Tag: small business management course

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How to Reduce Your Fail Rate in Business by 50%

What You Can Do this Christmas

business start up online training course christmas holidays2
There’s lots to do in preparation for starting a business and the summer holidays is a good time for the ground work.

DID YOU KNOW research shows that by taking just one short course on small business management, the chance a business will fail is reduced by as much as 50 percent.

This is because business mismanagement is the primary reason businesses fail; the other most common reason is because owner/s fail to implement appropriate credit management processes. In both cases, this failure has come about because the owners, directors, partners or managers lacked the appropriate management skills to make it a success.

Learn the basics in business

The Christmas holidays is a perfect time for taking the steps needed to start your small business. While everyone else has gone on holidays, you’ll be ready to take on your first client or customer by the time business really starts kicking off again at the end of January.

business start up online training course christmas holidaysSo let’s get to it: there’s work to be done. And this work generally requires some rudimentary knowledge of Australian tax law, copyright law, trademarks and patents.

You should also have knowledge of particular software applications, and digital marketing.

Other key areas of business you need to know

The key areas business owners should understand before starting a business include:

Ordinarily, to become skilled in each of those areas, a person would have to take, at least, five different training courses. But few people are ever likely to do this. Instead, they’d be more likely to cherry pick the areas they’re least familiar with, and fly blind with the others. Needless to say, that’s where people run into problems.

Take Advantage of our Christmas Savings!

We don’t want you to wing it or fly blind — our goal is to help small businesses succeed which is what we’ve been doing for nearly 20 years.

We cover what you need to set up a small business in our EzyStartUp Business Course, priced at just $297. This course covers each of the key areas mentioned above that a small business owner needs to be familiar with, in addition to the following:

  • Originating and developing concepts
  • Establishing legal and risk management
  • Product packaging
  • Marketing your business

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When you enrol you will also receive FREE ACCESS to a bunch of our other online training courses, including Xero Set Up and Beginners’ Excel and Word.

Our Last Dasher Sale is also on now with special Christmas discounts on our online training courses in social media, and cloud accounting software (MYOB, Xero) and Excel, Word and WordPress.

Don’t Wait — Become the Head Honcho Today

Use your time off from work this summer to begin working on your new small business. All of our training courses are delivered online, and can be completed at your own pace, so you can complete them while you’re actually on holidays, or relaxing at home or at a cafe.

And since one of the best ways to start a new business is by operating it as a side project to your other job, if you get all the start up stuff out of the way while you’re on holidays, it’ll be ready to go by the time you back to work.

Learn more about the EzyStartUp Business Course at our website or view all of our special offers to save on your next EzyLearn training course.

start your own business online training course videosAnd as a gift to you, remember our Bookkeeping Basics Guide is yours’ for free!

 

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Don’t Wing It With Customer Service – Plan It

Great customer service doesn’t just happen.

learn online training videos about small business customer service
If you’re unsure about what makes up the kind of customer service people rave about, then perhaps you should look into our EzyStartUp Course.

HOW TO PROVIDE REALLY exceptional customer service is just one of the modules covered in our EzyStartUp Course which teaches you all about how to start up your own business.

We handpicked this inclusion as our experience is that, time and time again, good, nay excellent customer service goes a long way to ensuring a business has longevity. Continue reading Don’t Wing It With Customer Service – Plan It

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Cash Flow Reporting in Xero

Show me the money!

learn cashflow reporting in xero online training course videos
Creating a cash flow report in Xero will tell you more about the financial state of your business than profit and loss statements.

IN OUR BRAND NEW Cash Flow, Budgets and ROI Xero Training Course, you’ll learn how to generate a cash flow report for your business.

Cash flow reports show the money going in and out of the business, so they’re better indicators of a business’s overall financial health than a Profit and Loss statement (P&L).

A cash flow report enables you to make forecasts and budgets for your business based on previous trends — recurring expenses, average time to get paid, seasonal quiet periods, and so forth.

The 3 cash flow categories

Cash flow reports are typically broken up into three categories:

  1. Operating activities: cash flowing in and out of the business from revenue-generating activities
  2. Investing activities: cash flowing in and out of the business from the acquisition and sale of long-term assets
  3. Financing activities: cash flowing in and out of the business from borrowings and changes in equity.

Items in a cash flow report

In our Cash Flow, Budgets and ROI Xero Training Course, you’ll learn how to generate a cash flow report in Xero. That report will show every transaction that’s run in and out of your business, divided among one of the three categories.

In the operating activities category, you’ll typically find things like costs associated with any training courses or seminars, advertising and marketing expenses, income or commissions from your business, subscriptions to any magazines or periodicals, etc.

