newcastle are built entirely around recreating that moment. The three seconds between someone opening a door and deciding to stay. Every person who comes for the first time is the person Mitch was on that morning. And somewhere in the room, there is always someone who will do what Phil Moore did.

Mitch still tells Phil whenever he shares the story. He says: send this clip to him.

Why business owners still feel lonely online

Mitch’s answer to why so many business owners feel isolated despite being more digitally connected than at any point in history is simple and a little uncomfortable.

Most of us are waiting for someone else to reach out first.

We sit in the audience of our own social media feeds, watching other people’s connections form, wondering why nobody is reaching out to us, and not quite taking the step of reaching out to anyone else. The initiative has to come from somewhere. And it turns out that when you take it, people respond. Most people actually want to be connected with. They are just waiting for someone else to go first.

His advice is practical. Say yes to more things. Be direct about the things that drain you so you can protect the things that fill you. Show up not just where you think you should be seen, but where you genuinely want to be. And do not limit your search for connection to business contexts.

Some of Mitch’s most meaningful relationships have come through tennis. He can name twelve people he could call right now who would be on the court in ten minutes. The community that forms around a shared genuine interest is often richer than the one that forms around a shared professional category.

LinkedIn as an extension, not a substitute

The reason Mitch became a LinkedIn certified consultant is that he kept seeing the same pattern: people who showed up brilliantly in person but had no online presence, and people who had a polished online profile but never showed up anywhere in real life. Neither worked particularly well on its own.

His view is that LinkedIn is a tool, an extension of networking rather than a replacement for it. Used well, it amplifies in-person relationships and keeps connections warm between meetings. Used in isolation, without the social proof that comes from actually being known in a community, it struggles to build the kind of trust that moves a business forward.

The real work is still done in person. LinkedIn helps it last.

Be, do, have

When asked for the one truth he wishes he had known earlier, Mitch lands on something that has genuinely stayed with me.

You do not have to have what you want to have in order to be who you want to be.

Most of us operate from have, do, be. I need to have the time, the money, the circumstances, and then I can do what I need to do, and then I will become who I want to be. It is a framework that guarantees delay, because the having rarely arrives on schedule.

The inversion is be, do, have. Embody the person you want to be right now. Let that shape the actions you take. Let the actions produce the outcomes.

Mitch credits this idea to Jim Fortin’s podcast, and he applies it directly to his own story. Had he understood it earlier, he says, he would have reached out for help sooner. He would have stopped waiting to feel ready and started moving toward the person he wanted to become. He would have saved himself years.

He did eventually get there. And the version of himself he describes today, clear on who he is, comfortable with his own pace, doing work that fills him up, building community that he loves, is exactly the person the be, do, have model produces.

To connect with Mitch Toner, find him on LinkedIn, join his free Wednesday evening online networking event, or look up his in-person events in Newcastle through Meetup.