Small Business Support Resources
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- Branding 1
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- Business Foundations 19
- Business Support 11
- Change Management 3
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Business Foundations
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At Business Abundance, we love dealing with business owners to help them achieve their goals, whatever they might be. This business-focused podcast will be delivering free content for business owners to help them solve problems and grow their business. It'll cover topics from marketing right through to finance and work/life balance. To sign up for podcast updates:
Productivity & Mindset
Marketing
Employees & Recruitment
Systems & Operations
Being good at your trade is not the same as being good at business
People go into business because they’re good at what they do, not because they’re trained to run a business. A tiler, landscaper, electrician, designer, or consultant doesn’t wake up one day wanting to manage accounting software, compliance, people, systems, and cash flow. They start because there’s demand for their work, and at some point, that demand turns into responsibility.
Why Control Feels Safer Than Stepping Away
When processes are clear, roles are defined, and expectations are shared, responsibility spreads. The business becomes less fragile, not more. And stepping away stops feeling like abandonment and starts feeling like freedom.
Why Many Business Owners Have Bought Themselves a Job
Most people don’t start a business because they want to work longer hours with more risk and less certainty. They start because they want independence, flexibility, better income potential, or the chance to build something of their own. No one sets out with the goal of buying themselves a job.
Small Business Burnout Often Starts in Survival Mode
When you’re no longer able to look ahead and every day is spent putting out urgent fires, something has shifted. Decisions become reactive, sleep and nutrition fall away, patience runs thin, and anxiety becomes a constant background noise. This is survival mode.
The Most Dangerous Phase of Burnout
After reflecting on Ian’s story of burnout in Episode #3 of the Business Abundance Podcast, it became clear that the warning signs deserve more attention. If you haven’t already, I recommend listening to Ian’s story before reading on, it provides important context for what follows.
If You’re Burnt Out, More Rest Isn’t the Answer
We’re taught that the solution is self-care, holidays, and rest, and while those things can help, they’re often band-aid solutions. In the end, you still have to return to the job that created the burnout in the first place.
Burnout isn’t about how much you work.
It’s about how trapped you feel while working.
Most Advice Doesn’t Work
Most people don’t consume advice to make decisions. Instead, they want to feel productive, inspired or reassured. Unfortunately, it's become entertainment. You can watch, read and nod along and because there is always more advice, nothing ever feels urgent enough to act on it. Most advice doesn’t fail because it’s wrong. It fails because it’s absorbed without context, without diagnosis, and without a decision attached to it.
How Smarter Systems Create a More Efficient Business
If your business is still weighed down by paperwork or disconnected tools, it might be time for a smarter setup.
Cybersecurity: Why Business Owners in Australia Can’t Afford to Ignore It
In 2023-2024 alone, Australians reported over 87,000 cybercrime incidents. That’s one report every six minutes! For small businesses, it’s estimated that the average incident costs about $49,600. For many, that’s enough to erase profit margins for the year.
Stop Throwing Money at Ads
Stop wasting money on marketing that doesn’t convert. Learn how to focus on spend vs return, invest wisely, and build a strategy that drives real customers. Not just clicks.
Excuses from Employees – Boundaries and Accountability
Excuses are rarely about the actual problem; they’re about protecting ourselves from discomfort. When something goes wrong, our brains look for the quickest way to preserve our self-image to protect the story we tell ourselves that we’re competent, capable and in control.
The Keeper Test – Keeping Good Employees
The Keeper Test is a brutally simple idea made famous by Netflix’s culture deck:
“If one of your employees can to you tomorrow and told you they were leaving for a similar job at another company, would you fight to keep them?”
If your gust reaction is yes, they’re a keeper. If your honest reaction is no, it’s time to start planning their exit.
Treating Your Employees as Adults
The trap many owners fall into is assuming more training will fix every performance gap. But often, the problem isn’t that people don’t know what to do – it’s that they’re not taking responsibility for doing it. That’s why coaching is important.
Hire the Best, Fire the Rest: Standards, Not Desperation
Every hire in a small business has a big footprint. In a large company, a poor performer can hide in a small team; they’re instantly visible, and their mistakes are instantly felt.
Scrap the Mission and Vision
As the months pass and the to-do lists pile up. It becomes increasingly easy to forget the reason you started in the first place. I am pretty sure you didn’t start your business to spend your life on the edge of burnout.
Working With Yourself (a.k.a The Boss You Can’t Quit)
You’re the boss here. You set the pace, make the calls and pay the price if it all goes pear-shaped. The funny, and slightly annoying thing is, you’re also the employee. This means your success depends entirely on whether the boss side of you can get the employee side of you to show up, focus and not get lost in an Instagram scroll hole.
Why Did You Start Your Business?
No one wakes up one morning and thinks, “I want to work twice as hard, take on all the risks and give up my weekend, just for the fun of it”.
And yet, as of June 2024, there were 2,589,595 small businesses in Australia. That makes up 97.2% of Australian businesses*.
What is a Business Owner?
When I ask people what they do, and they say they own a business, it doesn’t take long to realise that those people ‘own a job’. I don’t mean that as an insult – it’s a reality for so many small business owners, especially in the early years.
The 80/20 Rule: Less Hustle, More Impact
The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is the idea that a small percentage of actions produce most of our results. Now it’s not always 80% and 20% but the pattern holds. It’ll apply to your business in a lot of ways.
Managing Personality Types
If you’ve ever explained something perfectly clearly, only to have the other person stare back at you like you’ve just read them IKEA instructions in reverse Swedish, you already know this – people don’t all think the same way.
If people don’t know about your business, they can’t choose it. It doesn’t matter how good it is.