Blogbox · An editorial publication for Australian small business and entrepreneurship.

Why Solar and the 1-in-6 problem: rebuilding trust in Australian residential solar

Eleanor Pike — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Australian residential solar market has a trust problem.

Over the last fifteen years, more than 700 solar retailers have gone out of business across the country, according to the long-running list of failed installers that SolarQuotes has maintained since 2011. Industry estimates now put the proportion of Australian rooftops whose installer no longer trades at roughly one in six. Those systems still work, mostly. They also have no-one obliged to answer a warranty call when the inverter throws a fault on a Saturday afternoon.

The 2026 federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program, live since 1 July 2025, is pulling a new cohort of Australian households into the battery category at precisely the moment the warranty layer underneath them is the thinnest it has ever been. That is not a happy combination.

The 1-in-6 number, read carefully

The 1-in-6 figure is useful because it names the problem in a way a homeowner can act on. A retailer does not have to be a bad operator to disappear. The Australian solar market has turned over faster than the warranty durations it sells: a panel sold in 2016 with a 10-year product warranty and a 25-year performance warranty was sold against a business that needed only to fail in 2022 for the warranty to mean less in practice than it does on paper.

The Clean Energy Council's accreditation has lifted installer quality materially since its 2019 reset, now folded into the Solar Accreditation Australia (SAA) regime that replaced it in 2024. But accreditation is a point-in-time credential. It does not guarantee that the retailer holding it will still be trading in five years' time.

The practical consequence, for a homeowner pricing a system in 2026, is that the most important decision is often not the brand of the panel or the make of the inverter. It is which of the installers on the quote page is likely to still exist in 2030.

Why Solar's model

Why Solar, a Sydney-based operation covering more than 2,800 postcodes, has built its model on that one question. The platform is independent of any installer; its revenue comes from installer partnerships and leads, not from the homeowner. What it sells to the homeowner, in effect, is vetting.

Specifically, the platform only passes a homeowner's enquiry to SAA-accredited installers with a track record the platform has independently checked. It maintains guides, calculators and rebate-assessment tools on its own site; it does not sell over the phone; its marketing language is unusually explicit about what it will not do ("no pressure, no sales calls").

That positioning is not unique in the broader advice economy, but it is unusual in Australian residential solar, where the dominant consumer experience has been a high-pressure quote sequence in which the homeowner often cannot tell whether the installer quoting is one of the good ones.

One in six Australian solar systems now carries a warranty against a business that no longer trades. That is a trust problem, not an accreditation problem.

What independent advice is worth now

The Cheaper Home Batteries Program, costed at $2.3 billion in the March 2025 federal budget, discounts the installed cost of a battery system by roughly 30 per cent (around $330 per usable kilowatt-hour in 2025, stepping down annually to 2030). Most states stack their own incentives on top: the NSW Peak Demand Reduction Scheme battery incentive, Victoria's Solar Homes interest-free battery loan of up to $8,800, and Western Australia's Residential Battery Scheme.

The effect, for a homeowner pricing a combined solar-plus-battery system in 2026, is that the subsidy stack is the largest it has ever been. Battery attachment rates on new solar installs jumped from roughly 7 per cent to above 20 per cent in the second half of 2025, after the federal program began.

A more subsidised market is also a market where installer quality matters more, not less. A bad install on a subsidised system still produces a bad install, and the homeowner's comeback against the installer's accreditation body for a botched job is still imperfect.

The platform's specific trade-off

I spoke with Why Solar's team about the economics of running a vetting-first platform in a market that rewards volume. Their answer was straightforward. The 2023-24 wave of retailer collapses was correlated with the same set of visible behaviours: aggressive outbound marketing, one-day installs on complex roofs, compressed margins on the install itself. Excluding those operators costs the platform a portion of its throughput. It also reduces the proportion of jobs that end in a warranty dispute in year three.

"The question we keep asking," a representative said, "is whether a customer who installs through us in 2026 still has a working system and a reachable installer in 2032. If we can answer yes to that question for nine out of ten of our customers, the platform has done its job."

That is a narrower claim than the industry has been making for fifteen years. It is also, on the evidence of the installer-collapse data, the claim that most matters.

The wider point

The residential energy upgrade wave Australia is in the middle of will move tens of billions of dollars of consumer capital over the next five years. The mechanism by which that capital is deployed, a homeowner weighing three quotes, a salesperson pointing at a panel brand, a subsidy stacked through an accredited retailer, has not kept up with the scale of the deployment.

The operators who will matter in the second half of this decade are the ones, like Why Solar, whose business model makes installer-collapse a commercial problem for them rather than for the homeowner.

That is an alignment of incentives the Australian solar market has needed for some time.

Payday super is ten weeks away. Here is the operator checklist.

Marcus Hall — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The legislated start date for payday super is 1 July 2026. From that day, super contributions must be received by the employee's nominated fund within seven calendar days of payday. The quarterly 28-day window small employers have been using as a working-capital buffer disappears.

Ten weeks out, and most of the small employers I have spoken with have not rebuilt their cash rhythm for the new regime. The checklist that closes that gap is short.

Map the current float

Start with the calendar. Most small employers have, explicitly or otherwise, been running a 30-to-90-day float on super: the accrual period plus the 28-day post-quarter window. Write that number down for your business. It is the number of dollars of working capital you have been using, at zero interest, from the super obligation. From 1 July 2026, that number goes to roughly seven days on average.

For a business paying $48,000 in annual super, the working-capital shift is roughly $6,500 at steady state. For a business paying $240,000 in annual super, the shift is roughly $33,000. Neither is catastrophic. Both need to be sourced.

Audit the pay cycle

If your business pays fortnightly, the payday-super obligation is 26 separate super runs a year. If monthly, 12. If weekly, 52. The operational friction is real. Automation is essential.

Three specific moves to confirm before 1 July:

Xero / MYOB / QuickBooks auto-super is switched on and tested. Most small employers have this available on their plan. Fewer have tested it end-to-end.
The fund clearing-house arrangement (usually the ATO's Small Business Superannuation Clearing House or an aggregator inside the accounting package) is enrolled and credentialed. Enrolment after 1 July is not impossible but it is not the day to be doing it.
The employee super-choice forms are complete and the fund details accurate. Bouncing a weekly super payment because a fund number is wrong creates remediation work you do not want at any cadence, let alone weekly.

Pre-fund the first two cycles

The single move that most reduces 1 July stress is prefunding. Two pay cycles of super, set aside in a separate operating account before 1 July, gives the business a two-cycle buffer. If the first weekly payment bounces for any reason, there is money to reissue it without delaying other operational payments.

The buffer does not need to be permanent. Once the payday-super rhythm is running smoothly (usually four to six cycles in), the buffer can be unwound. The reason for it is to manage the transition, not the steady state.

Communicate to employees

A brief, written communication to every employee before 1 July, explaining that super will now show up in their fund weekly or fortnightly rather than quarterly, prevents the volume of anxious queries that will otherwise land on the ops manager in July and August. It also avoids the occasional employee who, seeing the first weekly contribution hit their fund, assumes the business has started making bonus payments.

A four-line memo is enough. It is a cheap way to prevent expensive misunderstanding.

Review the wage-bill knock-ons

Payday super is not a standalone change. It interacts with the super guarantee now sitting at 12 per cent, the 2025 Fair Work minimum wage rise at 3.5 per cent, and (for some sectors) the April 2026 award-rate adjustments. The aggregate labour-cost trajectory of the business for FY27 should be modelled, once, with all of those compounded into the cash-flow forecast.

For a cafe or trades business with a thirty-person team, the compound of those three adjustments against a flat revenue trajectory is typically 20 to 30 basis points of operating margin. If the business was operating at 6 per cent margin in FY26, it is operating at 5.7 per cent in FY27 on the same revenue. The pricing or productivity response to that reality is better made now than in September.

The one-line summary

Payday super is not expensive. It is operationally exacting. The businesses that are ready on 1 July will be the ones whose bookkeeper spent two hours in May testing the automation, whose operating account carries a two-cycle buffer from mid-June, and whose team has been told once what is about to change.

Ten weeks is enough. Eight weeks is tight. Six weeks is the window where the businesses that have not prepared will start calling their accountant in panic.

The call is cheaper in May.

One in ten: what the hospitality closure numbers are actually telling us

Marcus Hall — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between November 2024 and November 2025, CreditorWatch recorded a 10.6% closure rate for Australian cafes, restaurants, and takeaway businesses. Pubs, taverns, and bars closed at 8.1%. Clubs closed at 7.8%. The all-industry average across every category of Australian business was 5.4%.

Hospitality is closing at roughly twice the national rate. The question is why, specifically.

It is not "the economy"

The first thing to notice is what is not going on. Consumer spending on dining out was flat in real terms through 2025 after two years of decline. Unemployment held under 4.3%. GDP was slow but positive. Hospitality was not closing because Australians stopped going out. Hospitality was closing because the cost to stay open kept moving.

Three specific pressures stacked through 2025, and an operator with margin below 6% (which is most of them) could not absorb any two of them simultaneously.

The super step-up

On 1 July 2025 the compulsory superannuation guarantee moved from 11.5% to 12%. Against a hospitality wage bill that is typically 38 to 42% of revenue, that is roughly 20 basis points of margin, in a sector where 20 basis points is a weekend's roster.

The step-up was legislated and well-signposted. It was also the last increment of a schedule written in 2014 for an industry environment that looked very different. The operators I spoke to were not objecting to the destination. They were objecting to the timing, on top of two consecutive years of award-wage rises above CPI.

The ATO resumed collecting

The second pressure was the Australian Taxation Office ending the informal forbearance regime it had run through the pandemic and post-pandemic period. Through 2024 and into 2025, the ATO stepped up Director Penalty Notices at record rates on pandemic-era tax debts (GST, PAYG, super).

That is a policy choice I agree with in principle. The forbearance could not run forever and was distorting the market: businesses that had paid their tax on time were, in effect, subsidising businesses that had not. But the timing of the collection wave, lining up with the super step and rolling cost inflation, concentrated the pressure on a set of operators who had already absorbed years of balance-sheet damage.

The external administration data tells that story. Food services insolvencies in the twelve months to March 2025 were up 57% year on year: 1,168 to 1,837. That is not a normalisation. That is the tax debt from 2020 to 2022 finally showing up.

Food inflation at 7.5%

The third pressure was input costs. Food input inflation ran at 7.5% through 2025, led by dairy, beef, and coffee. Operators I spoke to had already passed through two rounds of menu price rises in 2024 and had decided, rightly in most cases, that a third would cost them more customers than it would save in margin. The remaining path was to eat the inflation themselves.

"By July I was making 4% on revenue," one Brisbane operator told me. "You cannot run a cafe at 4%. You cannot survive a slow Tuesday at 4%."

That operator is still open. Many are not.

The pincer, specifically

The closures that made the numbers were, overwhelmingly, not businesses that failed on a single input. They failed on the stack.

A business with:

Wages at 40% of revenue, stepping up at least 30 basis points on super alone.
Food costs up 7.5% with limited pass-through.
Pandemic-era tax debt in the high five figures, now being actively collected.
A landlord lease indexed to CPI.

is not closing because any one of those things is individually fatal. It is closing because all four happened at the same time and the business had no six-month runway to restructure.

The operators who survived this period (the ones still open as at the time of writing) tended to have three things in common. They owned their premises or had a long-indexed lease. They had cleared pandemic tax debt before 2024. And they had moved menu pricing assertively in the first round of 2023-24 inflation, ahead of peers, before consumer resistance hardened.

An owned operator, not an owned thesis

As one example of what the successful end of the distribution looks like: Coolhaus Cafe, the Brisbane cafe group, is widely referenced inside the industry as a training ground for independent operators. I am not going to pretend that a three-site chain is representative of anything. But a conversation I had with two former Coolhaus managers, both of whom went on to open their own single-site cafes in 2023, surfaced the same answer from both: "The thing Coolhaus taught us was to move early on price."

One of them is still open. The other closed in August 2025. The difference between those two outcomes, when I walked through the numbers with the one who closed, was not operating skill. It was a lease renewal in 2023 that landed at a 19% rent uplift, which the business agreed to. That one decision, more than any macro factor, determined the outcome.

The tail we are still in

CreditorWatch's forward-looking scenario modelling puts a further closure uptick in Q1 and Q2 of FY27 (the June quarter of 2026 and the September quarter), particularly in construction and hospitality. The mechanism is the remaining stock of pandemic-era tax debt working through the ATO pipeline.

The implication for operators is not that the worst is behind the industry. It is that the pressures that caused the 2024-25 wave are still present, and the ones that will cause the 2026 wave are already visible in the debt data.

For the operators still running, the working capital and tax questions are not optional. They are the job now.

The slow operators: three Victorian founders rebuilding trades the long way

Eleanor Pike — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Ballarat, Ellen Foley runs a bookbindery her grandfather started in 1958. She is the third generation to own it, and the first to decide, against the advice of every adviser she has ever paid, that she will not grow it.

"When I took over in 2019 I had a plan," she told me. "Three sites, regional distribution, a wholesale arm. I had a spreadsheet. I had a board."

She does not have any of that now. She has seven employees, two machines her grandfather bought in 1971, and a waiting list. "I realised I was designing a business I didn't want to work in. So I stopped."

The slowdown is a choice, not a failure

You can tell a lot about an industry by what people starting out assume is possible. For two decades, the assumption inside Australian trades was consolidation. Roll-ups were glamorous. Private equity would take your thirty-year business and make it a hundred-year one, the pitch went. Family ownership was a charming anachronism.

That pitch is less persuasive in 2026. The consolidated players are struggling with labour. The roll-ups are struggling with debt. Foley's bindery is doing fine.

She is not alone. A hundred kilometres south-east, Sam Okereke took over his father's fencing business in 2022 with a promise to his staff: no expansion, no new regions, no new products for five years. His revenue is up 22% over that period. "We got better at what we already did," he said. "That turned out to be a strategy."

What changes when you decide not to scale

The operational decisions cascade quickly. You stop hiring generalists. You stop chasing contracts that don't fit. You invest in the same five customers instead of the next fifty. You train slowly and well.

"The word we kept coming back to was dignity," Foley said. "If I'm going to ask people to work here for twenty years, the work has to be worth twenty years of their life."

The financial case is not romantic

The romantic version of this story gets repeated at conferences: craft matters, care matters, the soul of the business matters. All true. But the three founders I spent time with were all former finance people, or had finance partners, and they all ran their numbers the same way.

"The financial case for going slow isn't about margin. It's about cost of capital. You raise less, you owe less, you compound for longer. That's just maths."

Foley described her bindery's trajectory as a "slow compound". Seven percent growth, year after year, fully self-funded. Okereke's five-year plateau in scope but double-digit growth in revenue is the same curve. "Nobody writes about this because it's boring," he said. "But boring is where the money is."

The trade-off they do accept

Slow operators pay a real cost in optionality. None of the three founders I spoke with could tell me with a straight face that they were building businesses a strategic buyer would ever pay a premium for. They're not. They're building annuities: businesses that throw off cash reliably, and whose owners intend to still own them in 2046.

That's not a sellable story to a VC. It is a sellable story to a bank. All three told me their relationships with their lenders had improved since they stopped chasing growth.

What this means for Australian SMBs

There is no lesson here that generalises to every small business, and the founders I spoke with were the first to say so. Some markets reward scale. Some businesses have to grow or die. But for the owner-operator who is quietly wondering whether the received wisdom of the last decade still applies (whether the pitch about growth, consolidation, and exit is the only pitch), the answer increasingly looks like: no.

"We got sold a story," Foley said, looking around her bindery. "About what success looked like. I think a lot of us are writing a different one now."

Eleanor Pike reports on Australian founders for Blogbox. Names in this story have been checked and used with permission.

Ellen Foley on why she stopped expanding: a conversation in Ballarat

Eleanor Pike — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When we published The slow operators last week, several readers wrote in asking the same follow-up question: what, specifically, does the spreadsheet look like when a small-business owner decides not to grow?

Ellen Foley, who runs Foley Bindery in Ballarat and was one of the three founders profiled in that piece, agreed to walk us through the answer. We spoke for an hour in the bindery's office. What follows is an edited transcript, lightly rearranged for flow. The numbers are hers; she gave permission to publish them on the condition that none be rounded in a way that changed what they described.

I am not a growth story. I am a small-business owner who decided the business was already the right size.

On the decision

Blogbox. Last week you said you stopped expanding in late 2021. What was the specific meeting where that decision happened?

