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| Starting your own small business |
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| DerekG:
Several other things: 1/ If you do form a company, keep an eye on the Articles of Association. Some will give the chairman an extra vote (in the case of a tied vote of the board). If this is the case, YOU want to be the chairman! 2/ If you design & manufacture a product, get it independently tested by a NATA Certified Laboratory to ensure it meets the relevant Australian Standards. This is often the best way to prevent someone successfully suing you. 3/ Check out Australia's Fair Trading Act. This is Commonwealth Law and applies across all States & Territories. This will help you write your product warranty conditions. An example on how this affects hot water service manufacturers (& importers). The panel that provided expert advice to the Fair Trading Office determined that a storage hot water service should last for 10 years. As a result of this advice, if you manufacture (or import) a storage hot water service that fails at the 9 year mark (& provided the customer was not negligent & the installation was carried out correctly), you are required by the Fair Trading Act to not only replace that storage hot water service at no cost to the customer (which includes the fitting costs as well), but also you then need to supply a "new" 10 year warranty on that second hot water service. These types of costs need to be factored into your selling price. |
| EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Halcyon on May 09, 2018, 06:51:40 am ---I figured there would be a lot of experience on this forum. I'm looking to start my own small business, however not having any experience in this, I'd love to hear from those who have done it. The business will be based within and servicing clients in Australia only, so I'd need to do some research on the relevant tax rules etc... I have spoken to an accountant already to gain some basic advice. It will involve a few other people, so it won't be set up as a sole-trader, rather a partnership or a company. It will have no "employees" as such, the partners/directors will be doing all the work and taking a cut of the profit. --- End quote --- There are two ways to extract profits from the business, either as wages or as dividends. Your accountant will be able to tell you which one is which based on your regular income. Also, there some tax benefit in splitting income with your spouse, but you can't do that with dividends unless they are a shareholder. Just beware with dividends that over a small threshold the tax department will deem you be liable to earn the same dividends next year and will wan the tax up front. --- Quote ---I don't want to go into too many details but it is very much technology/electronics related (and no, I'm not going up against Dave or his many pies). I think our business plan is solid and the products/services we will be providing are very sought-after. We are targeting a very specific market so what we do and sell won't be open to just anybody. What makes it slightly more difficult is that we'll be running this company in addition to (and totally independent) of our full-time jobs. Essentially we aren't hoping to make millions, but rather boost our existing income. --- End quote --- With partners, just beware of who's actually doing what work and how much. They almost always end up with one person doing the majority of the work, yet all partners would be legally entitled to a share of the profits based on the percentage shareholding regardless if they are a slack arse or their skills weren't needed for a job etc. |
| EEVblog:
Damn, fooled by spammer necro-post. Anyway, any update on the business? |
| vk6zgo:
I, too, wonder what happened with Halcyon's business. I was going to put my 2c in that local Councils like to have their say about what kind of business you are running from home, too. I was looking at running an Electronics repair business from home, & looked up the Council guidelines. They had never heard of Electronics, but Computer repair was OK. :palm: This seems to be quite common.---------back in the early "2000s" Skilled Engineering had seemingly never heard of Electronics Techs, so they put me on the books as an "Instrument Technician". Bit weird for an occupation which had been around (in some shape or form) for nearly 100 years. |
| Shock:
There has been a serious lack of the "say thanks" button applied to this thread. :D |
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