r/ausbusiness

Hi,

I'm looking for solo traders (eventually small teams) in a field service business - plumbers, electricians etc who would like to trial an app for free, it does quotes, job scheduling, and invoices.

I'm a software engineer who does mobile car detailing on the side so I made an app during my spare time. You can send a quote/invoice in under 2 minutes from your phone and includes job scheduling and a calendar.

I am looking for honest feedback, in return I can give lifetime free access if its something you end up enjoying.

DM if you are interested and I'll send you the link so you can see if it looks good for you. Takes less than 5 minutes to set up. Thanks

I’ve been stuck deciding whether to use a broker for some fast business funding or just apply directly to the lenders myself. Has anyone here gone through a broker? Was it actually quicker and less painful, or did it just add another layer and extra fees? I like the idea of filling out one form and letting them shop around, but I’m paranoid about hidden costs or ending up with worse rates than if I went direct. If anyone has experience with brokers I’d love to hear how it went.

Hi everyone, I'm building an AI SaaS for travel and am looking for a partner who can weigh in on pathways we can make money with it. I am technical and can build agentic system but I struggle to find a scalable way to monetize the product. Preferably Australia based

If you're a business person (or better yet worked in travel before), would love to have a chat. Hit me up!!

Our commercial lease is up for renewal and with it the dreaded ‘market review’ where my REA proposed a 15% increase in rent, making it 35% higher than when I moved there 5 years ago and 50% higher by the end of the next term.

Knowing this would mean the end of my business and facing the thought of closing down, I spent a morning walking the main streets of town and counting empty shops to make my case against the rent rise.
That morning I met the new owner of literally the only other space that would work for us, who was renovating the shop to rent it out. Got taking and secured the lease- it’s almost half of what we’d be paying if we stayed where we are and it’s a better location!

I told my REA today that I won’t be renewing, even through I had intended to stay the full 15 years available on the lease, due to the cost.

Dear reader, she panicked! She responded in 7 minutes to see what they could do to change my mind. She offered NO increase for the first year of the new term lol

So reading between the lines, these muppets got greedy and tried to get a 15% increase when the landlord simply wanted to keep the tenancy in place and in doing so set it up so that I lucked in to a cheaper and better space. They just lost the landlords a guaranteed $350k+ over the next 5 years because they’ll have a hell of a time finding a new tenant in this market, at that price! They’ll also have to cover their own outgoings at $10k+ a year lol

FAFO I guess.

Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it this far, I just had to share my first win in what feels like a really long time with people who get what small business owners are up against. The last 18 months have been so hard but moving and saving so much in rent has renewed me and given me so much hope for the future of my shop. Calling the bad REA’s bluff is just the cherry on top!

A commercial client just walked away from our contract. No replies to my emails anymore, just a massive stack of unpaid invoices left on my desk. It’s absolutely wrecking my cash flow this month.

I need to get this sorted but I'm terrified of legal fees eating up the entire debt. Everyone says commercial litigation just drains your bank account for nothing. Someone told me to look into Sterling Legal because they focus on quick resolutions instead of just running up the clock, but I’ve never actually been through a full debt collection process before. I don't want to spend thousands on letters of demand if the hit to my savings is going to be worse than the unpaid invoice.

What’s your threshold for taking someone to court? Do you cut them off at 60 days or give them more time?

We built an AI product to help Small Businesses manage their digital presence (before I draw flak - it is vibe coded by an AI Engineer and a Developer, as Founder I have 15+ yrs experience as a PM and have done countless user interviews while building).

Back to the ask, we have a large anchor client on Trial now, should convert to billing once we sort a bug.

Looking to hire a Sales Rep or a Senior Sales leader as a business partner to get us off the ground.

I wish I was a better Sales hunter and grew with Founder-led-Sales but nah.

We signed up for an event in Melbourne early August, so a bit desperate now.

TIA

Hey guys, quick one. My business has been growing pretty steady (hitting around 20-25k revenue most months lately) but the usual story, suppliers want payment upfront, stock takes forever to arrive from overseas, and suddenly you're sitting there with orders coming in but not enough working capital to keep up. classic right? Been looking at options for a quick 50-60k top up. Thinking about going with ezy pzy business loans to sort it, not 100% decided yet but they're on my shortlist.