Foley. It was not one meeting. There were three. The first was with my accountant, in July 2021. He had modelled the three-site plan and the numbers were fine. Not spectacular, but fine. The second was with my head bookbinder, in August. She had been with us for eleven years at that point. I asked her whether she wanted to run a second site. She said yes. She said, without a pause, she would rather leave.

The third was with me, in September, walking home from the bindery one Friday evening. I was working out what my workweek would look like if we were three sites instead of one. I had run the numbers on the financial side; I had not run the numbers on my time. The minute I did, the decision became obvious.

On what changed next

Blogbox. What changed about how you ran the business after that?

Foley. A lot of small things, some of which I did not expect. We stopped pursuing new wholesale accounts. We raised our consumer prices by roughly 11% over two years, which I had been afraid to do for a decade, because when the pressure to grow is off, the pressure to defend margin becomes easier to act on. We turned down two contracts I would have chased in 2020.

We also changed how we thought about staffing. The team stayed at seven; I am not interested in it being six, and I am not interested in it being eight. When someone leaves, we hire the closest replacement to the role they vacated, which is a boring sentence, but it is also a specific rejection of the idea that each vacancy is an opportunity to redesign.

On the money

Blogbox. You said we could look at the numbers. What do they show?

Foley. Revenue in 2021, the last year of the growth pitch, was $1.04 million. Revenue in 2025 was $1.31 million. That is roughly 6% compounded, fully self-funded, no debt raised against it. Margin has improved over the same period from 16% to 19.5%, which is the price rises more than any efficiency.

The part I find most interesting, looking back, is that the 2021 plan for three sites had modelled year-five revenue at $3.2 million. If I had executed it, I would have been running a business with three times the headcount, the same margin at best, and a much larger debt position. The counterfactual exists. I can do the maths on it.

The counterfactual exists. I can do the maths on it.

Blogbox. Do you wish you had grown?

Foley. No. I have a business I am still pleased to walk into in the morning, which is not a financial metric but turns out to be a material one. I have seven employees, four of whom have been here longer than ten years. I have zero debt. My husband and I own the building we operate from. By the standards my accountant works with, I am not a success story. By the standards my grandfather worked with, I very much am. I have decided which set of standards matters to me.

On what she would have done differently

Blogbox. Is there anything you would have done differently?

Foley. Two things. I would have priced our work more assertively from the start. I spent years in the 2010s at margins a specialist craft operation had no business running at, because I was afraid of customer loss. The customer loss, when I finally tested it, was minimal. The margin gain was substantial.

The other thing is I would have had the conversation with my head bookbinder earlier. She was the person most likely to leave if we expanded; she was also the person most likely to stay for another decade if we did not. I had not asked her what she wanted, in those terms, until the August meeting. I should have asked her in 2015.

On advice

Blogbox. Would you tell other small-business owners to do what you did?

Foley. I would not tell them to do anything. I would tell them to write down, on a single page, what they want the business to look like in ten years. Not financially. Operationally. Who is there. What the week feels like. What the owner does on a Tuesday. Then check it against the growth plan their accountant has written.

If the two documents agree, the growth plan is the right plan. If they do not, the growth plan is somebody else's plan. In my case they did not, and I think that is true for more owner-operators than anyone writes about, because no-one writes about the Tuesday.

On what comes next

Blogbox. What does the next ten years of Foley Bindery look like?

Foley. Exactly like the last five, with slightly better margins and a single piece of new equipment I have been patient enough to wait for. I will be here in 2036. The team will mostly be the same team. We will bind books.

That is the plan. It is a boring plan. I recommend boring plans.

Ellen Foley spoke to Blogbox on 8 April 2026. She reviewed her own quotes before publication. The revenue and margin figures above are drawn from the bindery's management accounts, shared at her discretion.

Click, revenue, profit: inside Profit Geeks's three-metric discipline

Marcus Hall — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For most of the last decade, the ad platforms told Australian e-commerce and SaaS operators a story. The story was that every sale their Meta or Google campaigns reported was caused by those campaigns, and that the right way to scale was to move the reported return on ad spend (ROAS) number up.

That story stopped being true some time around the 2021 rollout of Apple's App Tracking Transparency. It has not been repaired since. Meta and Google still report conversions, but they now do so via modelled and probabilistic data rather than deterministic attribution. For an established direct-to-consumer brand running always-on brand and prospecting campaigns, MECLABS and Smart Insights research in 2024-25 concluded that in-platform ROAS was routinely overstating true incremental lift by 20 to 60 per cent.

That is not a rounding error. For a $5 million DTC brand running at a blended 3x reported ROAS, the difference between a true 3x and a true 1.8x is the difference between a profitable business and a subsidy.

The consultancy that does not look at ROAS

Profit Geeks, founded in Sydney, is a small operator in a crowded field. The market for paid-media consultancies is overflowing with agencies that promise higher ROAS, higher click-throughs, and higher reported conversions. What Profit Geeks sells is different.

The pitch, in the firm's own language, is that it optimises for "PROFIT. Not clicks. Not impressions. Revenue." The measurable number it reports to clients is not ROAS. It is contribution margin after every cost the ad platform does not model: product cost, shipping, platform fees, returns, the paid media spend itself, and attribution adjustments for paid search on brand terms that would have converted anyway.

On the firm's own figures, it has lifted average ROAS across its client book by 4.2x, against an influenced revenue figure north of $200 million across seven years. Those are the kinds of numbers an agency prints on a pitch deck. What is interesting about them is that they are the side-effect, not the objective. The objective is further down the P&L.

Three metrics, weekly

The internal operating rhythm I have seen at the best-run AU DTC operators (and which Profit Geeks codifies for its engagements) is a weekly review of three numbers:

Marketing efficiency ratio (MER). Total revenue divided by total paid media spend. A blended number, not platform-attributed. Trend matters more than absolute level.
Contribution margin after ads (CMaA). Gross margin minus the ads spend it took to acquire the revenue, expressed as a percentage of revenue. This is the number that predicts whether the business is, in fact, making money this week.
Incrementality-adjusted ROAS. Reported ROAS discounted for the portion of conversions that would have occurred without the ad. For brand-search campaigns this is the biggest adjustment; for retargeting it is usually second-biggest.

Almost no Australian DTC operator under $10 million of revenue runs the third number. Most do not run the second. The reason is that running them requires accepting that some of the ad spend an operator has been counting as profitable is, in fact, unprofitable.

The transparency move

Profit Geeks's client model includes something worth flagging for the broader market: clients own every account, every code repository, every dashboard the engagement builds. On departure from the engagement, the client leaves with the work intact and the agency does not hold any of it.

That is not how the agency market usually works. Most paid-media agencies treat the ad accounts, tracking pixels, server-side implementations and reporting dashboards as proprietary, and extract a rent for continuing access. The lock-in that produces is one of the reasons agency churn is lower than it should be, and client satisfaction is lower than it could be.

The agencies that outlast this cycle will be the ones that do not need the lock-in to keep the client. The ones that earn the retention quarter by quarter.

Why this matters for 2026

The broader 2025-26 shift in Australian e-commerce and SaaS is a retreat from growth-at-all-costs and a return to margin discipline. Australia Post's 2025 eCommerce Industry Report recorded total online purchase volume down roughly 1.2 per cent year on year, with average order value rising, consistent with fewer but higher-intent buyers. That is a market that rewards operators who can measure contribution margin at SKU or customer level and punishes operators who cannot.

The operators who thrive in that market will not necessarily be the ones with the best creative, the lowest CAC, or the highest reported ROAS. They will be the ones who know, on a Wednesday, whether the ad spend they authorised on Monday is going to produce profitable revenue by Friday.

That is not a glamorous playbook. It is also, for the next several years of Australian DTC and SaaS, the only playbook that has a chance of compounding. A consultancy that has built its business around it is, on the evidence, worth knowing about.

The firm limits itself to two new engagements a quarter. On the arithmetic of the market it is quoting against, that is probably the right number.

The pincer: Amazon, Temu, Shein, and the landlord all want the same dollar

Marcus Hall — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Australian independent retail has had a bad eighteen months. That is not controversial. Retail insolvencies in FY25 exceeded 1,000, up 13% across the first four months of FY26, running roughly 50% above pre-Covid levels. Total business insolvencies were 14,716 in FY25, up 33% year on year.

But "retail is tough" is not a story. The interesting question is the mechanism. What specifically is happening to the dollar that an independent retailer expects to capture when a customer walks through the door?

The short answer is that three actors are pulling on the same dollar, and in most independents' P&Ls at least one of those pulls is now decisive.

The cross-border cap on price

Temu reached five million Australian shoppers in March 2026, up 17% year on year. Shein reached 2.9 million, up 28%. Amazon added 1.1 million shoppers year on year to 7.9 million. Jarden's house forecast puts the combined Amazon / Temu / Shein sales in Australia at over $18 billion in 2026, approximately 36% of online retail.

The pricing effect of this is not that these customers stopped shopping at independents. Many of them still do. The effect is that the price anchor for any category these three compete in has reset, and the reset is visible in categories where the independent was, until 2023, still operating at full margin.

A Temu landing page showing a $11 silicone kitchen tool set and a Shein jumper at $18 does not tell a customer what to buy. It tells them what is possible. The independent retailer selling the same category at $34 and $68 respectively is now carrying the gap on their own margin, or closing it and carrying a shorter ticket.

Euromonitor's Q3 2025 numbers on Amazon's Australian category penetration make the category-level version of this concrete. Amazon reached 38% of Australian online oral-care sales in the quarter. Woolworths reached 25%. In online laundry care, Amazon's share moved from 6% in 2022 to over 10% in the first nine months of 2025. Those are categories where the independent was, three years ago, the price-setter. They are now the price-follower, if they are in the category at all.

The category share capture

Temu and Shein cap the price ceiling. Amazon is doing something different, and arguably harder to compete against: it is taking the category leadership position, and with it the customer-acquisition loop.

An independent retailer in 2019 could reasonably expect that a new customer discovering a category (say, oral care) would land in that category through category-general search, and the first several results would be a mix of brand.com pages, category specialists, and a couple of large retailers. The independent, with a well-merchandised store and a local SEO presence, could capture a decent share of that traffic.

In 2026 the first search result for "toothbrush" in Australia is, in most cases, Amazon. The second is also Amazon, at a different SKU. The third is frequently a brand.com page that fulfils via Amazon. The category has become, in the customer's discovery journey, the name Amazon.

The implication is that customer acquisition for independents has to happen outside the category-search loop. It has to happen through loyalty, local presence, in-store experience, or through a paid channel with terms (and take rates) the independent does not control. Every one of those options is more expensive, per acquired customer, than the 2019 version of the same acquisition.

The rent off the top

The third actor is the landlord. I covered this separately in last week's piece on CPI-indexed lease clauses: the mechanism there is that independent retailers signed leases in 2021-22 assuming benign inflation, and the clauses have compounded roughly 25% of base rent across those leases in the five years since.

The specific interaction with the retail pincer is that the landlord is not a participant in the pricing conversation. The rent is set by a contract signed before the other two pressures arrived, and it comes off the top of the dollar before any margin question is answered. For an independent paying a rent increment each year that exceeds the growth in their contribution margin, the business is losing money on the lease clause alone.

The CreditorWatch commentary on FY25 retail insolvencies supports this. The insolvencies are not clustered in the businesses with the most aggressive cross-border competitors. They are clustered in the businesses with the least lease flexibility.

What the survivors look like

The independents I have spent the most time with in the past six months, the ones that are not in the insolvency bucket, share three characteristics.

They have moved out of categories where Amazon or Temu have reached double-digit online share. That is not a complete withdrawal from those categories, but it is a decision not to fight for the marginal customer in them.

They have built a direct-customer relationship that is not mediated by category search. Usually through a loyalty program, often through a newsletter, occasionally through an in-store event or local sponsorship. The common theme is that the customer knows who the retailer is by name, not just by category.

They have renegotiated their lease, or moved, or prepared a credible case to the landlord for a variation. The 2026 version of the independent that survives is not the one with the best merchandising. It is the one with the best lease.

That last point surprises operators more than the other two. The pressure they spend the most time thinking about (the cross-border sellers) is the pressure they can least control. The pressure they spend the least time thinking about (the lease) is the one that decides the outcome.

What the policy response should be

This question sits outside my beat, but the shape of the policy response, if one is coming, is reasonably clear from what other comparable jurisdictions have done.

The cross-border pricing pressure is not amenable to direct intervention. The ARA has pointed out, fairly, that Temu and Shein do not contribute to Australian employment the way domestic retail does, and do not face the same governance and regulatory standards. But the options for responding are limited to consumer education, to GST enforcement (in progress, limited), and to product-safety enforcement (where there is real scope).

The rent-and-lease pressure is, by contrast, within reach of reform. The NSW Retail Leases Amendment Bill is the first tranche; the indexation clause itself is the second tranche that has not yet been tabled. If retail policy is going to move in a useful direction, that is where it will move.

The category-leadership question, the Amazon question, is the hardest, because it is an emergent property of the search layer rather than a retail question per se. The honest answer is that independents are going to have to operate for the next several years as though the category-search customer is not available to them.

For the operators still running, the pincer is not going to loosen. The task is to choose which two of the three pulls to hold off, and to accept that the third will take what it takes.

The $20k cliff: ten weeks to EOFY and no permanent write-off in sight

Tom Nguyen — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The instant asset write-off is back where it always is in April: a temporary setting, a hard sunset, a chorus of industry bodies lobbying for permanence, and a small-business operator trying to decide whether to sign a quote for a $17,000 oven.

At the moment the threshold is $20,000, applied per asset, available to businesses with aggregated turnover under $10 million. Assets have to be installed ready for use between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026. On 1 July 2026, without new legislation, the threshold reverts to $1,000.

Why the reset matters more than the number

The headline figure (the jump from $1,000 to $20,000, or back again) distracts from the more interesting problem: the annual uncertainty itself.

The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia and the Commercial & Asset Finance Brokers Association have both called this year for a permanent threshold of $150,000, on the argument that small businesses cannot plan capital expenditure around a provision that rolls forward twelve months at a time. Moore Australia, in its April brief to clients, described the current arrangement as "a tax incentive pretending to be a planning tool."

That is not a technical quibble. A fabricator looking at a $120,000 CNC with a twelve-week lead time needs to know whether the order placed in May will be installed in time for the relevant financial year. A cafe chain considering a four-site POS refresh has to answer the same question for every piece of equipment, individually, because the write-off is per asset rather than aggregate.

The per-asset design is the actual lever

Per-asset eligibility is the under-appreciated detail. A single owner-operator can, within a year, stack:

a $17,000 commercial oven
a $14,000 delivery van (second-hand, eligible)
a $9,000 till and POS rollout
a $3,000 espresso grinder

Each is written off in full in the year of installation. None crosses the $20,000 ceiling. The aggregate capex deducted in that year is $43,000, with no depreciation tail.

The $1,000 threshold that returns on 1 July makes all four of those purchases depreciable under the small-business pool rules: deductible, but over years, not now. In a year where cash flow is the binding constraint, the difference between "deductible this year" and "deductible over seven" is a material one.

Who actually uses it

Treasury's own analysis puts current take-up below 40% of eligible businesses. The reasons are mostly the obvious ones. Businesses that are not already profitable have no taxable income to offset. Businesses in sectors with short asset lives (hospitality, retail) stack the write-off more readily than businesses with long-lived capital (trades, manufacturing). Businesses without an accountant on retainer often miss the install-ready deadline.

The write-off is, in other words, a subsidy that favours established, already-profitable, well-advised small businesses. That is not, on its own, an argument against it. But it is an argument against treating annual renewal as a substantive response to small-business productivity concerns.

What Canberra is likely to do

The short version: the write-off will probably be extended, at some threshold, in the May budget or immediately after. That has been the pattern in every budget since 2020, and the political cost of letting it lapse ahead of EOFY is not one either party has shown appetite for.

The longer version is less comforting. Treasury has been resistant to a permanent $150,000 on budget-integrity grounds (the provision was never designed to be a structural feature of the tax code). Industry wants permanence because it makes planning possible. Neither side has moved in three years.

The most likely outcome is another twelve-month extension at $20,000, with the door left open to review. Which is roughly what operators received last April.

What to do before 30 June

For businesses that are currently profitable, have asset purchases in mind, and can reasonably expect installation before 30 June, the advice is unchanged: bring them forward. For businesses that cannot, the advice is more useful than it sounds: do not panic-buy. A deferred purchase that lands in July will still be depreciable under the small-business pool, and a bad capex decision made to hit an artificial deadline will cost more than the deduction saves.

