Do You Want to Start a Business?
If you want to start a business, there are a few keys things that you have to do which apply to all businesses in Australia. You need to get an ABN, register a business name and GST, test your products, find clients, make a business plan, prepare an easy-to-follow structure regarding managing your business and think about further product development.
Get an ABN
Obviously, there are all sorts of different structures that you can go for, but at its most basic elements, you need to be registered with the government to be able to start your own business. Make sure you get yourself an ABN number. You can jump online onto the taxation website and get an ABN number in about 40 minutes once you know what you’re doing, which I sincerely suggest you do. They also give you lots of pamphlets, flyers, and printouts that they’ll send across to you for you. I recommend sitting down with a beer and reading through them to get more information on exactly what it is that you’re paying with GST, what your commitments are when it comes down to your BAS amongst other things.
Read: Legal Requirements for Starting a Business in Australia
What are you going to name your business?
If you have a bunch of ideas going through your head I would suggest going to a domain register. Look up domain names that are nice, short, and sweet. For instance, our business name Dorks Delivered. We’ve got the domain name Dorks. You want your business name to be easy to remember.
Read: A Guide to Business Insurance in Australia
Register a Business Name and GST
Once you got ABN, make sure that you get a business name registered. Again, a similar process, jump online, and you can get it done. Once you’ve got that, you’re then able to start trading. If you think you’re going to be turning over more than about 80 grand (not profit, but actual turnover) you need to be registered for GST. Once you’re registered for GST, you then have to be submitting your BAS every quarter.
Read: Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Business in Australia for Foreigners
Ask Yourself: Why Are You in Business?
What is your product and how are you going to test that? I see businesses all the time start up and fail because they don’t think about where they want to be in the future and how the vehicle, being their business, is going to take them there. More recently, there was a business that started up and I advised them to ask themselves where will they find their audience? It was a bricks and mortar style business and they didn’t have a lot of capital to set it up.
What they did was instead of taking my advice of getting an audience so that when you invest in bricks and mortar, you’re able to have people come in and know about you already, they spent all the money on a building lease and fit out. They wanted 50 people minimum a week coming into the store but they had about 16.
Read: How to Use the 80/20 Rule to Your Advantage as a Business Owner
Where Will Clients Come From?
How are you going to find clients? I would strongly suggest as one of your first investment choices towards your business to create a website and a Facebook page, and start inviting people into these different sources and ask them, “Do you want this?” Maybe you’ve found a great way to do something a little differently. If you’ve done that, you need to see how many people are going to be interested in this product.
Read: How to Sell Your Service or Products With Less Effort
Make a Business Plan
Creating a business plan is super important. You can do different things such as a SWOT analysis, but look into agile development. It’s all about creating the smallest, most basic item that is scalable that you can then have sent off to your clients or sent out to market. If you use agile development, once you’ve created that small product, you can then build it into a bigger product.
A great example of this is Uber. Uber wanted to make autonomous vehicles, but they couldn’t just make autonomous vehicles with the amount of money it was going to cost. Instead what they did is they created an app that allowed for a global community to drive, which allowed for them to take a little bit of money from everyone so they can then create autonomous vehicles.
Read: 9 Proven Ways to Automate Your Business for Fast Growth
Managing Your Business and Furthering Product Development
Have an easy-to-follow structure in place. When you’ve got a product that you know is going to work, then you can start to manage it with other products that allow you to gain visibility into what your customers are interested in.
Once you have more insights into the way customers they are using your product, that’s when you can really develop your products. but you need to have a system to be able to manage all those clients. I hope this has been useful!
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