Under the investing activities category, you’ll find the cost of purchasing office or warehouse space and the capitalised borrowing cost, for example.

The financing activities category will show the loan you’ve taken out to purchase your business’s office or warehouse space.

You’ll learn how to generate and work with cash flow reports in our new Cash Flow Reporting, Budgets and ROI Training Course. ENROL now or read more about the benefits of cash flow reporting to your business. Are you a sole trader or contractor needing to record your ongoing expenses? We cover that too!

cashflow reports in xero and excel

Our Xero online training courses include EVERYTHING for ONE LOW PRICE. Furthermore, if you select our Lifetime Membership option, you’ll have LIFETIME access to our ongoing course updates. All EzyLearn courses are accredited by the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (ICB) and can be counted towards Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points. Find out more about our Xero online training courses. Or learn more about our entire suite of online software training packages and social media training packages.

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Should You Start a Business That You LOVE or a Business YOU CAN DO?

Pairing knowledge with a gap in the market

how to find the right career path
I love watching TV. And I have an opinion on many things. Doesn’t mean I can monetise the pairing of these two. Or can I? Did somebody say Gogglebox? 

CONFUCIOUS ONCE SAID: “FIND a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life”. That’s good advice, although it’s not always practical.

After all, I love watching television, but it’s probably impractical to try and monetise that to start a business — not impossible; but it is impractical.

A better measure of finding something you can turn into a business idea, and then a business, is to find something you’re good at, that also addresses a gap in the market. In other words, put your existing skills and work experience to use in a new, different way. Continue reading Should You Start a Business That You LOVE or a Business YOU CAN DO?

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Hiring Someone New? Why You Need to Personally Check their References

Why It Pays to Call the Switchboard When Doing a Reference Check

reference checking
How do you really know the mobile numbers provided for references truly belong to who they say they are?

I recently had a conversation with a colleague who said she’d never once been asked to produce a copy of her university degree or her transcripts, despite stating on her resume that she’d graduated with a high distinction average.

Gee, I thought, not once? Not a single recruiter or employer had ever requested a copy of her degree? I found this fact astonishing, particularly since more professions require, by law, certain qualifications — as BAS agents are, for example. So how people know my friend wasn’t fibbing in her credentials? Fact is, they didn’t.

Check, even if you use a recruiter

I wrote a blog some time ago about recruiting on LinkedIn and why it’s so important to check references for yourself. People often underestimate the importance of checking a person’s credentials, so long as they get a reference from their last employer. Often, though, most people only provide a mobile number for their references, so whether you’re speaking to the candidate’s former employer, a co-worker, or their mum is sometimes anyone’s guess.

I was reminded of how important reference-checking is again, when I was reading a couple of articles on Longreads, and I found myself utterly fascinated by two of the biggest cases of journalistic fraud ever committed (though I admit to having never heard of them before the weekend, despite one occurring more than 30 years ago).

Sometimes people don’t just lie on their resume

In the first instance, a journalist named Janet Cooke fabricated a story for The Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1981, and then had to give it back when it came out that there was no such 8-year-old. In the second case, Jayson Blair, a journalist for The New York Times, was found to have fabricated or plagiarised 36 out of 73 stories written over a 6-month period, in what turned out to be the biggest scandal in the newspaper’s hundred-plus year history.

What I found most intriguing, though, was that neither Cooke nor Blair had been properly vetted before their employers hired them. In fact, it was Cooke’s falsified resume that was ultimately her undoing when, after receiving the highest honour in the field of writing, a former employer noticed something was amiss with her Pulitzer biography — her education and professional achievements had been grossly overstated. (Rather ironically it was Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein — the journalists who uncovered the Watergate Scandal — who signed off on hiring Cooke.)

The same would prove true for Blair, who, it turned out, never graduated from university, and had a murky work history with the Times’ sister publication, The Boston Globe, where his superiors had been less than impressed with his less-than-high standard of work.

(Of course, the equally interesting case of Australian author, Helen Demidenko, who won the Miles Franklin Award in the early 1990s, only to later be dubbed by the Sydney Morning Herald as a ‘literary hoax’ also springs to mind.)

Benders-of-truth almost always get caught

Plenty of people lie or embellish on their resumes, and while a good majority of them go unnoticed, others are caught out — sometimes very publicly, and often only after the organisation has been very publicly embarrassed, as in the case of Cooke and Blair.

My advice, then, is to always check the references of new hires meticulously. Rather than calling the mobile numbers or direct lines of the candidate’s references, call the main switchboard and ask to speak to that person’s manager or superior.