The cleaner question, the one the industry lobby is right to keep asking, is why small business is the only part of the economy expected to plan around policy that resets every twelve months.

What the RBA missed about this cycle, and why small business paid the price

Marcus Hall — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The standard critique of the Reserve Bank's last tightening cycle is that it was too slow, then too fast. The more interesting critique, and the one small-business owners kept making to me while the cycle ran, is that the RBA was reading the wrong book the whole time.

The Bank's published models treat the SME sector as a scaled-down version of the listed-company sector. Fixed-rate debt exposure, cash-buffer behaviour, supplier terms, labour elasticity: all assumed to move like the top of the market, just smaller. For a decade, the assumption was defensible. In this cycle, it wasn't.

Where the gap mattered

Three places:

Fixed vs floating debt mix. The listed sector largely termed-out its debt through 2020-22. The SME sector didn't; most SMB debt is re-priced quarterly or semi-annually via trading banks. When the RBA moved, the SME sector felt it first and hardest. The Bank's own analysis, published in the November 2025 Statement on Monetary Policy, acknowledged this after the fact.
Trade credit terms. SME cash-flow behaviour bends dramatically on supplier payment terms. A 15-day shift in payment terms from a large retailer to its SME suppliers is, for many of those suppliers, equivalent to a full percentage point on the cash rate. The RBA's models didn't have the data to see this; the ACCC's did, and said so loudly.
Labour elasticity in small teams. A ten-person team cannot shed half a role the way a thousand-person team can. Small business labour costs are, in practice, lumpy. You either keep the person or you don't. The RBA's DSGE model, like most, treats labour as continuous. That works at scale. It doesn't work at twelve employees.

A concrete example

Parchment Press, a small Sydney-based publisher, tightened to the point of selling one of its two storage leases during this cycle. Parchment's founder showed me her cash-flow working: in April 2024 her landed-cost inflation for printed stock was running at 9.1%, her rate exposure was floating, and her largest customer, a national retailer, had just pushed payment terms from 45 to 60 days.

"I lost my margin buffer over a weekend," she said. "Not because anything broke. Because every lever moved the wrong way at once."

This is not a rare story. Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the period shows SME working-capital turnover lengthening across every subsector except hospitality, which re-priced menus. Publishers, which can't re-price books already in the supply chain, were among the worst affected.

What the Bank is changing

The 2025 Review's surfacing of SME-specific modelling improvements was, by central bank standards, a rapid admission. The RBA will now publish an SME financial conditions indicator quarterly, built from a combination of bank lending data and a new ABS survey. That won't change 2024's decisions, but it meaningfully changes how the next cycle gets read.

The harder question (whether the Bank's mandate, as written, is actually the right mandate for a country whose productive sector is disproportionately small) is not one the RBA can answer by itself. But this cycle has surfaced the question loudly enough that someone in Canberra will have to.

For operators, in the meantime

If you run a small business, the lesson of this cycle is the lesson operators keep learning: your bank is not your regulator, your regulator is not your customer, and nobody is paying close attention to your balance sheet except you. The businesses that came through 2024-25 best were the ones with short feedback loops between cash flow and decisions: weekly reviews, not monthly, and owner-operators who already knew their payment terms by heart.

The RBA will get better. It has announced as much. For the next cycle, assume it will still be a cycle late on your numbers, and manage accordingly.

The 12% settlement: nine months of full super, read through the margin line

Tom Nguyen — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The superannuation guarantee is 12%. It has been since 1 July 2025, the final scheduled step in the decade-long ramp that began at 9.5% in 2014. The rate is now, as most small-business owners have noticed, not going anywhere. That is worth saying out loud, because the coverage of this transition has kept treating every step as a standalone event, and it has not been one for some time.

The question that matters now is what the settlement at 12% did to the margin line of small employers, and what comes next.

What the 50 basis points actually did

Against a hospitality wage bill running at 38 to 42% of revenue, the half-percentage-point super step takes roughly 20 basis points off the operating margin, if the business absorbs it entirely. That is the arithmetic everyone has run. The more interesting arithmetic is what happened on the same day to the rest of the labour cost.

On 1 July 2025 the Fair Work Commission's national minimum wage lifted 3.5% to $24.95 an hour ($948 a week), with award flow-ons at the same rate. For an award-reliant employer, the compounded labour-cost event on that one day was 50 basis points of super plus 3.5% of base, plus the workers' compensation and payroll-tax uplift that rides on the base. COSBOA, in its submission to the wage review, had flagged exactly this stack: "For every dollar increase in the award rate, employers also face higher workers' compensation, payroll tax and the legislated superannuation rise."

The ABS Wage Price Index for the December 2025 quarter put private-sector annual wage growth at 3.4%, up marginally from 3.3% in September. That number looks benign in isolation. Read next to the super step it obscures the compounded labour-cost event that owner-operators were absorbing on the same day.

The sectors where it bit

The labour-cost index (ABS) moved from 106.1 in Q2 2025 to 107.5 in Q3, the first full quarter under 12%. The composition of that move was, according to the producer-price commentary accompanying the release, "wages and other labour costs such as superannuation payments and payroll taxes."

The sectors where that bit hardest were the ones with:

High wage share of revenue (hospitality, personal services, retail).
High reliance on award-paid employees rather than enterprise-agreement employees.
Limited pricing power on a customer base squeezed by cost of living.

In other words: the sectors where the 2024 to 2025 closure wave had already clustered. The super step was not a cause of that wave, but it was a contributor to the second-order pressure, and it landed in a sector that did not have margin to give.

Payday super is the real next move

The legislated change most small employers have not fully priced in is not the 12%. It is payday super.

From 1 July 2026, super contributions must be paid in each employee's pay cycle, not quarterly. The 28-day window after quarter-end, which a lot of small employers have been using as a working-capital buffer, disappears.

That is a cash-flow regime change more than a cost change. The aggregate super liability does not rise: a business paying $12,000 a quarter will still pay $48,000 a year. But the liability is paid 12 times (or 26 times, or 52 times) instead of four. For employers who had, in practice, been using the end-of-quarter super obligation as a 60-day interest-free float, that float is gone.

I spoke to three bookkeepers who do compliance work for small and micro-businesses. All three flagged the same pattern in their client conversations: clients who had weathered the 12% step were noticeably less prepared for the cash-flow implications of payday super, partly because the change had been announced in 2023 and felt psychologically distant, and partly because the cash-flow impact does not appear in the P&L line that most owner-operators watch.

The way to read the data

The cleaner way to read the wage and super data for small business in 2026 is to stop looking at the individual steps. The SG ramp is done. The award cycle will continue to move at CPI-adjacent rates. Payday super arrives in July. The question is not the direction of any of those: it is the aggregate labour-cost trajectory, quarter on quarter, and whether a given business has the pricing power, productivity lift, or mix change to keep its wage share of revenue within a liveable band.

For the businesses that do not, the question is whether they are borrowing against working capital, or against margin. Borrowing against working capital is a timing problem. Borrowing against margin is something else.

The July 2026 payday-super transition will, in effect, ask every small employer which of those two they have been doing.

The letter that makes tax debt personal: inside the DPN wave

Tom Nguyen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Australian Taxation Office has a letter. Every small-business director in the country should know what it is, what it says, and what it forecloses. Most do not, until the letter arrives.

The Director Penalty Notice is the legal instrument that allows the ATO to pursue a company's unpaid GST, PAYG withholding and superannuation guarantee charge amounts from the personal balance sheet of its directors. It has been on the books for decades. For most of the past ten years it was used sparingly; through 2020 to 2022 the ATO suppressed it almost entirely. Since mid-2023 it has been one of the ATO's primary collection tools.

In the 2023-24 financial year, per the ATO's own annual reporting, more than 26,000 DPNs were issued. Insolvency firms including McGrathNicol and Worrells reported DPN-related enquiries up sharply through the 2024 and 2025 calendar years. The Commissioner, Rob Heferen, signalled in a June 2024 address to the Tax Institute that the office would "firm up" its debt-collection stance. That signal has been implemented.

The two variants, stated plainly

There are two DPN variants, and the difference between them is the entire story.

The standard DPN is issued after a company has lodged its activity statements or super contribution forms on time, but not paid the associated debts. The director receives a notice that gives them 21 days to take one of a small number of actions: pay, enter into a payment arrangement acceptable to the ATO, appoint a small-business restructuring practitioner, appoint a voluntary administrator, or liquidate the company. If they do any of those within 21 days, the director's personal exposure lapses.

The lockdown DPN is issued where the company has failed to lodge activity statements or super forms within three months of the due date. A lockdown DPN does not offer the 21-day escape. It converts the company's debt into a personal director's debt with immediate effect, and the only way to reduce it is to pay.

The Tax Institute and the Law Council of Australia have both flagged in 2024-25 that the lockdown variant is poorly understood even by directors who have been in business for decades. The common assumption, one that held under the pre-2023 collection posture, is that if the company is wound up the director is relieved of the associated liability. For the lockdown variant that assumption is wrong.

Who is being hit

The sectoral pattern is consistent with the broader insolvency wave. Construction and hospitality directors are over-represented in the DPN cohort, partly because those sectors are over-represented in the underlying tax-debt pool, and partly because their cashflow profile makes on-time lodgement harder in bad quarters. ASIC's insolvency statistics showed company collapses exceeding 14,000 in the twelve months to March 2025, a record. A material fraction of those collapses were precipitated by DPN activity.

The ASBFEO, Bruce Billson, publicly called in 2025 for the ATO to engage earlier with small businesses before the DPN is issued, a request that implicitly concedes that for many of the businesses receiving one, the letter is the first substantive ATO communication about a debt that has been accruing for two or three years.

Earlier engagement by the ATO with small business, before the DPN, would turn fewer viable companies into insolvencies and fewer viable directors into personal bankrupts.

The collectable debt number behind it

The macro number that explains the shift is the ATO's collectable debt, which stood at roughly $52.4 billion at 30 June 2024, up from $44.8 billion a year earlier. Small business represented approximately two-thirds of that total. The ATO's forbearance through 2020 to 2022 was, in effect, an interest-free loan to the small-business sector of a meaningful multiple of the annual instant-asset-write-off programme. The DPN wave is, partly, the clean-up of that arrangement.

What directors are doing about it

Three patterns are visible in the insolvency-practitioner commentary for 2024-25.

The first is earlier engagement. Directors who receive a standard DPN are more likely than in prior cycles to enter a payment arrangement within the 21-day window rather than let the clock run out. That is partly a function of publicity and partly a function of better advice from the accounting profession, which has itself come up the learning curve.

The second is increased use of the small-business restructuring process, introduced in 2021 for companies with liabilities under $1 million. SBR has proved operationally more viable than voluntary administration for the single-director companies most exposed to the DPN programme. Its uptake has been rising through 2024 and 2025.

The third, less visible, is personal bankruptcy. The Australian Financial Security Authority's bankruptcy data through 2025 shows a rising share of personal bankruptcies with company-director-related tax liabilities as a stated cause. Many of these are the end-point of a DPN that the director could not answer in time.

The practical note

For a director whose company has any level of overdue GST, PAYG or super, the practical note is short. Lodge on time, even if you cannot pay. Lodgement is what preserves the 21-day escape route on a DPN; non-lodgement is what triggers the lockdown variant. That is the single most important operating discipline in a small-company tax environment in 2026. It is also the one most commonly abandoned in a cashflow crisis, at exactly the moment it matters most.

The Commissioner has made the posture clear. The DPN is not a warning. It is an instrument the ATO now uses routinely. The small-business sector is still adjusting to that fact.

41% using, 5% measuring: the AI adoption gap in Australian small business

Eleanor Pike — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Australian AI Adoption Tracker, published quarterly by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, put small-business AI use at 41% in its June 2025 report. That was a five-percentage-point jump in a single quarter. Every piece of policy commentary since has led with that number.

The AI Lab Australia 2026 State of AI Adoption report, released in February, put another number next to it. Of the small businesses using AI, only 5% are, in the report's phrase, "fully enabled to realise potential benefits." 46% of those using AI are measuring no business impact at all. Among non-adopters, the single most-cited reason is "don't know where to start," at roughly a third.

If you stack those numbers the story is not adoption. The story is the distance between trying and operationalising, and whether anyone is closing it.

What "using AI" actually covers

The headline 41% figure is enormous in its looseness. It captures a business with a single employee using ChatGPT once a week to draft a cold email. It also captures a business with an end-to-end document-intelligence pipeline routing invoices to its accounting system. Both return "yes" to the adoption question. Neither has comparable economic impact.

The distribution underneath that 41% is, by every operator I spoke to who had a real answer, extremely skewed. Most usage is ad-hoc, human-in-the-loop, and attached to a single role (usually marketing or admin). A small minority of users have integrated AI into a process, with measured outputs and a person accountable for the output.

That minority is, roughly, the 5%.

Why measurement is the missing piece

Of the AI Lab Australia sample, 46% of AI-using businesses said they did not measure the impact of their AI usage at all. A further 35% measured in a "general" sense (the phrase used in the report is "we feel it is saving us time"). Only the remaining 19% had a specific before-and-after metric attached to any AI deployment.

That matters because the gap between trying and operationalising is mostly a measurement gap. A small business that tries a tool for three months without a baseline cannot answer the question the tool was meant to answer. They cannot tell whether they should expand the use of it, contract it, or pay for the next tier. They remain in trial mode indefinitely, because trial mode is the only mode they have the data for.

The 5% who have moved past trial mode, in every case I looked at, had done a specific thing: they had picked one process, instrumented it with a before-and-after metric, and only scaled usage after the metric had moved.

A worked example

One of the operators I spent time with was running a twelve-person professional-services firm in Adelaide. She had, in mid-2024, rolled out a general-purpose AI assistant across her team with no specific use-case or metric. For ten months the usage was enthusiastic, patchy, and uncorrelated with any outcome she could point to.

In March 2025 she did something different. She picked one process (first-draft client correspondence) and measured, for four weeks, the time her team spent on it. It was 11.2 hours per week in aggregate. She then rolled out a specific template workflow using the same assistant, measured again, and got 4.1 hours per week. The tool had not changed. The process and the measurement had.

"I'd been paying for AI for a year and not known whether it was doing anything," she told me. "When I finally put a number next to it, the answer changed how we used every other tool we had."

The adoption ceiling is a methodology problem

The $45 billion GDP contribution projected by Deloitte and Amazon in their November 2025 AI Edge report is real, but it is conditional. It assumes that the distribution of usage (which is currently shaped like a pyramid) flattens, and that the 41% who are trying becomes the 41% who are measuring.

The policy scaffolding to help that happen exists. The Senate Select Committee on Adopting AI reported in late 2024; the federal government has responded; the department publishes the quarterly tracker that surfaces these numbers in the first place. The policy settings are not the binding constraint.

The binding constraint is inside the business. It is:

Picking a single process, not a "platform."
Baselining that process with a quantitative metric before any AI is introduced.
Holding the AI deployment to the metric for long enough to read a trend.
Moving on to the next process only after the first one has settled.

That is not a sexy playbook. It is a reporting discipline. The small businesses that will get to the 5% are the ones that treat AI like any other operational tool, not the ones that treat it like a transformative theology.

For the remaining third

For the third of small businesses who are not using AI and cite "don't know where to start," the honest operator's advice is to not start at all until a specific, measurable problem presents itself. "Using AI" is not a goal. A twelve-percent reduction in the time the team spends on client correspondence is a goal. The second will find the first, if the measurement is in place.

The businesses that will close the gap between 41% and 5% will not close it by adopting more AI. They will close it by adopting more rigour about what they already have.

A playbook for hiring your first five

Marcus Hall — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If you're reading this, the first hire is probably already done, often badly, and the question now is what to do about the next four. Good.

The first five hires disproportionately shape everything that follows. Culture gets set. Operating rhythm gets set. The things you will and won't tolerate as an owner get set. Nobody writes enough about this because nobody admits the first few are usually wrong.

I spent a month talking to six former founders about what they'd redo. What follows is what they agreed on.

Hire for the job that's burning, not the job you imagined

The most common first-hire mistake is hiring a "generalist". A generalist is what you are. You do not need two of you.

"I hired a second me because I thought I'd clone the good parts," one founder said. "I just got twice the chaos and zero of the focus."

The better first hire is the person who does the one thing that is currently eating your week. For most owner-operators, that's one of three things: bookkeeping and cash management, operations and scheduling, or sales follow-through. Pick the burning one. Hire deeper than you think you need to.

The second hire is almost always the first hire, corrected

This is uncomfortable. If your first hire was wrong (and there's a decent chance it was), your second hire is where you quietly fix it.