MB someone used them? good experiences? hidden gotchas? or should i just grind it out with the banks again (already tried that, took forever and got nowhere useful).

Hi reddit community.

I have a very noob question.

I am about to invoice my first client (for a service, not product) - only thing is, I've never invoiced a client (!) I don't have any sophisticated invoicing systems set in place as I'm very early days, and don't have the capability to set something proper up yet.

Can any of you please share some advice on simple invoicing methods for early days of business (I will of course look into more sophisticated systems if I get momentum in my business). I at least have a business bank account set up and ABN.

Thanks so much!

hi everyone! i've finally ticked all the boxes set up ABN and shipped my website ready to take on clients
https://omarj.dev/
now , im here to ask this:
any tips on how to acquire work?
i've done mock ups and sent them out,
done cold reach outs ,,
and get no response
i would really like to hear from the community, I'm open to suggestions

Hey everyone , I need some help here

Im pretty new at this business and i'm looking for businesses that has repetitive tasj that can be automated ill do it for free . Im trying to build my portfolio before charging for a service.

I use make.com, n8n, gohighlevel and retellai(for voice agents and sms agents) any repetitice high volume task.

I can automate bookings, follow-ups, reminders, CRM updates, document chasing, AI voice agents, email/SMS workflows, reporting, and app integrations to save your team time.

If it sounds useful, send me a message or just comment down below and let's see if I can save your business some time.

Hi guys, just wondering if anyone has taken on a lease for a whole boarding house (E.g. 10-15 rooms, modern) and whether you found it was a worthwhile investment for you? By my calculations it can make around $30-$40k per year with a 10% vacancy rate and a live in manager, but my numbers could be wrong. Anyone been down this path before?

https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/1mv9caf/dance_teacher_groper_sues_underage_victims_friend/

>Dear r/melbourne Moderation Team,

>I am writing to respectfully request that you review and consider removing the following post:

>https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/1mv9caf/dance_teacher_groper_sues_underage_victims_friend/

>After carefully reviewing the subreddit rules, I believe this submission raises concerns under multiple community rules and would appreciate the moderation team's assessment.

>Rule 7 – No Witch-hunts

>This rule prohibits posts that target individuals or groups where the discussion may lead to harassment or the spread of personal information. The linked article prominently identifies a specific individual, and the discussion surrounding the post has the potential to encourage targeted harassment, abuse, or coordinated attacks. Regardless of whether the information originates from a mainstream news source, I believe the resulting discussion may conflict with the purpose of Rule 7, which is to prevent individuals from being targeted by the community.

>Rule 6 – Be Respectful

>The nature of this post has the potential to generate hostile, abusive, or malicious comments directed at an identifiable individual. I am concerned that the discussion may not remain civil, which is inconsistent with the expectation that users engage respectfully.

>Rule 5 – No Hate Speech / Harassment

>Although the article itself is not hate speech, discussions involving identifiable individuals can quickly lead to personal abuse, threats, harassment, or bullying. I ask that the moderation team consider whether allowing the post creates an environment contrary to the spirit of this rule.

>Rule 11 – No Low Effort Posts

>While the submission links to a news article, the discussion appears likely to focus primarily on attacking an individual rather than encouraging constructive discussion about issues affecting Melbourne. This may reduce the quality of discussion within the community.

>My concern is not with the reporting itself, but with whether this particular submission is consistent with the subreddit rules intended to prevent harassment, witch-hunts, and uncivil discussion.

>I respectfully request that the moderation team review this submission and determine whether it complies with the subreddit rules. If you find that it breaches Rule 7 or any other applicable rule, I kindly ask that you consider removing the post.

>Thank you for your time, consideration, and the work you do in moderating the r/melbourne community.

>Kind regards, William

My old man owns his own painting business and is constantly harassed by these AI bros. Cold calls, emails etc all promising to 'automate' his business with ai.