And always ensure to ask for a copy of any credentials, like university degrees. If you’re employing someone where, by law, they’re required to hold a certain qualification — as is the case for BAS agents, for instance — it’s imperative you can verify the person’s credentials.

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Xero online training course

At EzyLearn we offer online training courses to help you up-skill and find employment. Choose from our range of cloud-based online accounting software courses, to business start up and management courses, to marketing and sales courses, or update and further your skills in a range of Microsoft Office programs (Excel, PowerPoint, Word) or social media and WordPress web design). 

 

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FREE Digital Business Course

Learn How to Run a Business Online

starting-a-new-cafe-or-retail-business
It doesn’t matter whether you have a specifically online business, or a gift shop, clothing store, cafe or other bricks and mortar business, as a business owner, we can help you understand the digital economy.

In a post I published about starting your own business, I said that all small business owners should have an understanding of traditional and digital marketing. You’ll be surprised how many don’t!

All businesses have a digital aspect to them these days so it’s vital that business owners and managers know how to manage the digital aspects of their business.

This starts by understanding some of the terms used and how websites, domain names, hosting and the Google search engine works. Continue reading FREE Digital Business Course

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Start Your Business NOW!

The Christmas Holidays is a Terrific Time to Start a New Business

start-your-own-small-business-this-christmasIF YOU’VE DECIDED THAT this will be the year you start your new business, don’t wait until January to begin your journey to becoming the head honcho.

Right now is the best time of the year to begin — because while everyone else (businesses included) has gone on on holidays, you’ll be ready to take on your first client or customer by the time January 2017 rolls around. Continue reading Start Your Business NOW!

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The High Cost of Selling Too Cheap

How to tell whether your prices are too cheap

cheap can be bad for business clients and your health small business startup training course will help with your breakevenDETERMINING YOUR PRICES, and whether you’re selling yourself too cheap, is a critical element in the success of your business, and in your own success as well.

The EzyStartUp Course covers setting prices in some detail as there are many factors you need to consider and include in your prices to ensure you’re not just competitive — but that you’re also drawing a living wage. Continue reading The High Cost of Selling Too Cheap

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Becoming a National Bookkeeping Bookkeeper

Starting a Business as a Bookkeeper is about Business Knowledge, Skills and Support

start a bookkeeping business
It can be daunting knowing where to get your first clients when you start your own business.

It’s not easy starting out as a bookkeeper running your own business. We think our partnership with National Bookkeeping is going to help you get underway.

If you’ve subscribed to our blog and followed our recent posts, then you probably know that EzyLearn has partnered with National Bookkeeping.

National Bookkeeping can now administer training courses to their new licensees, along with a range of other perks and benefits to help you launch your own bookkeeping business.

Continue reading Becoming a National Bookkeeping Bookkeeper
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How do you manage your online content marketing?

What’s all this about content marketing?

Content marketing and automatic marketing response marketing can help real estate agents standout and build credibility for property vendorsWe’re busy developing a new content marketing course because as a form of online marketing, content marketing is finally starting to come into its own. Content marketing has actually been around for many years – it’s been known as custom publishing, branded content, branded journalism, and custom media – but as it became more popular, marketers began referring to it as content marketing to make it easier to for their clients to understand.

Content marketing is basically the process of creating valuable, informative content – blog posts, email newsletters, ebooks, etc – and sharing it online to help attract and retain customers. But because it requires a lot of content to be produced and regularly, many small businesses are outsourcing their content marketing needs.

Your content marketing needs to have a purpose

To make the most out your content marketing, you need to have goals and a strategy in place to achieve them so you’re not just wasting your time. This is the same as traditional marketing activities, which we cover in our Small Business Management Course. You also need to be able monitor how each piece of content is going at achieving those goals.

If you’re also hiring a content writer or strategist to help you with your content marketing, you also need a way to easily collaborate. Now, if only there was a way to monitor and analyse your content marketing AND schedule and set content marketing tasks for those people you’re working with…

A tool for schedule and managing content marketing

Well, as we’ve recently discovered, there is! It’s a cloud-based content marketing and editorial calendar called CoSchedule and it allows you to schedule and create content marketing tasks, assign those tasks to your team, create and publish blog posts, share links to content via social media, and monitor the success of your content and the social media platform all within the CoSchedule app.

It’s a very powerful, very useful tool for small businesses that work with a number of remote workers who are based around the country, as it allows complete collaboration with your team and also integrates seamlessly with WordPress. It also helps you to optimise your blog titles and your social media sharing to help drive your web traffic.

By providing you with detail stats – and also integrating with most web analytics software, including Google Analytics – you can see what content performs well and what doesn’t, so you can improve you content in the future.