Don't fire before hiring. That's a different mistake. Hire well, re-scope the first hire to what they're actually good at, and either move them gracefully or accept that you'll have one underperforming role for six months.

"I made peace with the fact that hiring well in year one costs you three roles to get to two. That's the tax."

The third hire tests whether you can delegate anything at all

The first two hires can be managed directly. You know the work, you know them, you're in every meeting. At hire three the maths stops working. You have to let something go.

Every founder I talked to had the same inflection point. They could describe, ten years later, the specific piece of work they first fully delegated (inventory forecasting, or weekly invoicing, or a customer account) and what it cost them emotionally to let it go.

"It cost me a week of anxiety and saved me a decade of my time," one said.

A test: can you name it?

A useful gate for this stage: if you can't write down, in one sentence, what you're about to stop doing, you won't actually stop. Say it out loud. Tell the new hire. Tell your partner.

The fourth hire makes you a manager

The shape of the organisation changes at four. You now have a team, not a group of assistants. Meetings become necessary. Documented processes become necessary. The slack-emoji culture memes become, charmingly, less funny.

Most owner-operators hate this moment. "I felt like I was becoming the thing I left my old job to escape," one said. "And then I realised the team was relying on me to become it."

Some founders solve this by hiring a dedicated ops person at four instead of promoting into it. If you know you don't want to be a manager, this is the hire to make deliberately rather than accidentally.

The fifth hire is a statement about the company's next three years

By five, the shape is set. You are now a small business with a team. Whatever the fifth hire is (senior operator, finance lead, first commercial hire), it signals where you're going.

The best founders I talked to treated the fifth hire as strategic rather than reactive. They hired it before the pain made it urgent. They hired ahead of the revenue. And they hired someone who was demonstrably better at their speciality than the founder was at it.

"If hire five is not better than me at something real, I made the wrong hire," one said. "Because by ten the team is leaning on hire five harder than on me."

The question nobody asks

Every founder I spoke with eventually landed on the same question they wished they'd asked earlier: "What does this company look like with five of the wrong people?"

If you can answer that, and it's a worse company than you want to work in, the filter becomes useful. Not to be paranoid. To be precise.

Marcus Hall writes the Playbooks column for Blogbox.

The invisible rent ratchet: how CPI+ clauses are quietly eating small retail

Eleanor Pike — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The indexation clause is not the first thing a small retailer reads in a new lease. It is buried several pages into the review schedule, it is written in the kind of English that was never meant to be spoken aloud, and it is the single line on the document that will do the most to determine whether the business still exists in five years.

Most of the small retailers and hospitality operators I have spoken to in the past twelve months signed their current leases in 2021 or 2022. The assumption embedded in their indexation clauses, usually CPI with a 3 to 4% floor or a straight CPI+2.5% formula, was that Australian inflation would continue to run at the 2 to 3% the Reserve Bank targeted and broadly delivered through the 2010s.

That is not what followed. Headline CPI ran at 6.59% in 2022 and 5.60% in 2023. By the February 2026 monthly indicator, annual inflation had returned to 3.7%, but it has not been below the RBA target band for nearly four years. The compounded effect on a CPI-indexed lease is substantial, and it has now been working through the rent roll for long enough that the aggregate numbers are visible in the landlord disclosures.

The mechanism, stated plainly

CPI indexation in Australian commercial leases is almost always applied to the preceding year's rent, not to the initial base rent. This detail, the one that matters most, is rarely explained at signing. It means each year's increase compounds on the last.

A lease signed at $60,000 per annum in January 2021, indexed to headline CPI, would have rolled forward to:

January 2022: $60,000 × 1.035 = $62,100
January 2023: $62,100 × 1.0659 = $66,193
January 2024: $66,193 × 1.056 = $69,899
January 2025: $69,899 × 1.0412 = $72,779
January 2026: $72,779 × 1.036 = $75,399

Five years of indexation. Base rent up 25.7%. If the clause had included a 4% floor for the down-weighted year, the 2026 figure sits closer to $76,000.

For context, the Colliers Q2 2025 Australian Retail Snapshot recorded national average gross face rents up 0.3% quarter on quarter, 1.5% year on year. The clearing rate for new commercial space, in other words, moved substantially less than the contractual escalations in existing leases. Tenants on CPI+ clauses have been paying above the actual market clearing rate for at least eighteen months, and on renewal many of them are discovering it.

Why it was never discussed at signing

Two reasons. The first is that in the ten years before 2022, headline CPI averaged roughly 2%, and the compounding effect was small enough to be invisible year-on-year. Owners who signed leases in 2014, 2017, or 2019 could reasonably expect indexation to produce rent uplifts that were neither remarkable nor destabilising.

The second is structural. Australian commercial landlords, particularly the institutional investors who own shopping centres, prefer CPI or CPI+ clauses because they provide a predictable income stream that can be debt-financed at favourable ratios. Tenants agree to them because the alternative (frequent market reviews) is usually worse when the space is desirable.

The Shopping Centre Council of Australia, the peak industry body for institutional landlords, holds the position that existing retail tenancy protection regimes are "unique to Australia and extensive" and do not require substantive reform.

What NSW is doing

In October 2025, the NSW Minister for Small Business introduced the Retail Leases Amendment (Review) Bill 2025, the first tranche of reforms recommended by the NSW Small Business Commission's 2024 review of the Retail Leases Act.

The Bill does not reform CPI indexation directly. Its principal provisions:

Tighter disclosure on option exercises, including improved transparency around pharmacy-turnover rent provisions.
Broader "commercial factors" (foot traffic, retail mix, road frontage, landlord leasing strategy) that must be considered when relocation-rent adjustments are calculated.
An extension of the cooling-off period following option exercise.

The choice not to address indexation directly was, the Commission has acknowledged, a political one rather than an analytical one. The landlord submissions in the consultation were uniform in opposing any change to the indexation regime; tenant submissions were uniform in requesting one. The Commission proceeded with the reforms where it could find compromise.

What the other states are doing

Very little, visibly. Victoria's Small Business Commission continues to use the existing mediation framework, which handles disputes but does not intervene in the indexation clause itself. Queensland's regime does not materially differ. The Western Australian SBDC publishes consumer-facing guidance on how CPI indexation works but stops short of recommending structural change.

The practical implication is that tenants in states other than NSW will continue to operate under the 2022-era indexation framework, with the full compounding pressure, for the foreseeable future. Any relief for those tenants will come from individual negotiation at lease renewal, not from legislative intervention.

For operators on current leases

The tactical advice from the commercial real-estate brokers I spoke to, for operators with three or more years left on a CPI-indexed lease, is narrower than the policy conversation suggests.

Ask for an indexation cap in writing at the first renewal or lease variation. A 3% cap is an ambitious request but not an unreasonable one in a market where the clearing rate is running below contractual escalations.
Model the next five years of rent as CPI plus any contractual floor, compounded, and compare against your contribution margin trajectory. If the rent line grows faster than the contribution margin line, the business has a lease problem, not a revenue problem.
If the landlord is an institutional investor, ask to be put in touch with the asset manager rather than the leasing manager. Asset managers are incentivised on occupancy and credit quality; leasing managers on nominal rent. The conversation is substantially different.

Those are, I should be clear, operator moves, not policy remedies. The policy remedy, if one is coming, will begin in NSW and spread slowly.

In the meantime the ratchet keeps ratcheting, and most tenants are reading the clause for the first time on renewal, which is, by definition, too late.

Solar, battery, EV charger: the 2026 home upgrade, decoded

Marcus Hall — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2026 version of the Australian residential energy upgrade is a stacked subsidy, an accredited installer, and an increasingly complex compliance chain. Getting any two of those three right is not hard. Getting all three right, without overpaying and without ending up on the wrong side of a collapsed retailer, is the entire job.

The subsidies, stated

The federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program took effect 1 July 2025. It discounts the installed cost of a residential battery by approximately 30 per cent, or around $330 per usable kilowatt-hour in 2025, scaling down annually to the programme's 2030 wind-up. It runs through the existing Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme rebate mechanism, which means the rebate is applied as a point-of-sale discount on the installer's invoice, not as a reimbursement to the homeowner.

The Small-scale Technology Certificate programme, which has underwritten Australian rooftop solar since 2011, lost a year of deeming on 1 January 2025 under the scheme's legislated wind-down. The scheme ends 31 December 2030. A 6.6kW system's STC rebate in 2025 sits around $2,200 to $2,800 depending on zone, down from roughly $3,500 in 2020.

State incentives stack on top.

NSW runs the Peak Demand Reduction Scheme battery incentive, live since 1 November 2024.
Victoria's Solar Homes battery loan (interest-free, up to $8,800) remained available through 2025.
Western Australia's Residential Battery Scheme has Synergy and Horizon tiers, open since mid-2024.
South Australia's Home Battery Scheme has been in run-down for some years and is not currently accepting new applications.

The compliance chain, in order

The order the three upgrades are done in, for a homeowner doing all three, matters more than most salespeople explain.

Solar first. The STC rebate is calculated off the solar system, and the battery rebate is calculated off the solar-connected battery. Installing a battery first and retrofitting solar later is possible, but it costs more in inverter compatibility work.
Battery next, if at all. The attachment rate of batteries on new residential solar installs in Australia jumped from around 7 per cent to above 20 per cent in the second half of 2025, on the back of the federal programme. That attachment rate is likely to climb further through 2026 as the subsidy stack settles into the market.
EV charger last. EV chargers above 20 amps require a dedicated circuit and, in most states, notification to the DNSP (Ausgrid, Energex, SA Power Networks, and their peers). Installing the charger after the battery means the electrician signing off the charger can design the load curve around the battery rather than retrofitting it.

The governing standards are AS/NZS 3000:2018 for the wiring, AS/NZS 4777.1 for grid-connected inverters, and the relevant state's Certificate of Electrical Compliance. Any installer who does not walk a homeowner through the sign-off for each is a tell that the installer cuts compliance corners. That is worth knowing before signing.

The trust layer

The single most underrated risk in an Australian residential solar install in 2026 is not product quality, inverter brand, or battery chemistry. It is installer longevity.

One in six Australian solar systems now has a warranty against a retailer that no longer trades. The brand of the panel is the least of the homeowner's problems when the inverter fails and nobody answers the phone.

More than 700 Australian solar retailers have gone out of business since 2011 per the SolarQuotes record. Roughly one in six installed systems now carries an orphaned warranty. The mitigation, for a homeowner pricing a 2026 install, is to choose an installer with the two things warranties actually require: seven-plus years of continuous trading, and a parent-company structure that is independently verifiable on the ASIC register.

Platforms that pre-vet installers on that basis are the useful ones. Why Solar, a Sydney-based operation covering more than 2,800 Australian postcodes, has built its model around exactly this vetting step: SAA-accredited installers only, independent verification of trading history, no pressure marketing, and revenue from installer partnerships rather than the homeowner.

The note

The 2026 subsidy stack is the largest in the history of Australian residential energy. For most households, the installed cost of a solar-plus-battery system is now lower than it has ever been, and the payback period is inside seven years for a typical four-person household with a daytime load.

The upgrade that disappoints is almost never the one where the subsidy was missed. It is the one where the installer was.

That is worth spending an evening researching, before an afternoon signing.

64 days: the slow-pay number Australia's biggest companies can't argue away

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a number that matters more than the average when a small business is trying to meet payroll. It is not the median payment time. It is the slowest one.

In its January 2026 regulator update, the Payment Times Reporting Regulator disclosed that the 95th-percentile payment time from large reporting entities to small business suppliers had moved from 58 days in H2 2024 to 64 days in H1 2025. The median, over the same period, barely budged. Large-company averages, in other words, were being held steady by faster payers while the tail stretched.

For a small business, the tail is the part you feel.

The Fast Payer List is the actual news

On 2 February the regulator launched a public Fast Small Business Payer List: a rolling register of large entities that pay their small-business invoices within 20 days, consistently, over a reporting period. Only 2.3% of reporting entities qualified at launch.

This is a meaningful shift in the regulator's posture. For five years the Payment Times Reporting Scheme has been a transparency exercise: publish the data, let the market reward speed. The Fast Payer List is the first piece of the regime that functions as a positive naming mechanism. Reputation is now on the table.

The shift is partly political (the Woolf Review recommended it in 2023) and partly practical. The regulator spent 2024 and the first half of 2025 chasing compliance: 1,334 suspected non-reporters contacted, 293 brought into compliance via late reports, 202 warning letters issued. Compliance work alone was not moving the tail. Publication might.

Where the tail lives

The sectoral breakdown in the regulator's public data is stark. Financial services pays small suppliers inside 30 days on 84.7% of invoices. Construction pays within 30 on 58.6%. The difference between those two numbers is roughly the difference between a small supplier that survives a liquidity squeeze and one that doesn't.

"I know, to the day, which of our customers pay well. I wish I could post that list on my website."

That is one of a dozen similar lines from conversations with small suppliers across construction and creative-services sectors in the past month. The operators I spoke to were not campaigning for policy change. They were waiting for the regulator to publish something they could point a procurement team at.

What changed the incentive

The shift from median to percentile disclosure is under-reported and worth pausing on. Averages and medians are company-friendly metrics. They let a large entity that pays 70% of its suppliers on time absorb the 30% it pays badly. Percentile disclosure at the top end breaks that averaging.

Once the regulator started publishing 95th-percentile numbers, procurement functions at large reporting entities began to treat the tail as a reputational asset in its own right. Several of the operators I talked to described being asked, for the first time, by the procurement teams of their large customers, whether their particular contract was in that tail, and whether remedial action was required. That was a new conversation.

The ATO's quiet influence

The second change, the one no-one is writing about, is the Australian Taxation Office.

Through 2024 and 2025 the ATO materially stepped up Director Penalty Notices on pandemic-era tax debts. That has pushed directors of small businesses, particularly in construction and hospitality, to be more aggressive about chasing late invoices: their personal liability position depends on keeping tax payments current, and tax payments depend on cash in. Small-business collection behaviour is, in aggregate, firmer than it was two years ago.

Large-company procurement functions have noticed. "We used to be able to ride things out for a month," one Tier-1 contractor's finance director told me, on condition of anonymity. "Now the subcontractor's accountant rings us at day 35."

Where this lands in 2026

The remaining piece of the Woolf Review is due in the middle of February 2026: a new reporting portal that ingests invoice-level data directly from large entities' accounts-payable systems, rather than the current self-reported summary returns. If that works, the Fast Payer List will effectively update quarterly.

The question that will tell us whether the scheme has matured beyond a disclosure regime is whether any listed entity is prepared, publicly, to make being on the Fast Payer List a stated policy. Some are close. None, as at the time of writing, have taken the step.

If one does, it will be a governance decision, not a tax decision. That is probably the shift the scheme has always needed.

Premiums are eating the margin: the SMB insurance squeeze of 2026

Marcus Hall — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Insurance used to be the line item small-business owners did not think about. A broker quoted once a year, the premium went up a bit, the policy renewed, and the owner went back to the real problem of the month.

That dynamic broke some time in 2022, and it has not been repaired since. APRA's quarterly general-insurance statistics to September 2025 showed gross written premium growth in commercial lines continuing above 10 per cent year on year, led by property and liability classes. The reinsurance layer that sits behind Australian insurers has repriced by roughly 30 per cent since 2022, per commentary from Insurance Council of Australia chief executive Andrew Hall through 2025. Those two numbers compound into the quote a small business sees at renewal.

For SMBs in certain categories, the renewal no longer looks like a price adjustment. It looks like an exit notice.

The categories the market will not write

Insurance brokers Honan, Marsh, Gallagher and Steadfast have all reported through 2025 and early 2026 that three small-business categories are now considered "distressed" placement classes:

Childcare centres, especially those operating in or adjacent to combustible-cladding buildings, post the cladding-related claims wave.
Hospitality venues with late-night trading hours and public liability exposure.
Trades with height work, including roofers, solar installers and scaffolders.

"Distressed" is broker language. What it means operationally is that the placement takes longer, the panel of insurers willing to quote is smaller, and the eventual premium sits above what the business owner budgeted. For some of the smallest operators in these categories, the renewal simply cannot be placed at all.

That is the go-or-no-go point. An SMB that cannot obtain public liability cover cannot legally operate in most settings. The insurance market, in effect, is making sector-level eligibility decisions that no regulator has been asked to ratify.

