A Small Piece of a Big Pie

Duncan Malcolm MacRae reflects on a lesson that runs through every business he’s built: a small share of a big pie beats total ownership of a small one.

If you look across the different businesses I’ve built over the years—silver jewellery, reptiles, snake venom, botanical extracts—they don’t share an industry, a market or even a continent. But they do share something less obvious: in every single one, some of the most important work wasn’t done by me.

It was done by partners. And the more of these businesses I’ve built, the more convinced I’ve become that this isn’t a compromise you make when you run out of time or expertise. It’s the actual strategy.

CV Silvex and the Shopkeepers Who Knew How to Sell

When I built CV Silvex, the temptation would have been to build my own retail presence—open shops, hire staff, sell directly to tourists myself. Plenty of people in that market did exactly that.

I didn’t. I deliberately positioned myself as the supplier to the people who were already good at selling: the shop owners who knew their customers, understood the tourist market, and had spent years building the relationships that actually moved product. My job was to give them a manufacturing partner they could rely on. Their job was everything downstream of that.

It meant I never captured the full margin on a single piece of jewellery that eventually sold. But it also meant I didn’t have to become a retailer, learn that trade from scratch, and compete with people who already did it better than I ever would have. A smaller slice of a much bigger pie, sold many times over, beat owning the whole pie on a handful of shops I’d have had to build myself.

The Venom Business and Trusting the Scientists

The snake venom business made the same lesson even clearer, just from the other direction.

I knew how to keep and handle venomous snakes, and I learned how to extract and process venom to a professional standard. What I was never going to be was the scientist. Peter Mirtschin, who first brought me into the business, understood the market for venom and toxins in a way I simply didn’t, and was instrumental in introducing Indonesian venoms to the right customers. Bryan Grieg Fry and the researchers I supplied were the ones actually doing the work of understanding what these toxins were and what they could do.

My role was to be excellent at one specific link in that chain—collecting and processing venom to a standard researchers could trust—and to trust the people on either side of me to be excellent at theirs. I never needed to understand toxin biochemistry to run a successful venom business. I needed to be a good partner to people who did.

Motark and the Limits of Doing It All Myself

This lesson shows up most clearly in how I’ve built Motark Enterprise, my current botanical sciences business.

In the early stages, I sourced plant material largely on my own—travelling, building relationships with growers, learning the properties of different species firsthand. That hands-on experience was genuinely valuable, and I don’t regret a single trip. But it doesn’t scale. Sourcing at that level is slow, specialised and enormously time-consuming, and there’s a hard ceiling on how much any one person can personally oversee.

So I changed the model. Instead of trying to personally manage sourcing and manufacturing end to end, I built relationships with grower partners who already had deep expertise in their specific regions and species, and with manufacturing partners who could standardise extracts to a consistency I couldn’t easily replicate on my own. The result wasn’t that I did less—it’s that the business did dramatically more. Smaller margin per partner relationship, spread across a far larger volume, produces a better outcome than trying to personally control every gram that moves through the business.

Reptiles, Iguanas, and Borrowed Bloodlines

The same principle runs through my reptile work, from the earliest days of the breeding farm in Bali through to the rare and endangered iguanas I focus on today.

Genetically healthy breeding populations depend on genetic diversity, and no single collection—mine included—can hold enough diversity entirely on its own. I’ve always made a point of working with trusted breeders to source and exchange breeding pairs, rather than trying to build an entirely closed, self-sufficient collection. Access to the right bloodlines, at the right time, from breeders I trust, has consistently mattered more to long-term breeding success than anything I could achieve by working in isolation.

The Pattern Behind Every Business

Looking back across all of it, the pattern is the same every time. I could have tried to control the entire sales process for CV Silvex, become a venom scientist instead of a venom supplier, or insisted on personally sourcing every gram of plant material for Motark and breeding every animal from a closed collection. In every case, it would have meant doing less, more slowly, to a lower standard than the people who actually specialise in that part of the process.

You cannot do everything yourself—not well, and not at any real scale. The businesses that have worked best for me are the ones where I identified exactly which piece of the process I was genuinely best placed to own, found excellent partners for the rest, and let each of us do what we were actually good at. A small, well-defined piece of a much bigger pie has consistently outperformed trying to hold onto the whole thing myself.

This pattern of partnership runs through every chapter of my life. Read the fuller story on my About page.

Sources

• Motark Enterprise (official website). Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
• Venom Supplies Pty Ltd (official website). Tanunda, South Australia.
• Professor Bryan Fry, UQ Researchers, The University of Queensland.
• Bali Reptile Park (official website). Singapadu, Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia.