On our blog, we'll be sharing a tips and lessons learnt during the last year as small business owners. We don’t pitch ourselves as experts by any means; just a couple of hustlers who’d love to support others RSS

You’ve negotiated, ordered and are excitedly awaiting your stock.  But this is not the time to take a break (even if you really want to after the negotiating the supplier maze and pitfalls). Marketing any new business is essential, and this begins even before you have something to sell.  Building the brand before you launch is a way to generate an online presence and audience.  ‘Marketing’ can cover a multitude of areas; from physical marketing collateral, digital marketing, through to utilising your network to your advantage by ‘marketing yourself’ and gaining business exposure.For now, I will stick to the digital side of things. Having an online presence is more important than ever before.  The ability to reach people digitally has...

In an ideal world, we would all shop local.  A product sourced locally can be a great selling point, however in reality the cost of this can outweigh overseas manufacture, even if you factor in the import costs and taxes. We would have loved to have our product made in Australia, but as a start-up, we had no choice but to source overseas. I didn’t know where to start, so I entered the often-criticised world of Alibaba.  I suspect that most people have heard horror stories about off-shore production, but I think a bad experience can be avoided by doing due-diligence.  An online wholesale marketplace where you can buy products in bulk such as Alibaba allows you to compare a...

We’re no business experts…. But we are entrepreneurs. If you’re thinking of starting a small business or side hustle, we’d love to help out a little by sharing some of our experiences and lessons learnt. ‘Entrepreneur’ is an intimidating word. I suspect that most of us who have started a small business, or are planning to do so, don’t consider ourselves as such. The reality is, that no matter how modest your venture is, that is exactly what you are. Entrepreneurship has been described as: “A person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit” (Oxford English Dictionary) For the most part, myself and my business partner Leslie, would probably call ourselves...