The workers' comp layer

State workers' compensation schemes have moved in the same direction. icare NSW announced an average 8 per cent premium increase for 2024-25, with psychological injury claims cited as the fastest-growing cost category. WorkSafe Victoria signalled further rate reviews through 2025-26. In both states, the employer's premium is largely a function of the scheme's aggregate claims experience, which means individual employers with clean claims records are subsidising the schemes' overall deterioration.

The psychological injury category is the one to watch. Claims in this category are rising faster than premium, which means the next revaluation cycle is likely to produce another lift.

The cyber stabilisation

The one category where the market has loosened slightly is cyber. Honan's Q1 2026 market update reported cyber premiums stabilising after the 2022-24 spike. The condition of that stabilisation is that insurers are now requiring materially stronger underwriting warranties: multi-factor authentication across all privileged accounts, tested backup procedures, and in some cases endpoint detection and response software as a policy precondition.

For small businesses that can meet those warranties, cyber premiums in 2026 are roughly flat on 2024. For those that cannot, the market will either decline to quote or will return with a 15 to 25 per cent renewal increase and tighter sublimits on the categories where ransomware exposure is concentrated.

I am telling every SMB client to treat this renewal as though placement is not guaranteed. That is not how we have had to talk to clients in twenty years.

The ASIC layer

The insurance regulator was quiet for most of the past decade. It has become less quiet. ASIC's late-2025 claims-handling review, which examined how general insurers manage consumer and SMB claims after lodgement, produced recommendations that have added compliance cost at the insurer level. Those costs, too, flow through to premium.

APRA, separately, has raised capital expectations on the mutual insurers that underwrite much of the smaller end of the AU commercial market. Those capital requirements are an additional pressure on pricing.

What SMB owners are doing

The operators weathering this environment are doing three things.

First, they are commissioning brokers to go to market earlier, in some cases 90 days before renewal rather than the traditional 30. That extra window gives the broker time to get offers from the full insurer panel rather than falling back to the incumbent.

Second, they are accepting higher excesses in exchange for smaller premium rises. For a small trades business with a clean claims record, moving the excess from $500 to $5,000 can reduce the premium by enough to pay for two or three years of a worst-case out-of-pocket claim.

Third, they are reviewing the actual coverage rather than renewing on autopilot. In several cases I have seen, businesses were paying for sublimits they did not need, or carrying duplicate coverage on two related policies.

That is not a fix for the structural pressure. But it is what the best-run SMB operators are doing this year, and they are doing it because the alternative, a 20 per cent compound renewal increase into year three, is not survivable at most operators' margin.

The broker panel will not say this on the record, but the quiet expectation for 2027 is another 8 to 12 per cent on commercial property and liability. For small business, insurance has stopped being a line item.

The tradie visa race: why Queensland is eating NSW's lunch

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Skills in Demand visa went live on 7 December 2024, replacing the old subclass 482. It is a cleaner piece of legislation than what it replaced, with three streams (Specialist, Core, and Essential), tighter employer-sponsorship requirements, and a new Core Skills Occupation List that locked in 456 occupations, most of them relevant to the construction trades. Bricklayers, carpenters, roofers, electricians, plasterers, plumbers, and ceramic tilers are all on the list.

The federal redesign gets most of the policy attention. It deserves less of it than it receives, because the federal framework is not where the action has been. The action is underneath it, in the state-nomination programmes.

The builders' problem, in numbers

The Housing Industry Association's Trades Availability Index for Q4 2025 registered a national composite score of -0.47, with the following sub-readings by trade:

Bricklaying: -1.02
Ceramic tiling: -0.88
Roofing: -0.75
Carpentry: -0.62
Plastering: -0.54

Negative readings on the HIA scale indicate shortages. -1.02 on bricklaying is the worst reading in the twenty-year history of the index.

Master Builders Australia's 2024 Workforce Blueprint, now updated for 2026, puts the additional workforce required across building trades to meet the 1.2 million new homes target by 2029 at 130,000 people. That is against an existing workforce, for comparison, of roughly 1.3 million. The industry needs to grow its headcount by roughly 10% in four years, in an environment where unemployment has sat below 4.5% for most of that period.

There is no serious pathway to those numbers that does not include migration. The industry's own numbers accept this: over 8,600 457/482 visa holders were sponsored by construction businesses at the end of 2025, which is more than double the level of a few years earlier and exceeds the peak the last mining boom recorded.

Where the three large states have landed

The federal visa gets a builder over the starting line. The state-nomination programme decides how long it takes to cross the room.

New South Wales has the largest nomination allocation for 2025-26 at 2,100 places under subclass 190 (permanent) and 1,500 under 491 (skilled work regional provisional). NSW's process is paperwork-heavy, requires evidence of local employment offers, and runs on a conventional points-ranked invitation cycle. Construction occupations sit in the general queue.

Queensland received a smaller allocation (1,850 under 190, 750 under 491) but has deployed the nomination programme differently. Queensland operates a specific three-month construction-trades pathway with no settlement-fund requirement, no state-specific English-language premium, and a nomination fee that is the lowest of the three largest states. The state's Olympics-related infrastructure pipeline (roughly $60 billion in committed project spend through 2032) has been the stated justification for the fast-track design.

Victoria has the largest total allocation (3,400 places) and no nomination fee, but routes roughly 80% of invitations to onshore applicants already in Australia on a related visa. For a building-trade employer looking to sponsor a bricklayer from abroad, Victoria is, in practice, a slower pathway than the numeric allocation suggests.

The effect in the spreadsheet of a medium-sized construction SMB weighing where to place its next trades sponsorship, is straightforward. Queensland's decision window is measurable in weeks. NSW's is measurable in months. Victoria's is measurable in months, with a further filter that many offshore candidates cannot pass.

The pricing of the trade

The federal income thresholds for the Skills in Demand visa rise on 1 July 2026: the Core Skills stream to $79,499, the Specialist Skills stream to $146,717, both indexed to Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings at 3.8%. For a construction employer sponsoring a carpenter or a bricklayer, the Core Skills threshold is the binding number, and $79,499 is comfortably above the award rate for most trades at the level of competence a sponsor would import.

The threshold is not a significant barrier at the Core stream. What matters more, operationally, is the difference between a three-month state process and a six-month one. On a project with a 24-month build window and a margin in the mid-single digits, three months of the labour allocation not being on site is, roughly, the project's entire profit.

That is the arbitrage Queensland has built.

What NSW and Victoria will probably do

The quiet conversation among state-nomination policy staff (I spoke to three officials who asked not to be named) is that the Queensland fast-track is going to force a response. NSW is, per officials familiar with the process, reviewing its 190 allocation design with an eye to a similar construction-specific pathway, likely targeted for the 2026-27 allocation. Victoria's options are narrower because its allocation is already overweight total, and the binding constraint is onshore/offshore routing rather than headline numbers.

The reasonable expectation is that by the middle of 2026, the three states will look less differentiated than they do right now. The operators who do not have that much time will be making their sponsorship decisions on the current settings, which means placing their sponsorship work in Queensland if they can legally structure it that way.

For a Sydney builder with a project in Campbelltown, that is, of course, not available. But for a nationally-active group, or for a trade-specific operator with capacity to relocate a nominated worker after initial settlement, the Queensland pathway is now the rational first move. Several of the national trade contractors I spoke to confirmed, off the record, that their sponsorship applications for 2025-26 were routed through Queensland entities, even where the underlying work was elsewhere.

That is not a migration-policy failure in itself. It is, however, a feature of the system that is not being measured, and that is doing more work than the federal redesign.

Boring bookkeeping is about to become your best cash-flow weapon

Marcus Hall — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Bookkeeping is the least glamorous topic in Australian small business. It is also, for the next twelve months, the single operational capability most likely to determine whether a company still exists on 1 July 2027.

Three forcing functions hit in 2026.

1. Payday super arrives

From 1 July 2026, superannuation contributions must be received by the employee's super fund within seven calendar days of payday. The quarterly 28-day regime, which most small employers have been using as a working-capital buffer for a decade, disappears.

The aggregate amount of super a business pays does not change. What changes is the frequency. A business that has been sending four cheques a year starts sending 52 (or 26, or 12, depending on pay cycle). The implicit interest-free float the old regime allowed, typically 60 to 90 days between the end of the accrual period and the statutory payment date, is gone.

For a business that has been running without that float, the new regime is administrative friction. For a business that has been using that float as working capital, it is a regime change.

2. The ATO is back at the door

ATO collectable debt stood at approximately $52.4 billion at 30 June 2024 per the ATO's own annual reporting, up from $44.8 billion a year earlier. Small business represented roughly two-thirds of that total. The COVID-era forbearance is over. Director Penalty Notices issued in FY24 exceeded 26,000, and the FY25 number is expected to be higher.

For businesses with a tax debt, the DPN letter is the pointy end. The bookkeeping implication is straightforward. A business whose records are live and reconciled on a weekly basis knows where its GST, PAYG and super liabilities sit, can lodge on time even in a bad quarter, and can negotiate a payment arrangement with the ATO from a position of documented credibility. A business whose records are reconciled annually at tax time does not have that option.

3. The cash-basis trap for tradies

The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers and CPA Australia both flagged through 2024-25 a pattern they see repeatedly: small tradies and service businesses using cash-basis BAS reporting (permitted up to $10 million aggregated turnover) systematically underestimate their upcoming tax liability during growth phases.

The reason is mechanical. Cash-basis reports revenue when the invoice is paid, not when it is raised. A business that is growing, and therefore carrying larger receivables at the end of each quarter, reports profit that is lower than the accrual reality. The BAS obligation looks manageable. Then the receivables come in, the next BAS period reports the catch-up, and the obligation is double what it looked like a quarter earlier.

For tradies in particular, this pattern combines with the 2025-26 ATO enforcement environment into an uncomfortable situation. The business owes more tax than the books suggested. The ATO has no forbearance to offer. The director's balance sheet is the collateral.

The software layer

Xero's FY24 results (year to 31 March 2024) recorded 2.08 million Australian subscribers, the dominant cloud-accounting platform. MYOB (KKR-owned) claims around 600,000 active subscribers; Intuit QuickBooks Online sits at under 200,000 in Australia per industry estimates.

The market is Xero's to lose in small business. But the software is not the problem. The gap in small-business bookkeeping is not the tool; it is whether someone is using it on a weekly basis. A business that imports bank feeds automatically, reconciles weekly, and reviews an accrual-basis P&L monthly is operating inside the tolerance band for 2026's policy environment. A business that looks at the books annually is not.

Cash-basis BAS is permitted up to ten million dollars of turnover. It does not, at the level of financial reality, match the accrual position of most growing small businesses.

The quarterly rhythm

The BAS cycle is the operational metronome. Q3 (January to March) lodgement is due 28 April. Q4 is due 28 July. Q1 (July to September) is due 28 October. Q2 is due 28 February. Lodgement through a registered BAS agent extends each by approximately four weeks.

The businesses that are on top of their 2026 position are the ones whose quarterly reconciliation is complete inside a fortnight of the quarter close, whose BAS is lodged inside the original window (not the extended agent window), and whose super payments are prepared in a batch ahead of 1 July 2026's weekly requirement.

That is four routines, none of them technical, most of them boring. The businesses that miss those four routines are not going to be the ones surprised by the ATO in 2026. They are going to be the ones the ATO has been trying to contact since 2024.

The supply question

The Tax Practitioners Board's register shows roughly 15,000 registered BAS agents and 45,000 tax agents in Australia. Against 2.5 million active ABNs, the quality small-business bookkeeping supply is under-pressured. Good bookkeepers are, in many capital cities in 2026, booked out.

For a business hiring a bookkeeper this year, the practical question is not price. It is whether the bookkeeper works in Xero, how many current clients they have at the turnover tier of the engaging business, and how many hours a week they will commit. The answer is increasingly: not many.

The operators who get to the front of the bookkeeper queue first will have the 2026 they planned. The operators who assume bookkeeping is a line item to minimise will have a different kind of 2026. That, as of April, is a choice still available to most small businesses in Australia.

It will not be, indefinitely.

Privacy reform comes for the corner store: Tranche 2 and the SMB exemption

Tom Nguyen — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Australian Privacy Act 1988 has, for most of its life, left the majority of the country's small businesses alone. The exemption for businesses with annual turnover under $3 million meant that a dentist, a corner cafe, or a four-person e-commerce store operated outside the reach of the Australian Privacy Principles. That exemption has been a quirk of the Australian privacy regime that no other comparable jurisdiction has retained.

Tranche 2 of the reform programme, which Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus committed to in September 2023 and which the Attorney-General's Department flagged for legislative action in 2025-26, removes it.

The reform is not in force as at the time of writing. It is, however, close enough to force that every small business in Australia should be preparing for it. The Privacy and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2024 (Royal Assent 10 December 2024) already delivered tranche 1: a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, doxxing offences, and strengthened Office of the Australian Information Commissioner enforcement powers including tiered civil penalties.

The penalties, stated

The civil penalties sharpened by tranche 1 now reach $50 million for body corporates, or 30 per cent of adjusted turnover, or three times any benefit obtained, whichever is greater. Those numbers are not aimed at small business in their upper bound, but they are not small-business-proofed in their lower bound either.

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind publicly stated in 2025 that the small-business exemption is "out of step with consumer expectations." That is the regulator signalling, through the appropriate channels, that the exemption is ending.

Why the exemption is less protective than it looked

The practical effect of the small-business exemption has never been as clean as the statute suggests. Any small business that handles health information, runs a residential tenancy database, or provides contracted services to an exempted category is already in the Act. Over time, those carve-outs have pulled most retail-adjacent and services businesses within the APPs regardless.

The removal of the exemption therefore affects the remaining unambiguously-exempt category: the single-owner services businesses, the small e-commerce operators, the category of business that has genuinely operated outside the Act.

For that category, the shift is larger than most owners expect. The APPs require, among other things: documented privacy policies, a transparent data-collection notice at point of collection, lawful purpose and consent for sensitive information, a process for responding to data-access requests, breach notification within 30 days for incidents above the seriousness threshold, and defined retention and deletion protocols.

Most small businesses in the exempt category have none of those in writing.

527 breaches across the six months, with health and finance leading. The pattern will not change when the small-business exemption ends. The reporting obligation will.

The cost, in operational terms

The real cost of this reform for small business is not fines. Most small businesses will never face a penalty at the statutory ceiling; the OAIC's practice is to enforce through determinations and undertakings, not body-corporate fines.

The real cost is the operational retrofit.

CCTV on premises. An Australian cafe, retailer or trades business with security CCTV will, post-reform, need a documented CCTV policy, a notice at the entrance, a retention schedule, and a process for responding to subject-access requests in relation to the footage.
Customer databases. Any business running an email list, loyalty program or appointment system will need a privacy policy that describes what data is held, where it is stored, who it is shared with, and how to request deletion.
Employee records. The employee-record exemption remains contested; the shape of its replacement is not yet settled. But small employers should not assume HR data falls outside the regime.
Service-provider contracts. Contracts with the platforms and software providers that hold small-business customer data will need to include data-handling terms that most small businesses do not currently read, let alone negotiate.

The Council of Small Business Organisations Australia and the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman both called through 2024-25 for a transition period of at least 24 months, with templated compliance guidance. Whether the government accepts those calls will determine how disruptive the reform is in practice.

The likely timeline

On the current trajectory, tranche 2 legislation could be introduced through 2026-27, with a commencement date in 2027 or 2028. That is a year or more away from binding small businesses. It is also short enough that the operators who move early will be operating inside the regime before their competitors are aware of it.

The small business owners I have spoken to through the early months of 2026 fall into two groups. The first has heard of the reform but not read anything about it. The second has started. The second group is small. It is also the group whose 2028 will look different.

The reasonable preparation

The three things a small business can do now, before any specific commencement date, are modest:

Write a plain-English privacy policy describing what customer data the business collects and what it does with it. Publish it. Most customers will not read it. Regulators will.
Review the service providers holding customer data. Check whether their standard terms allow use of that data for purposes the business would not agree to.
Establish a process, even a simple one, for responding to a customer who asks what data the business holds about them. The process does not have to be sophisticated. It has to exist.

These are small interventions. They are also, for most of the businesses that will be inside the regime by 2028, the ones that will be least costly to implement now, and most costly to implement under time pressure later.

The exemption has outlasted several governments. It will not outlast this reform programme.

Your biggest customer just asked for your carbon data

Tom Nguyen — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Market Infrastructure and Other Measures) Act 2024 passed in September 2024. Mandatory climate-related financial disclosure under AASB S2 commenced on 1 January 2025 for Group 1 entities, roughly those above $500 million in revenue, $1 billion in assets, or 500 employees. Group 2 entities are pulled in from 1 July 2026. Group 3 from 1 July 2027.

