Harold Mitchell's career in advertising started at seventeen when he left West Gippsland for Melbourne with GBP 2 in his pocket and found a job as an office boy in an ad agency. By the time he was thirty-three he was running the media buying operations of Masius Wynne Williams, Australia's third-biggest ad agency. In 1976 he opened Mitchell & Partners, now the largest independently owned media buying agency in Australia, of which he remains chairman and sole owner.