Taking Care of (small) Business
From credit unions to commercial property — and why small business needs a voice
Forty years watching small business from both sides of the desk — thirty inside banking and financial services, the rest inside commercial property.
The route in
Tony Romano takes Bruce Filing of Media365 through the whole route: a building society in the mid-seventies, twenty-five years in the credit union sector, out of banking in 2008, the licence in 2009, four years learning the trade under other people, then his own commercial agency in Spearwood in 2015 and the move to West Perth in 2019.
The two-speed economy
From the outside, Western Australia looks like it is doing fine — mining royalties, strong employment, all of it. Underneath that, there are cracks small business falls straight through. The businesses genuinely prospering are the ones connected to mining, or riding on the back of it.
Losing staff to the mines
Two mechanical businesses recently on the market, the same problem in both: they cannot find staff. You cannot compete with a mining wage. Apprentices in particular go where the money is, and nobody can blame them for it — which leaves a workshop owner with the work booked and nobody to do it.
What a hospitality fit-out costs
Three to four hundred thousand dollars. That is a typical hospitality fit-out, and it is spent before the doors open and before a single coffee is sold. When people ask why so many venues fail in the first two years, start there.
Compliance arriving faster than owners can absorb it
From 1 July, every real estate agency in Australia has to comply with the anti-money-laundering legislation — appointing an AML officer, training the sales team. For a smaller operator without a spare person to appoint, “one more thing” is exactly the problem.
Why the show exists
A lot of lip service is paid to small business. Very little positive action follows it. The plan is not for this to be one man’s opinion on a loop — small business owners living it, industry bodies, and the people whose decisions land on them.