And on top of that we recently had an AI intern start at my company and it kind of clicked something for me as a young guy in the IT engineering space. This person was brought in specifically for AI and yet the actual knowledge and infrastructure side just wasn't there. And that's not a dig at them, its genuinely everywhere right now.

These AI Agencies are just people saying 'agentic' and 'ai powered' a hundred times and quoting businesses like my dad five/six figures for what sometimes is just a GPT wrapper with no second thought.

It shits me because it ruins it for the people doing automation work that genuinely helps.

Anyway heres what's actually possible right now without the buzzword slop, I built an internal tool that reads vendor invoices with azure document intelligence and spits out reports for our compliance team. hours of work done by hand instantly squashed down to them just uploading invoices and getting the information they need within minutes.

Its not magic its just engineering pointed at a boring annoying problem. Heaps of SMBs have stuff exactly like this, loads of manual data entry, the same report copy pasted every week, some job that gets done over and over and a lot of it can be automated now and its finally cheap enough to bother.

I have been doing more and more automation at my day job as opportunities have presented themselves, im spending a lot more time in this space than i really should be. So i tend to look at what's the real problem and requirements instead of trying to find an excuse to bolt AI onto something so it sounds impressive.

And to be fair it does depend on your business, what's worth automating for a one person operation is completely different to a 300+ head count. You also shouldn't automate something just because you can, because no matter how good it is, it will break at some point, and that's just technology. So it has to actually be worth the hassle of maintaining, otherwise your better off leaving it as is.

a good example is my dad is old fashioned and doesn't even have a website and gets 100% of his work from word of mouth because he's the best at what he does. so no he does not need an AI generated landing page and a automated lead generator, if he did he would not pay you $10k for a grifter package.

Same goes the other way, sometimes the best bet is not needing someone to automate and just buy the $30 a month tool, 99% of the time the hard part isn't doing the automation its knowing what to build and what to just buy and how to make it work with whatever you already have.

And lastly to my rant the thing that really bugs me is a lot of the AI bros will happily run your customer data or financials through some random API and have no idea where it ends up or whether its getting trained on. I support & engineer for two businesses that are in heavily regulated industries so that stuff makes me nervous and its completely avoidable. If you really have to run a model, you can do it inside your own secure environment, your data stays in Australia and its not being trained by anyone's model. It's the same setup banks and hospitals use.

So yeah, ask away if you have any questions or if there's some manual thing eating your week and you're wondering if it can be actually automated?, is it worth automating? or you've had an agency quote you eight grand to completely rim you.

Side note - not trying to sell you anything

Hi Guys, just wondering if anyone finds it hard to keep up with the government requests for a pay rise and surcharge ban coming in October? Is there anything that we can do to let the government know that us Small businesses are dying slowly?

I'm studying bookkeeping and virtual assistance while finishing my education. I'm curious—what tasks take up the most of your time that you wish someone could handle? Bookkeeping, invoicing, email management, scheduling, or something else? I'd love to learn what business owners actually need.

I’m looking at buying a small established service business in Melbourne. I recently was looking at a business price around $500k with solid profits (reported ~$240k+ net) I will likely move down to 300k to 400k asking price.

The broker says 100% vendor finance is unrealistic.

My business coach says it can work for smaller deals but not larger.

Have very low expenses so I could repay the seller aggressively within 3 years or less assuming numbers are all good.

Is offering 100% vendor finance be taken seriously, or is it a waste of time?

Looking for thoughts from people who have bought or sold small businesses with seller financing, especially in Australia. What’s realistic?

Curious what people actually track week to week.
If you could only follow 3 metrics as an investor, what would they be?

Seeking Web Developer | UC/ANU Students Welcome
We're looking for a talented web developer to build a custom website and marketplace for our growing business.

What we need:
Full-stack development (frontend & backend)

Modern web technologies (React, Node.js, or similar)

Database design & API integration

Mobile-responsive design

About us: We're a Canberra-based electrical services company expanding into a new venture.

How to apply: Drop a comment below with your portfolio/GitHub link, or DM us your experience and rates.