Melissa Clarke: Starting a small business is hard work and 12% don’t survive past the first three years. A great product or a new idea isn’t enough. Business owners need to know how to manage their finances. So industry leaders have set up a new task force to find better ways of teaching financial literacy to entrepreneurs. Business reporter Adelaide Miller reports.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: When Storm Menzies started her small business a year ago, she thought the hardest part would be making the special products she’d invented to help people who struggle with their hands to use everyday beauty products.<\/p>\n
Storm Menzies: And it’s like, no, that’s like a tiny part of running a business. Like that’s the fun part. But then, yeah, all the financial stuff and the actual like running of the business. Oh my gosh. I had no experience doing that.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: She isn’t alone. A survey from accounting platform Xero has found about a third of small businesses don’t know if they turned a profit last month. Given that there are about 2.6 million small businesses across the country injecting more than $600 billion into the economy, Xero’s Angad Soin says this research is concerning.<\/p>\n
Angad Soin: If you’re running a small business and you don’t know if you’re turning a profit, you don’t know if you can pay yourself a wage, that has an economic impact to everyone. Because as we know, small businesses also usually buy and sell from other small businesses.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: A task force of representatives from small business, finance, education and politics met at Parliament House yesterday, aiming to equip people with the skills to run a business. The Minister for Small Business, Dr Anne Aly, fronted the event.<\/p>\n
Anne Aly: Government needs to work together with business, with advisors, with technology providers, with community to ensure that small businesses have all the conditions that they need, not just to get off the ground, but also to access all the resources that they can as well.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: And the suggestions are already coming in. Skye Cappuccio is the Chief Executive of the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia.<\/p>\n
Skye Cappuccio: By looking at how we educate people in some of their entry level training programs and even at the level of secondary school.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: About 12% of new businesses don’t survive past the three year mark, according to CreditorWatch.<\/p>\n
Skye Cappuccio: It’s not a fault of any individual small business owner, but we don’t have the established systems and structures to support that learning across the country. And small business owners are having to figure it out as they go.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: The move to establish the task force is welcomed by business owners like Storm Menzies.<\/p>\n
Storm Menzies: You see a really stark contrast between people who have grown up with financial literacy, people who may have parents who have run businesses, who have access to capital and funding and all of these things that you’re like, you actually sound like you’re talking jibberish.<\/p>\n
Adelaide Miller: Over the coming months, the task force will arrange workshops to hear from businesses about the support they need, before taking its recommendations to the government.<\/p>\n
Melissa Clarke: Adelaide Miller reporting there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melissa Clarke: Starting a small business is hard work and 12% don’t survive past the first three years.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[395,99589,12457,99588,15133,6032,13876,4318,34044,19846],"class_list":["post-71510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-adelaide","tag-adelaide","tag-business-skills","tag-business-start-ups","tag-business-training","tag-financial-literacy","tag-industry","tag-podcast","tag-small-business","tag-small-business-owners","tag-small-businesses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}