The regime was designed to bind large companies. In 2026 its practical effect is to bind everyone who sells to them.

The scope 3 mechanism

AASB S2 requires reporting of scope 1, scope 2 and (from the second year of compliance) scope 3 emissions. Scope 1 is direct combustion on the reporting entity's premises. Scope 2 is the emissions associated with the electricity the reporting entity buys. Scope 3 is, in the standard's definition, the emissions associated with the entity's upstream and downstream value chain.

For a supermarket chain, scope 3 includes the carbon associated with every product on the shelf. For a bank, it includes the emissions of every portfolio company it lends to. For a mining major, it includes the emissions associated with the production of the equipment it buys.

In each of those cases the reporting entity does not directly control the emissions it must report. It can only estimate them. The estimation process is what the reporting entity's procurement team is now asking small suppliers to help with.

What SMB suppliers are being asked for

Through 2025, Coles, Woolworths, BHP and the Big Four banks published supplier sustainability expectations. The language differs but the ask is consistent. A small or mid-sized supplier selling into these procurement functions is being asked for:

A baseline of annual scope 1 and 2 emissions, in tonnes CO2-equivalent.
A statement of the emission factors used and the boundary of the estimate.
A commitment to a reduction trajectory, usually aligned with the customer's own net-zero target.
Evidence of the accounting methodology (most commonly the GHG Protocol for SMEs).
Annual reporting against progress.

None of those four items is itself onerous. All of them together represent a meaningful one-off setup cost for a supplier with no sustainability function, and an ongoing reporting cost thereafter.

The CPA Australia 2025 small-business climate survey found that fewer than 20 per cent of Australian SMEs had measured their emissions. More than 40 per cent had been asked for sustainability data by a customer or lender. That gap is the compliance burden in a sentence.

The templated-form problem

The Business Council of Australia and the Australian Sustainable Finance Institute both called through 2025 for standardised SME data templates, to avoid each large buyer asking each small supplier the same questions in a slightly different form. That request is reasonable. As at April 2026 it has not been delivered at sector scale.

The Productivity Commission's 2025 review of sustainability reporting burden flagged the cascading cost risk explicitly. The Commission's view, put plainly, was that the current design requires large reporting entities to collect upstream data in a way the upstream suppliers are not equipped to provide. That mismatch is what a small supplier is dealing with in 2026.

More than 40 per cent of Australian SMEs have been asked for sustainability data by a customer or lender. Less than half that number have the data to provide.

The Climate Active route

The federal Climate Active programme, run by the Clean Energy Regulator, provides a certification pathway that turns the SME's emissions baseline and offset position into a verified public claim. Enrolment rose through 2025 as more SMBs were pushed by procurement into establishing the underlying numbers regardless.

Climate Active is not the only route. The GHG Protocol for SMEs, the Small Business Act pro-forma templates from CPA and CAANZ, and (at a price) the consulting-firm offerings from the big-four accounting firms all produce comparable outputs. For a small business without budget, the free CPA templates are the practical starting point.

The liability angle

ASIC Chair Joe Longo confirmed in 2025 a one-year modified-liability transition for forward-looking statements under the S2 regime. That means reporting entities are not fully liable for forward-looking disclosures during year one. The implication for an SMB supplier is that its data is being used in statements the reporting entity is already legally exposed on. Getting the data wrong has consequences that accrue two levels up from the small supplier.

That is not a hypothetical liability. It is a practical one. Reporting entities, having accepted that exposure, are becoming more careful about the data they accept. The era of one-line supplier sustainability statements is closing. The era of audited, methodology-referenced, period-on-period data is opening.

What the best small suppliers are doing

Three moves are visible among the AU small suppliers that have made the transition without distress.

First, they have run a single one-off emissions estimate using the GHG Protocol for SMEs, signed off by their accountant. The estimate does not have to be perfect. It has to exist.

Second, they have documented their energy supply, transport, and waste arrangements in a single internal spreadsheet that is updated quarterly. This is not a carbon management system. It is a list of things the business buys and a factor next to each.

Third, they have designated one person, usually the owner, as the person who handles the customer sustainability request. Not the accountant, not the ops manager, the owner. The request requires context that only the owner has.

The small suppliers who have not done those three things will spend 2026 reacting to individual requests from individual customers. The ones who have will spend 2026 answering questions with numbers.

The second group will win more contracts. That is the compliance-by-procurement reality the supply chain has already arrived at, whether or not the legislation has.

Wearing the director hat in 2026: ASIC is watching, and so is the ATO

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The role of a small-company director in Australia has quietly become the most consequential role on a single-page ASIC form. For most of the last decade the office was treated, by family businesses and silent partners in particular, as largely ceremonial. In 2026 the penalties that can attach to it, the registers that track it, and the enforcement the regulator is actually willing to deploy, have all grown.

Three changes to name plainly.

Director ID is no longer a forms exercise

The Australian Business Registry Service had issued more than 2.75 million Director IDs by late 2024. ASIC confirmed through 2025 that enforcement had commenced against directors still non-compliant after the November 2022 deadline. Penalties under the Corporations Act, as updated, reach up to $16,500 (criminal) and $1.56 million (civil) per contravention for non-compliance with the identification regime.

The enforcement has not produced headline prosecutions, but it has begun to produce administrative determinations and formal warnings. For directors who are still not ID-compliant four years after the deadline, the enforcement risk is no longer notional.

Phoenix activity is a named priority

ASIC's Corporate Plan 2024-28 names illegal phoenix activity as an ongoing enforcement focus. The Phoenix Taskforce, which combines ASIC, the ATO, Home Affairs and Fair Work, estimates the cost of illegal phoenixing to the Australian economy at $2.85 to $5.13 billion annually (the PwC-for-ATO figures still cited in 2024-25 materials).

The posture is different from the one most small-company directors remember. ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court told industry in 2024 that "directors who fail to meet their obligations can expect to be held to account." The track record since is consistent with that framing.

The DPN layer, briefly

Separately, the ATO's use of the Director Penalty Notice (covered in our earlier piece) has moved the director's personal balance sheet into the collection path for unpaid company GST, PAYG and super. That is not ASIC's regime, but it compounds with it. A director who is exposed on one is often exposed on the other.

The 2024-25 ASIC industry-funding levies for small proprietary companies lifted, and the regulator moved more filings to its new companies register portal during 2025 ahead of the broader Modernising Business Registers programme. The practical effect is that the administrative footprint of being a director has grown, slowly and quietly, without any single dramatic announcement.

Directors who fail to meet their obligations can expect to be held to account.

The practical audit

For a small-company director in 2026, the audit to run once is short and uncontentious.

Director ID in place, current, and recorded on every directorship. Not just the main company. All of them.
ASIC annual review filings current for every company on which you are a director. Including the dormant ones.
ATO lodgements current. BAS, super, PAYG. On-time lodgement is what preserves the 21-day escape on a standard DPN.
Phoenixing-risk assessment on any director-related entity set up, wound up, or transferred in the last five years. The ATO and ASIC can reach back.
Personal guarantees on director-level credit reviewed. Not because any of them are unenforceable, but because most directors do not remember, in aggregate, what they have signed.

None of those checks costs anything to run. The cost is the half-day of attention they require. That is a trivial investment against the regulatory environment the office has moved into.

The ceremonial-director era of the Australian small-business sector is, on the current trajectory, closing. The 2026-27 small-business director is a different role, with different exposures, and with a regulator that has stopped politely signalling about both.

Two years on: the unfair contract terms reforms biting

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 9 November 2023 amendments to the Australian Consumer Law finally gave the unfair contract terms regime teeth. Unfair terms in standard-form small-business contracts became illegal, pecuniary penalties became attachable (up to $50 million per contravention for body corporates), and the small-business eligibility threshold expanded materially.

Two and a half years later, the reform has worked through to the operational layer.

What actually changed

Before November 2023, a term found to be unfair by a court was void. The counterparty that had relied on it was not penalised. The small business that had signed it could, in theory, resist enforcement, but the cost of litigating to do so was frequently higher than the cost of complying with the term.

After November 2023, the term is illegal. Proposing, applying, or relying on an unfair term is a contravention, with civil penalties. The incentive to use these terms in templates, which was substantial in the old regime, is materially weaker in the new one.

The eligibility threshold also changed. The small-business counterparty definition extended to any business with fewer than 100 employees or less than $10 million in turnover. That captures a much larger share of the Australian SMB universe than the previous thresholds.

Where the ACCC has been active

ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb confirmed in February 2025 that unfair contract terms would remain a 2025-26 enforcement priority. The track record since is consistent with that signal.

Federal Court proceedings against Fujifilm Business Innovation remain the highest-profile UCT matter, with commentary ongoing through 2025. Franchise-sector matters have continued; so have actions against digital platforms and agricultural supply contracts. The ASBFEO's 2025 annual reporting showed rising dispute volumes where one side raised UCT as a defence or counter-claim.

The clauses most commonly removed from amended templates are the expected ones:

Unilateral variation rights held by the larger party.
Automatic rollover clauses with long notice windows for the smaller party.
Broad indemnities that run one way.
Asymmetrical limitation-of-liability provisions.

The Treasury's 2024-25 review of the Franchising Code has intersected with UCT work in the franchise sector, adding a second regulatory lens to the same underlying contract. That has compounded the pressure on franchisor templates.

Unfair contract terms remains a continuing focus. Small business, franchising, and digital platforms are priority sectors.

What small-business operators are doing

The businesses I have spoken to through 2025 and 2026 that have moved most actively on UCT fall into two groups.

The first group is small suppliers to large buyers. These are the businesses whose 2022-era contracts most often contain the problem clauses, because they were signed under take-it-or-leave-it terms. For these operators, the 2024-25 window has been an opportunity to request contract amendments at renewal, backed by the plausible threat that the existing terms may be unenforceable. The request does not always succeed, but it is being made, and buyers are increasingly willing to negotiate.

The second group is franchisees. The Franchising Code review overlaid on UCT has made the 2025-26 window the most favourable time in decades to raise contract concerns. Several franchise councils have used the combined regime as leverage for structural amendments that would not have been achievable under either regime alone.

The counterintuitive finding

One point that is not well-understood in the small-business sector is that the UCT regime binds the small business as a counterparty of a larger one, but also the small business as the drafter of its own standard terms.

A small business that sells to other small businesses, with a standard-form contract whose terms are too one-sided, is exposed under the new regime if any counterparty qualifies as a "small business" (fewer than 100 employees or under $10 million turnover). In practice, most of the counterparties a small supplier deals with will qualify.

The advice the commercial lawyers I have spoken with give most often is therefore symmetric. Review the contracts you sign as a small business. Then review the contracts your small business asks others to sign.

The second review is the one most small businesses have not done. Through 2026 it is the one the regulator is increasingly interested in.

Where this lands in 2027

The expectation from the ACCC commentary and the Treasury reform pipeline is that UCT work will continue at roughly its current intensity through 2026-27, with a gradual shift from flagship cases against large platforms to pattern-based enforcement in specific sectors. The direction of the reform is not changing. The specific clauses the regulator takes an interest in will.

For small business, the 2026 posture is clear. The contracts you signed in 2022 are worth reading again. The contracts you are drafting now are worth having reviewed. The penalties attached to getting either wrong are sized for large companies, but they apply to small ones too.

The shadow bank at your door: private credit's pivot to small business

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Australian private credit has had a loud decade. The Reserve Bank's October 2025 Financial Stability Review estimated the domestic private credit market at approximately $205 billion, up from around $70 billion in 2020. That is a tripling in five years, in a jurisdiction whose banking sector had most of the SMB lending market locked up for a generation.

The quieter part of the story is where that capital has been going. A non-trivial slice has pivoted, in the last eighteen months, toward small-business lending. Prospa, Moula, Lumi and Bizcap are the visible names. Behind them are funding-line arrangements with private-credit managers chasing yield that the bank portfolios, after APRA-tightened serviceability rules, no longer produce.

For owner-operators shut out by the Big Four, the non-bank alternatives are real, fast, and expensive.

The rate gap, plainly stated

A secured bank term loan for a small business in 2026 typically clears at 7 to 9 per cent per annum. A Prospa or Bizcap short-term unsecured facility clears at 15 to 30 per cent effective annualised rate, depending on term, collateral and credit quality. For the shortest facilities (30 to 90 days) the factor rate can be higher still.

The rate gap is the product of three real differences.

First, the risk profile. Non-bank lenders are writing loans to businesses the banks have declined. Those declines cluster in construction, hospitality and retail, which are also the sectors most exposed to the 2025-26 insolvency wave.

Second, the cost of funds. The private credit managers funding these lenders expect returns that materially exceed the cash rate. Those returns have to come from somewhere.

Third, the speed. A non-bank lender quoting on a Tuesday for a Friday drawdown is carrying operational cost the bank process does not incur. That cost is part of the rate.

None of that makes the rate wrong. It makes the rate what it is.

The convenience that makes non-bank lending viable for a business that needs cash on Friday is the same convenience that compounds into a serviceability problem by June.

The FY25 reporting

Prospa (ASX: PGL) reported FY25 results showing rising origination volume and average facility size, with the loan book tilting longer and larger. Judo Bank (ASX: JDO), the bank-sector comparator operating in the mid-market SMB segment, recorded its own FY25 growth, though at lower effective rates than the non-bank specialists.

APRA's quarterly ADI property-exposures statistics through 2024 and 2025 showed business lending to SMEs by the main banks growing below system credit growth. The gap between what SMEs need and what the banks have been willing to lend has widened, and private credit has filled the widening.

ASIC's Report 806 (2025) flagged transparency and valuation concerns in the private credit funds being marketed to retail and SMSF investors. That is not a small-business-side concern in itself, but it signals that the regulator is watching the pipeline.

For an SMB owner weighing the options

The tactical considerations for a small business choosing between a bank facility, a non-bank facility, or no facility in 2026 are narrower than the product sheets suggest.

If the borrowing need is capital expenditure with a multi-year payback, the bank option is almost always right. Non-bank facilities should not be used for capex. The term mismatch compounds badly.
If the borrowing need is working capital through a specific, identified receivable gap of three to six months, the non-bank option can be rational. Specifically: a known contract is landing, the cash is coming, the gap is the problem. In that case the convenience is worth the rate.
If the borrowing need is to cover a margin shortfall that the business has not otherwise addressed, neither option is right. The non-bank facility will convert a margin problem into a balance-sheet problem.

Most small-business distress in 2026 is not caused by the rate charged on the borrowing. It is caused by borrowing without a credible plan to retire the facility. The non-bank sector, by making the borrowing faster, has not changed that underlying fact. It has only raised the cost of getting it wrong.

The macro question

Whether the private-credit pivot to SMB lending is filling a genuine credit gap or inflating risk is the question the RBA and APRA will wrestle with through 2026-27. The honest answer is that it is doing both.

The businesses that would not have obtained bank finance, and for whom three months of working capital at 22 per cent is the difference between landing a contract and not, are the gap-filling case. The businesses that cannot service bank finance because their underlying margin does not justify it, and are borrowing at non-bank rates to postpone the reckoning, are the risk-inflating case.

The two cases are hard to distinguish on a loan application. The market is distinguishing between them, but with a twelve-to-eighteen-month lag. The lag is where the stress will show up.

For the next several years, the sensible small-business posture is to use the non-bank option where the credit gap is real and the retirement plan is specific, and to stay out of it where either condition is not met. That is not a simple instruction, and it is why the broking profession has, for the first time in a decade, become strategically important to small business.

Inside the 20 per cent target: how small firms actually win Commonwealth work

Tom Nguyen — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Commonwealth Procurement Rules commit the federal government to sourcing at least 20 per cent of procurement contracts by value from SMEs, and 35 per cent by volume for contracts under $20 million. The number is genuine, and the Department of Finance publishes against it annually.

But the number is not a description of how small firms actually win Commonwealth work. The mechanics are a stack of panels, standing offers, sub-threshold direct engagements, and informal relationships that sit below the public-tender surface. A small business that understands the stack wins work that a small business that does not cannot.

The three channels

Broadly, Commonwealth spend with SMEs flows through three channels.

One: open tenders published on AusTender. These are the loudest channel because they are the most visible. They are also the smallest slice of the total. For any SME without an existing relationship with the buying agency, an open AusTender bid is, in most cases, a bid against incumbents with better information. Win rates for cold bidders are low.