You need to know your readers to succeed

Because content marketing is about creating engaging and interesting content, whether it’s blog posts or ebooks or something else, it’s vital that you know what content your customers like and what the don’t, so you can ensure you’re always keeping them engaged.

In a post I wrote about content marketing not so long ago, I mentioned how important it is to know and understand your reader, because that’s what’ll help you to engage and interest them with your content. If you have highly engaged people consuming your content, they’re more like to share it with their friends, family and other people in their social networks.

This helps to spread the word about your business, which will bring you more customers and make you more money. But better than that, it’ll also help you to see new opportunities and areas into which you can expand your business.

Content marketing can help expand your business too

We used the feedback we received from our content marketing activities when we decided to develop the Xero training courses and the currently in-development content marketing course; it also guided us in our decision to partner with National Bookkeeping who are taking on licensees and helping them to start their own bookkeeping business.

Yes, we got all that from content marketing! Because through our content marketing, we got to know you, our readers, and what you were interested in and that allowed us to look for the types of courses and business opportunities that would interest you. You can do the same for your business too.

Learn about content marketing from the experts

If you’d like to learn about content marketing, our new content marketing course is currently in development. We’re working with an Australian journalist, a successful small business owner, and a digital marketing specialist to create a relevant, easy-to-follow course that’ll guide you through the process step-by-step. In the meantime, you can subscribe to our blog to continue reading our posts, where we’ll keep you updated on how it’s progressing.

If you’re looking for the opportunity to start your own home-based bookkeeping business, we recommend you get in touch with National Bookkeeping, who is taking on licensees. We’ve made all of our courses available to them, which will include our content marketing course when it becomes available so their licensees can learn all about starting and operating their own bookkeeping business.

What about content marketing for real estate agents

We’ve recently become aware of the need for real estate agents to build their own personal profile and credibility online. Property vendors who want to sell their property are (like the rest of us) increasing looking online for selling agents who have good experience and great reputation to sell their properties at the highest possible price and as quickly as possible. Watch this space as we learn more.

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More People Are Working From Home Than Ever Before

Local Government Councils Encourage Home Businesses and Working from Home

Australian Bureau of Statistics office door reveal the majority of micro businesses use the Internet to let their staff work from homeIF YOU’RE THINKING about whether to start your own home-based business, consider this fact I stumbled across recently: More than a third of all Australian micro businesses – that is, a business with four or fewer employees – use the Internet to allow their staff to work from home, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

[quote]That’s an 8% increase in 2 years[/quote]

Continue reading More People Are Working From Home Than Ever Before

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FREE Guide on Becoming an Independent Contractor & Working Remotely

The Contractor versus the Employee

Receive the free guide on starting a business from home as a remote contractorIn a recent post, I talked about the StartUp Academy, which helps people start their own home-based businesses as independent contractors. The StartUp Academy is something I’ve been working on for sometime after I noticed a compressing of regular salaried jobs – sometimes it was the consolidation of two jobs into one but most often, entire jobs were being outsourced to consultants and contractors.

Continue reading FREE Guide on Becoming an Independent Contractor & Working Remotely

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How much should a local bookkeeper charge?

What is a local bookkeeper worth?

I recently wrote a blog post about whether bookkeepers could also provide marketing services to their clients, which I also touched on in another recent post about starting a bookkeeping business and the need to be diverse in the services you offer as an independent contractor.

While brainstorming with Ray from the Startup Academy about the services bookkeeper charge and the rates they can earn we discovered that there is a huge variety of services that a bookkeeper can offer and as a result their rates differ. Continue reading How much should a local bookkeeper charge?

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Why Start a Bookkeeping Business?

Australia needs bookkeepers!

start a bookkeeping business
It can be daunting knowing where to get your first clients when you start your own business.

EVERY BUSINESS HAS A LEGAL requirement to file an annual tax return, and for some businesses, a quarterly or monthly business activity statement (BAS).

Accurate record keeping and data entry is a crucial component of filing both, and with the increasing number of start-ups and new small businesses in Australia, the demand for a good, reliable bookkeeper has been growing steadily.

People start their own businesses for a variety of reasons, but usually it’s because they need flexibility and want to do work that is rewarding.

For some people, starting their own business is the next natural step in their career – perhaps they’ve worked for many years as hairdresser in someone else’s salon; or worked for someone else as a chef or photographer or builder, and going out on their own just makes good career sense.

Bookkeeping: the low-risk, high reward business option

However, for many, the career path isn’t so clear, or they always may have seen themselves shackled to a job working for someone else. To them, starting a business always seemed like something that hinged on a really great idea or new invention, and in absence of either, it has remained out of their grasp.