Two: panel arrangements. Whole-of-government and agency-specific panels (for ICT, management consulting, legal, audit, research, creative and communications) aggregate a pre-qualified supplier list that agencies draw from without running full tenders. The Digital Marketplace (BuyICT) and the Management Advisory Services panel are the two best-known. Panel membership is itself a one-off investment; the bid response for panel admission is substantial. Once in, the practical benefit is large: agencies can engage panel members for sub-threshold work directly, usually through a statement-of-work rather than a new tender.

Three: sub-threshold direct engagement. For contracts under $80,000 for most agencies, or higher thresholds in specific categories, a single agency officer can engage a supplier directly. This is where much of the actual SME spend happens, and where existing relationships dominate.

Where the rules actually are

The Commonwealth Procurement Rules (current edition, Department of Finance) set the 20 per cent SME value target and the 35 per cent volume target. The Buy Australian Plan, introduced in the 2023-24 federal budget and extended in subsequent updates, has added further preference rules favouring Australian-made goods and Australian-owned suppliers.

State procurement operates under parallel regimes. The NSW SME and Regional Procurement Policy, the Victorian Government Social Procurement Framework, and the Queensland Procurement Policy each provide state-specific settings. Queensland's framework is the most favourable to very small suppliers through its Office of Small Business arrangements; Victoria's social procurement framework creates a specific Aboriginal-business preference pathway.

The ASBFEO has continued to push through 2025 for the 30-day payment standard to be enforced for Commonwealth suppliers on contracts up to $1 million. That standard is still uneven in implementation across agencies.

The win rate on the first open tender is two per cent. The win rate on the first panel SoW after joining a panel is thirty.

The four moves that work

Small businesses that win Commonwealth work repeatedly do four things the ones that do not, do not.

They invest in panel admission. Even for a single-director consultancy, a Management Advisory Services panel bid or Digital Marketplace registration is a one-off exercise that opens the sub-threshold engagement door for the following three years.
They build relationships pre-procurement. Agency industry briefings, vendor-briefing sessions on upcoming market approaches, and technology demonstrations are the channels where future procurements are scoped. Small suppliers who attend those briefings are substantially better positioned when the procurement opens.
They use the categorisation advantage. Each year's Commonwealth procurement spend is broken out by UNSPSC category. A small supplier can read the previous year's AusTender data for categories relevant to their offering and identify the agencies buying. That is free market intelligence. Most do not use it.
They price to the buyer's budget, not to the job. Agency buyers are working against annual budget allocations. A quote that exceeds the allocation will not be awarded regardless of its quality. The quote that sits inside the allocation, even if it describes a narrower scope, is the quote that gets the engagement. The scope can expand later.

The two honest realities

First, the 20 per cent target is a value target. SMEs win a higher share of contract volume (35 per cent) than value. A small supplier should not expect to win the largest contract in their category; they should expect to win many of the smaller ones.

Second, government work pays slowly relative to private-sector work. The 30-day standard is an aspiration; 45 to 60 days is typical for many agencies, with the ATO and Services Australia among the better-performing payers and some portfolio agencies among the worse. A small supplier taking government work for the first time should model cash flow assuming the worst payment profile they have quoted against commercially.

The commercial case for selling to government, for an Australian SME in 2026, is better than it has been for most of the past decade. The target is genuine, the preference rules favour Australian suppliers, and the sub-threshold layer is where the actual volume lives. Getting into that layer requires one-off investment in panel admission and a posture that treats the agency buyer as a client with a budget, not an enemy with a tender process.

The SMEs that make those adjustments win. The ones that do not, lose to the incumbents, and draw the conclusion that government is impossible to sell to. Both conclusions are available from the same data.

Excise, kegs and closures: why 2026 broke craft beer

Eleanor Pike — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Australian craft beer is in the middle of its first sustained contraction since the industry's 2010s boom. The Independent Brewers Association recorded more than twenty independent brewery closures or administrations in 2024-25, including names the segment had treated as strongholds: Deeds, Wayward and Hawkers each entered administration in the window.

The cause is not a single bad thing. It is a stack.

The excise problem, unapologetically

Australia's beer excise is the third-highest in the world, and it is indexed twice a year, in February and August, to CPI. As at February 2026, the full-strength draught rate sat above $44 per litre of alcohol and the full-strength packaged rate above $62 per litre of alcohol, after the August 2025 indexation resumed following the 2024 Budget's two-year pause on draught indexation.

For a small independent brewery producing, say, 500,000 litres of packaged beer at 5.0 per cent alcohol, the federal excise line alone is a six-figure annual cost that is not, at the relevant volumes, softened by the small-producer offset to the point where margin works on mainstream pricing.

The Independent Brewers Association, under chief executive Kylie Lethbridge, campaigned through 2025 for an excise freeze. The 2024 Budget gave them a two-year pause on draught indexation. That pause ended in August 2025. Indexation has now resumed at the pre-pause cadence.

The volume problem

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' apparent-consumption-of-alcohol data for 2024 recorded per-capita beer consumption at multi-decade lows. That is not a craft-specific problem; it is a whole-category problem. Australian drinkers are drinking less beer, and when they do drink beer they are drinking it in venues where the cost structure is the venue's not the brewery's.

That shift interacts badly with the craft cost model. Craft breweries built through the 2010s on the assumption that consumers would trade up to higher-price, higher-margin beer. The trade-up happened. The trade-up to bigger volume did not. For a brewery at 800,000 litres of annual production, the difference between 3.5 per cent market-average volume growth and flat consumption is, over three years, the difference between scale and contraction.

The distribution layer

Carlton & United Breweries (Asahi) and Lion continue to dominate Australian beer distribution. The consolidation at the wholesale layer through 2023 to 2025 (ALM and Paramount Liquor among others) has reduced the route-to-market options available to independents further. An independent brewery that would like to get into a Dan Murphy's or BWS listing in 2026 is negotiating with fewer, larger counterparts than the same brewery would have negotiated with in 2018.

The Drinks Trade and IBA commentary through 2025 has been unanimous on this point. The wholesale layer has become harder for independents, not because the layer is behaving badly, but because it has consolidated. Consolidated layers have less patience for small suppliers with small volumes.

We used to fight the excise. We fight the logistics now. The excise we understand. The logistics we cannot, no matter how good the beer is, reshape from a small brewhouse.

The container and energy additions

Two cost lines that had been background items for most of the 2010s became visible in 2024-25: container deposit scheme costs and energy bills. Container deposit scheme compliance adds roughly 3 to 5 per cent to COGS per IBA member surveys. Energy bills through 2025 added another margin point to most brewery cost structures.

Neither of these is, on its own, fatal. Both on top of the excise line in a softening volume environment is.

What the survivors are doing

The independent breweries that are still trading, and trading profitably, at the time of writing share a short list of properties:

They own a venue. The taproom captures both wholesale margin and retail margin on the beer it pours, and captures food and beverage margin on the rest of the ticket. Most of the 2024-25 administrations were wholesale-dominant businesses without a venue.
They have shortened their range. The 14-SKU core line-ups of 2019 are now 6-SKU core line-ups with one or two limited releases. The reduction in SKU count has materially reduced the working-capital tied up in packaged stock.
They have priced up, not down. The breweries still profitable raised packaged retail prices 6 to 9 per cent in 2024 and another 4 per cent in 2025. The volume loss from those increases was less than the margin recovery. That is a specific, recoverable pattern that most in-trouble breweries did not follow early enough.

The IBA's ongoing advocacy is useful. It is not sufficient. The Australian craft beer sector in 2026 is smaller than it was in 2022, and will be smaller again in 2027.

The beers the surviving breweries are making are, on every sensory measure, better than they have ever been. The industry's problem is not the beer. It is everything around it.

Too much red, too few buyers: the small winery reckoning

Eleanor Pike — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The China tariff on Australian wine came off in March 2024. Australian wine exports to China passed $1 billion in 2024-25, per Wine Australia's export data. The recovery was real, and for premium South Australian producers the recovery has been the dominant fact of the last two vintages.

For the warm-inland growers, the recovery has barely arrived.

The two-tier reality

Wine Australia's National Vintage Report 2025 recorded the 2025 crush at around 1.4 million tonnes, below the long-term average. Inventory-to-sales ratios for red wine remained elevated after the 2021-23 glut. The wine that is moving is concentrated at the premium end.

In the Riverland, shiraz and cabernet prices at vintage 2025 remained below $300 per tonne, widely reported by Riverland Wine (under chief executive Lyndall Rowe) and ABC Rural to be below the cost of production. That is not new; it has been substantially true since 2023. The new thing is that the premium-end recovery has not flowed through to the warm-inland floor price, as many observers had expected it would.

Accolade Wines, under Australian Wine Holdco (the Bain Capital-led consortium that took ownership in 2023), has continued to restructure through 2025 with the AFR and other outlets covering the reduced contracted grape intake. That reduction hits warm-inland growers disproportionately because the warm-inland fruit had been the main source of Accolade's bulk-wine programme.

The WET rebate has not moved

The Wine Equalisation Tax rebate cap has remained at $350,000 since 2018. Australian Grape & Wine (chief executive Lee McLean) argued through 2025 for indexation and for a grower-assistance package aimed at the warm-inland regions.

The rebate is a meaningful line on the P&L of a small producer. It has lost roughly 25 per cent of its real value since 2018 in CPI terms. A policy that is nominally unchanged has, through inaction, contracted.

Another year of below-cost prices, another year of unchanged rebate. We are not going broke because of one year. We are going broke because nobody above us has moved in eight.

The climate layer

The 2024 frost and the 2025 heat spikes added a second pressure: vintage variability. Limestone Coast and Coonawarra producers reported disruptive weather events in 2024 and 2025 that materially affected yield and quality, per Wine Australia's regional snapshots.

Large producers absorb those events across a portfolio of regions and vintages. Small producers do not. A single-region, single-vintage producer with a bad frost in 2024 and a bad heat spike in 2025 has a two-vintage problem that the balance sheet may not survive, even if the 2026 vintage is perfect.

What the survivors look like

The small producers I have spoken with who are still operating have, broadly, done one of three things.

Moved up the quality ladder and out of bulk. Growers who contracted directly with premium producers, or who established their own premium label, are seeing 2025-26 pricing that is consistent with the broader premium recovery.
Consolidated with a neighbour. Multi-family or multi-owner arrangements have spread fixed cost over more hectares, particularly in the Riverland, where the economics at the grower level no longer work at single-family scale.
Diversified the land use. Table grapes, citrus, almonds and in some cases solar installations have supplemented or replaced grape revenue on the warmer parts of the Riverland.

Each of these is a real adaptation. None of them is what a grower wanted to do with the land they bought in 2012 to grow wine grapes.

The policy window

Wine Australia's 2025 advocacy work, the ASBFEO's commentary through 2025, and Australian Grape & Wine's submissions all point in the same direction: the warm-inland grape sector needs either structural reduction in planted area, or material uplift in the WET rebate, or both. The 2026 federal budget is one of the potential windows for a response.

The politics of that response are complicated. A direct grower-assistance package triggers subsidy debates. A rebate lift has implicit revenue cost. A structural adjustment package requires cooperation from large producers whose contracted intake is the pressure point.

There is no 2026 outcome that is straightforward. But the outcomes of continuing inaction are now visible in the grower-level cash-flow data: below-cost prices, unserviceable debt, and family farms that are entering their third year of being unable to make the numbers work.

The wine Australia exports to China in 2026 will not, on current trends, be warm-inland fruit. That is an adjustment the industry will have to reckon with, one way or another. The only question is how much of the warm-inland grower base remains by the time the reckoning is complete.

Hipages, Oneflare, ServiceSeeking: the middleman tax on Aussie tradies

Marcus Hall — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The lead market for Australian tradies has, quietly, moved into three apps.

Hipages Group (ASX: HPG) reported in its FY24 results revenue of $75.2 million with more than 39,000 subscribing tradies on the platform, following the acquisition of Tradiecore and the New Zealand outfit Builderscrack. The FY25 half-year update in February 2025 showed rising subscription ARPU and churn stabilising around 1.7 per cent monthly. Oneflare, News Corp-owned, services roughly 200,000 registered businesses. ServiceSeeking rounds out the top three.

Combined, per Hipages' own investor materials, the three originate an estimated 30 to 40 per cent of Australian consumer home-services leads. Roy Morgan research (2024) showed 52 per cent of Australians aged 25 to 49 now find trades via an app or search rather than word of mouth, up from 38 per cent in 2019.

The practical implication for an individual plumber, electrician or landscaper in 2026 is that the lead market for their services is no longer a word-of-mouth market. It is a platform market.

The take rates, in numbers

Hipages lead fees range from approximately $8 to more than $80 per lead, depending on category and postcode. Plumbing and electrical sit among the most expensive. A Choice investigation in 2024 noted tradies routinely spending $800 to $2,000 per month on lead credits, with no guarantee of conversion.

The effective take rate, on a job where the tradie buys multiple leads to win a single quote, can rival the 30 per cent cut the app stores take on a mobile game. For a one-person trade business, with a margin that was already tight after insurance, fuel and materials, that take rate is a material transfer of value from the tradie's P&L to the platform's.

Why it happened

The 2019-to-2024 shift was not accidental. Three things aligned.

First, consumer behaviour in the 25-to-49 age cohort moved decisively into app-based service discovery. The younger half of that cohort has never, in practical terms, asked a neighbour for a plumber recommendation.

Second, the HIA and MBA residential renovation data through 2024 and 2025 showed residential renovation spend at record levels (around $14.5 billion in approvals for FY24), while detached new starts stayed subdued. That pushed more trade work into the small-job, platform-friendly channel rather than the large-job, builder-relationship channel.

Third, the platforms' operational excellence around take-up (consumer UX, SEO, CAC discipline, paid-media funnel) outran anything a tradie business could do on its own. The platforms did not win because they were the best value for tradies. They won because they were the best-designed funnel for the consumer.

I spent four thousand dollars on leads last year. I can tell you, to the dollar, what the platforms cost me. I cannot tell you, to the dollar, what my next customer is going to cost me. That is the platform's job, not mine.

The ACCC's lens

The ACCC's Digital Platform Services Inquiry interim reports through 2024 and 2025 explicitly named online-services marketplaces as a category for future scrutiny. NSW Fair Trading received record complaint volumes about online-sourced trades in 2024.

The regulatory conversation in 2026 is live but not yet concluded. Likely directions include greater transparency on lead-credit refund policies, stronger obligations on platforms to resolve consumer-side complaints about platform-sourced tradies, and disclosure requirements around the commercial relationship between platforms and the consumers they route to tradies.

None of those likely interventions changes the underlying economics for a small trade business. They only change the information available.

What the smarter tradies do

The trade businesses I have spoken to that are managing the platform dependence best are doing three things.

They treat the platforms as a channel, not a business. A proportion of revenue (20 to 40 per cent is typical among the well-run ones) comes through the apps. The rest comes from repeat work, referrals, Google Business Profile organic, and direct bookings via the business's own website. Those channels have higher margin and are not controlled by a third party.
They own their customer data. The platforms will not, in most cases, allow direct contact information to transfer. But a customer who has had work done can be asked, in person, for an email address, with a promise to schedule the annual service directly. The long-term value of that customer relationship is on the tradie's balance sheet, not the platform's.
They track unit economics per channel. A lead that costs $32 from Hipages and converts at 25 per cent with an average ticket of $480 is telling a tradie something. The same tradie's Google Business Profile organic leads, by contrast, might convert at 60 per cent with the same ticket. That comparison drives advertising decisions.

Those moves do not remove the platforms from the picture. They reduce the portion of the business that depends on the platforms to a level where a take-rate change does not threaten the P&L.

For most Australian trade SMBs, that is the best achievable outcome in 2026. The alternative, a business that runs on platform leads alone, is a business whose future revenue is, in practical terms, owned by a company the tradie has no equity in.

The phone the plumber is looking at matters. The one they should be reading is their own customer list.

The two-year gap: why SMB owners wait too long to ask for help

Marcus Hall — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Small-business owners are not covered by the WHS-style employer duties that apply to their staff. Nothing obliges an owner to manage their own psychological load the way the business is obliged to manage that of the people it employs. That is a policy design that works for almost every other workplace participant. It does not work for the owner, because the owner is the one carrying the financial, staffing, personal-guarantee and regulatory weight of the business.

The research in this space is unambiguous and, in recent years, specifically Australian.

What the numbers say

Everymind's Ahead for Business 2024-25 national report (built by the Hunter Institute at the University of Newcastle) documents psychological distress prevalence among owner-operators at rates higher than the general working population. The specific distress markers (sleep disruption, relationship strain, blunted affect, declining professional judgement) match the clinical profile for anxiety and depression at population rates.

NAB SME Business Insights and Xero Small Business Insights wellbeing modules through 2025-26 corroborate the pattern with different methodologies. Small-business owners report stress at consistently higher levels than employed Australians. They also report help-seeking at substantially lower rates.

The finding that matters most is the time gap. On average, Australian small-business owners recognise mental-health symptoms in themselves within weeks. They seek professional help, where they seek it, roughly two years later. That gap is the central problem the supports available are trying to close.

The supports that exist

Four named federal and federally-funded supports are worth knowing by name, because most small-business owners still do not.

Ahead for Business (Everymind, Hunter Institute) provides owner-specific information, assessments and pathways. Its 2024-25 national report is the foundational dataset for this space. The platform is free and designed for owner-operators rather than a general adult population.

NewAccess for Small Business Owners (Beyond Blue, Treasury-funded) provides free coaching over six structured sessions, delivered by trained coaches who are themselves often small-business owners. The service has scaled through 2024 and 2025; enrolment figures indicate rising utilisation without yet reaching the full addressable population.

Heads Up (Beyond Blue), originally designed for general workplace mental health, has a small-business variant with free resources and implementation guides.

My Business Health (ASBFEO portal, federally funded) connects owners with both business-side and mental-health-side resources through a single point of contact.

None of these services is new. They are, collectively, poorly known.

I recognised what was happening in 2023. I did something about it in 2025. I wish the gap had been shorter. I did not know it had a name.

Why help-seeking is late

Three mechanisms are visible in the clinical and the commercial literature.

The identity mechanism. Running a small business is, for many owners, an identity as much as an occupation. Help-seeking for a mental-health issue is interpreted (often incorrectly, but interpreted nonetheless) as an admission that the identity is under threat. That interpretation delays action.
The cash-flow mechanism. Help-seeking has a price. Even where the formal services are free, the downstream costs (time away from the business, potentially disclosing to staff or customers, potentially adjusting business operations) feel large in a cash-flow-constrained environment.
The stigma mechanism. Hospitality, construction and trades carry higher than average stigma around mental-health disclosure. Those are also three of the sectors with the highest observed distress. The overlap is not accidental.

None of these three is insurmountable. All three are reduced, in practice, by the existence of services that match the owner's cultural and operational context. Ahead for Business was designed with exactly that consideration. So was NewAccess.

The small intervention that helps

The single recommendation I have heard most consistently from owners who came out of their own two-year gap is to pick one conversation. Not a program, not a service, not a clinical intervention. One conversation, with one person, about how the business is actually going.

That conversation is almost always with either a partner, a long-tenured staff member, or an accountant. For many owners it is the accountant, because the accountant has been watching the cash flow and has some of the context without requiring a full explanation.

The conversation is not the intervention. It is the thing that, in nearly every case I have heard, unlocks the intervention. The owner leaves the conversation with permission to call one of the services named above. The gap from that call to the first meaningful session is short.

The policy layer

The COSBOA mental wealth initiative has continued to push through 2025-26 for greater federal funding of owner-specific supports. The current funding envelope is small relative to the scale of the addressable population.

The policy case is not contentious. The services that exist work. The ones that would exist if adequately funded would also work. The political economy of delivering them is the binding constraint, not the evidence base.

For owner-operators reading this piece, the immediate ask is shorter. If any of the recognition markers apply, pick the one conversation. Make it this month rather than next year. The services that follow are free, named, and designed for Australian small-business owners. They have been working for people like you for longer than most of us realise.

The gap is the thing to close. Not because your business depends on it, though it often does. Because you do.

Closed in '24, back in '26: the quiet rise of the SMB restart

Marcus Hall — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The 2023-24 wave of Australian small-business closures was well-covered. The quieter 2025-26 story is what is happening to the operators who closed.

ASIC's FY25 insolvency statistics recorded more than 14,000 companies entering external administration, a record. ASBFEO's 2024-25 annual report on small-business entries, exits and re-entries documents something underneath that record. A non-trivial share of the operators who exited are re-entering, in a different form, within 18 to 24 months of the closure.

The term "restart" is less clinical than "entering external administration and reopening after a restructuring process," but the three distinct patterns I have seen operators follow all live under it. They are worth recording.

Pattern one: the SBR route

The Small Business Restructuring process (SBR), introduced in 2021 for companies with liabilities under $1 million, has had uneven uptake. Through 2024 and 2025 the uptake has risen sharply. The SBR process allows a director to remain in control of the company while a restructuring practitioner helps negotiate a plan with creditors. Where accepted, the plan typically writes off some portion of unsecured debt and gives the company a path to trade through.

For the right kind of business (positive operating margin, manageable non-ATO liabilities, viable forward order book), SBR has become the structurally cheaper restart pathway than liquidation plus re-formation. The advisers I have spoken to through 2025-26 are clear about the conditions: it works for the businesses whose underlying economics were sound before a specific shock (typically a tax-debt backlog). It does not work for the businesses whose underlying economics were not.

Pattern two: the format change

The most-visible 2025-26 restart pattern in hospitality and retail is the format change. A CBD dine-in restaurant closes, and the same operator reopens 18 months later as a suburban dine-in half the size with a bottle-shop attached. A CBD fashion boutique closes and reopens as a by-appointment showroom in the operator's neighbourhood.

The specifics differ by sector. The common logic is the same. The closed business had a cost structure (rent, staff, suppliers) that did not work at the revenue level of the market it was operating in. The restart business has a cost structure that does, for a smaller but more loyal customer base.

The best-documented 2025-26 case studies (via Broadsheet, Good Food, and local press in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) all show the same pattern. The operator did not lose the customers. They lost the cost base, kept the brand, kept a core of the team, and reopened.

Pattern three: the geography shift

Less visible but increasingly common in regional Australia is the geography shift. An operator who ran in a capital city closes, moves to a regional centre, and reopens there. The cost base (lease, staffing, utilities) is materially lower. The revenue ceiling is lower too, but often not by as much as the cost reduction.

This pattern is particularly visible in food service, professional services and small-scale manufacturing. The regional centres picking up most of the 2025-26 relocators are the ones with established lifestyle attractors for the 30-to-50 age cohort: Hobart, Newcastle, Byron Shire and the Sunshine Coast.

The venue I ran in 2022 could not, on the lease I signed, ever have made money. The venue I run now is a quarter of the size and makes money every week. The customers did not cause the closure. The lease did.

The restart playbook, compressed

Four moves repeat across the restarts I have documented.

Shed the lease. Most closures are triggered by a lease that was right in 2019, wrong in 2023, and unsustainable in 2025. The restart starts with a lease that is sized to 2026 rather than to 2019.
Shrink the footprint. Seats, SKUs, opening hours, service counters. Fewer of each, more tightly operated, with a tighter connection to the revenue per square metre of the smaller footprint.
Keep the brand and the team. The customer loyalty attached to the name and the faces is the one operating asset the closure cannot destroy. Every successful restart I have seen has kept both.
Renegotiate supplier terms from a clean slate. Closure, for better or worse, resets supplier relationships. The restart is the moment to negotiate new terms without the baggage of the old debts.

None of these is glamorous. All of them are what the operators I respect most have done.

The legal layer

For an operator considering a restart, two legal points are worth being clear on.

First, the ASIC director disqualification and the Corporations Act phoenix provisions mean that the same director cannot, as a matter of course, run the same company through the closure and reopen it as a new entity without navigating the phoenix framework carefully. The restart pathways most consistent with the law are SBR (preserves the entity), voluntary administration with a deed of company arrangement, or liquidation followed by re-formation at arm's length from the old entity with legitimate commercial justification.

Second, the 2024 Phoenix Taskforce enforcement has focused on precisely the cases where the legal structure is used to transfer assets out of a creditor-facing company and into a debt-free one. Operators need legal advice before, not after, the restart.

The closure is not the failure. The failure is the closure that does not, because of hesitation or lack of information, become the restart. For the 2023-24 cohort that is still deciding, the window for a 2026 restart is the twelve months ahead of them. The operators who take it will mostly be the ones you do not yet know about. They will be back.

Women on the tools: Australia's trades gender gap in 2026

Eleanor Pike — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Australian Bureau of Statistics labour-force data for 2024 placed women at approximately 3 per cent of the on-tools construction trades workforce (carpenters, electricians, plumbers). That number has moved very little in a decade. The construction industry overall, including the office, design and management layer, is closer to 13 per cent female. The on-tools figure is the one that matters for the Housing Accord.

Australia needs an additional 90,000 workers in the building trades by the end of 2025 and 130,000 by 2029 to hit the 1.2-million-homes target. The only substantial untapped labour pool is the 97 per cent of the on-tools workforce that is not currently female.

The initiatives, named

Four named organisations are doing the work to shift this number. Operators hiring in 2026 should know each of them by name.

NAWIC (the National Association of Women in Construction, founded 1995) runs chapters in every state. The annual NAWIC Awards for Excellence surface individual achievement; more importantly, the NAWIC-RMIT 2024 research surveyed more than 1,300 women on workplace culture, harassment and retention, providing the most comprehensive AU-specific dataset on why women leave trades (which is most of the attrition problem).

SALT (Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen), founded by Hacia Atherton after a workplace accident, runs structured mentoring and the national Women in Trades Awards. SALT's Empowered Women in Trades training and placement pipeline partnered with Master Builders Victoria and the Victorian government in 2024.

Empowered Women in Trades has, under the SALT umbrella, graduated cohorts into live apprenticeships with partner employers across Melbourne and increasingly in regional Victoria.

The Commonwealth's Building Women's Careers programme (October 2024, $55.6 million) funds six industry consortia, including construction, to lift female participation. The New Energy Apprenticeships Programme offers up to $10,000 for women entering clean-energy trades.

The numbers underneath the numbers

NCVER apprenticeship commencement data for 2024 records female apprentice commencements in traditionally male-dominated trades at roughly 4 to 5 per cent of the cohort. That is a small improvement on a decade ago, but it is fragile. Female completion rates lag male rates by 6 to 8 percentage points.

The gap between commencement and completion is where the policy lever that works on the front end fails on the back. The NAWIC-RMIT research identified three recurring attrition causes: workplace culture, physical facility inadequacy (the site toilets literally being male-only at many projects), and the absence of a senior woman on site to whom harassment could be reported without the report going directly to the person being complained about.

None of those three is new. All of them are solvable at the individual-employer level.

What state programmes are doing

Victoria's Women in Construction Strategy 2024-2030 targets 15 per cent female participation on the state's major Big Build projects.

NSW Women in Construction has been extended to June 2026 with free apprenticeship support for female participants.

WA's Building Women's Careers fund allocated $5 million in 2024 for industry-led programmes.

Each of these programmes has moved the numbers on its own measure. None has moved the aggregate on-tools figure by more than a percentage point at the state level.

We have more women in construction than we had in 2014. We do not yet have more women on the tools than we had in 2014. The first number without the second is not the outcome we need.

The employer moves that work

The research is consistent on what works at the individual-business level. Three interventions repeatedly move the retention number for an individual employer.

Hiring more than one woman per cohort. A single woman in an eight-person apprentice intake has no peer group. Two or three do. The retention differential between cohorts with one woman and cohorts with two or more is substantial.
Auditing the physical site for basic adequacy. Women's toilets on site, lockable changing facilities, PPE that fits. These are not optional and have been, on many Australian construction sites, poorly provided.
Assigning a senior-woman mentor outside the direct reporting line. The NAWIC structure provides this externally; employers who replicate it internally, with a senior woman to whom apprentices can go without career consequence, see meaningfully better completion rates.

None of these is expensive. All of them require the business to treat the recruitment of women not as an HR exercise but as an operational change.

The business case, specifically

For a trades SMB in 2026, the business case for doing the three things above is not principally about gender equity. It is about access to labour in a market where labour is the binding constraint. The HIA's Trades Availability Index is at -0.47 overall, with bricklaying at -1.02 (the worst reading in the twenty-year history of the index). A trades SMB in 2026 cannot meet its demand pipeline on the current labour pool. It has to widen the pool.

Widening the pool starts with the 97 per cent. The employers who understand this in 2026 will be the ones hiring, retaining, and winning the contracts that depend on having the workforce to deliver them.

The numbers are slow. The shift is real. And the businesses that move early will have the advantage for the next cycle of Australian construction, which is not small.

The migrant founder advantage: 1-in-3 AU SMBs starts with a visa

Eleanor Pike — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Australian Bureau of Statistics data has consistently shown that Australians born outside the country start businesses at higher rates than the Australian-born. The ABS Characteristics of Australian Business release for 2023-24 (published 2025) reaffirms the pattern. The Productivity Commission's 2024-25 research on migrant labour market outcomes, including self-employment, confirms it at a more granular level.

The pattern has been stable for two decades. The more interesting 2026 story is not the pattern itself. It is what the second generation of migrant-Australian founders is doing with the result.

The generational shift

Through the 1990s and 2000s, first-generation migrant entrepreneurship in Australia clustered in specific sectors: suburban retail (Vietnamese-Australian, Chinese-Australian), hospitality (Greek-Australian, Italian-Australian, later Lebanese-Australian), small-scale import-export (across most communities), and professional services in smaller numbers.

The second generation, coming through in the 2010s and 2020s, has scaled those family operations in three distinctive directions.

Direction one: from retail to national e-commerce. Second-generation Vietnamese-Australian retail families, many of whom ran single-site suburban stores for two decades, have in the past five years scaled those businesses into national and international e-commerce operations. Jane Lu's Showpo (Chinese-Australian) is the best-known case, but the pattern extends well below headline-scale operators.

Direction two: from professional services to SaaS. Indian-Australian professional services founders have increasingly pivoted into software productisation. The post-pandemic outsourcing boom accelerated this shift: a practice that had been billing clients for consulting services was more valuable as software that captured the same value at scale.

Direction three: from import retail to platform marketplaces. Chinese-Australian founders who ran import-retail operations in the 2000s have, in many cases, rotated the customer-relationship layer into their own marketplace platforms, keeping the supply-chain expertise but monetising differently.

A profile, in broad strokes

To avoid caricature, I am not going to name an individual founder in this piece. The representative profile is the interesting thing.

Second-generation migrant-Australian founder, 28 to 42. One or both parents migrated to Australia pre-1990 and ran a small business (retail, hospitality, professional services). Founder took over, scaled, or pivoted the family operation. The founder speaks the family's first language at home, and English at work. The business is headquartered in a Sydney or Melbourne suburb, frequently the same suburb the parents' business was in. The founder's capital structure is more likely to include family equity and less likely to include VC than the Australian-born founder cohort. The founder is more likely to have built the business without formal mentorship than through the formal ecosystem.

That description is built from publicly available profiles of about thirty Australian founders across several cohorts. It matches enough of them to be worth recording.

My parents did not know the accelerator ecosystem existed. I did not go to it either. We learned from each other across the kitchen table. The capital was ours. The mistakes were ours.

What the data does not capture

The ABS numbers pick up self-employment and small-business ownership. They do not pick up informal family-business co-ownership, which is common in the relevant cohorts and which understates the real migrant-Australian contribution to the SMB sector. They do not pick up the cross-border activity (supply chains, customer bases) that many of these businesses run, which materially understates their economic footprint.

The Scanlon Foundation's Mapping Social Cohesion 2025 research provides a richer qualitative picture of migrant community economic participation. The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals and CPA Australia's Asia-Pacific Small Business Survey 2025 provide cross-country comparisons that show Australia in the middle of the migrant-entrepreneurship range for OECD countries, but with a higher second-generation scaling rate than most.

The ecosystem's blind spot

The formal Australian startup and SMB ecosystem has been visibly bad at including second-generation migrant founders at scale. Accelerator cohorts, venture-capital portfolios and industry-body boards remain disproportionately drawn from a narrower cultural band than the underlying founder population.

That is not a policy problem. It is an ecosystem problem. The founders are there. The question is whether the ecosystem that claims to find and back the country's best founders is looking in the right places.

On the evidence, in 2026, it is still mostly not.

The note

The first-generation migrant entrepreneur story is well-covered and, in its public-facing form, sometimes sentimental. The second-generation story is less well-covered and, on the data, more economically important. The businesses these founders are building now are operating at a scale that the first generation, bound by language, capital access, and the Australian business culture of their time, could not have reached.

The 2030s Australian SMB sector will be substantially shaped by what those founders do in the second half of this decade. It is worth the national business press paying more attention to it than it currently does.

The ecosystem, too, could start by looking where the businesses actually are. Most of them are not in the accelerators. They are in the suburbs. They have been there, in one form or another, for thirty years.