But it’s not. Becoming a bookkeeper is an accessible, low-risk new business option for any self-motivated person with good computer skills. You don’t even have to love being a number cruncher to be a good bookkeeper, because most bookkeepers don’t do much number crunching these days anyway.

The multi-talented bookkeeper

With the rise of cloud-accounting software like Xero and MYOB Account Right Live, for which we offer online training courses in both platforms, most bookkeepers set up the bank feeds option for their clients, which automatically matches transactions in their bank account with the transactions in their accounting software. This eliminates much of the grunt work associated with the data entry aspect of bookkeeping, freeing the bookkeeper up to do other things for their clients (like BAS) or even pick up some extra clients.

Increasingly, though, and this is largely due to the number of new bookkeepers who don’t come from a finance or accounting background, many bookkeepers are diversifying in the services they offer by performing other functions within their clients’ businesses. This demand for multi-talented bookkeepers brings me back to what I was saying earlier in this post about the growing number of new small businesses.

With great demand, comes great opportunity

As more people start new businesses, which only looks set to increase over the next couple of years thanks to the many tax breaks included in this year’s federal budget, these businesses require more than a good, reliable bookkeeper; they also need web developers, content marketers, virtual assistants, operational managers, and the like.

Hiring several different contractors to manage each aspect of their business is not only costly – it’s also time consuming. Most business owners would rather hire just one or two contractors who have a broad base of skills – a bookkeeper with administration and operational experience or a content marketer with web design experience, for example.

Develop valuable business skills

A bookkeeper with business administration skills, which can be obtained by enrolling in our Small Business Management Course, is a valuable asset to any business — and it doesn’t mean you have to become a Jack (or Jill) of all trades.

EzyLearn is passionate about helping people start their own bookkeeping businesses, and to this end, we have worked to help develop National Bookkeeping, an Australia-wide network of Australian bookkeepers and registered BAS agents, which helps to match small businesses with a bookkeeping professional that meets their business needs. National Bookkeeping is now looking to expand its network by licensing its business to people who would like to start a bookkeeping business.

Becoming a National Bookkeeping Licensee

Ever since we started delivering our MYOB training courses online, and watched as other tools like Dropbox and WordPress and the many Google apps made it easier and easier for people work entirely from their home office, we’ve wanted to help people to start their own home-based bookkeeping business.

Finally that dream of ours has been realised with our partnership with National Bookkeeping. As part of the National Bookkeeping partnership, we’re offering our Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, MYOB and Xero Training Courses to National Bookkeeping licensees.

The reason for this is that we believe that continued learning and professional development is crucial for every business owner, especially if they want to stay ahead of trends and new developments in their industry and if you’re interested in becoming an independent contractor running a bookkeeping business from home then these software programs are essential.

Stay ahead of industry trends

Keeping up with industry developments is something we do as a matter of priority at EzyLearn because we want to be able to provide training courses that are relevant to the latest trends, which is why we’re busy working with some of the top digital marketers and strategists to develop our Content Marketing course.

When you become a National Bookkeeping licensee, you’ll have access to this Content Marketing training course as part of the small business marketing course which is available as an optional extra. This will help you market your services more effectively.

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lifelong learning platform woman online learning for lifeIf you would like to learn more about National Bookkeeping or becoming a licensee, visit the National Bookkeeping website or register your interest online. For more information on starting a bookkeeping business, continue reading our blog, which we constantly update with news and advice on starting a business.

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Don’t Spend Tony Abbott’s Money Yet

Expense It Rather Than Depreciate It

Utility Vehicle for small business tax write off concessionsThe other week, we wrote a couple of blog posts, discussing the recent $5.5b worth of breaks [tax deductions for cars for small business] the government was throwing to Australian small businesses in the form of an immediate $20k tax write off for an unlimited number of asset purchases.

Tax breaks make it easier for people to start their own home-based businesses because the costs of setup are deducted from their total income and you only need to pay tax on the resulting net profit. As an example, a graduate of one of our MYOB training courses could deduct an unlimited number of asset purchases of computers, office furniture or company vehicles that they incur in the setting up of their home-based business, as long as they were each under $20k.

This is twenty times the amount small businesses were previously allowed to claim as an immediate tax deduction. Up until the budget announcement, any asset purchases, such as computers or cars or office furniture, costing more than $1000 were pooled together and depreciated over time. Here’s some information about how asset purchases and depreciation normally works (how to handle this in MYOB is included in our MYOB training courses)

Immediate tax deductions for purchases under $20k

Announced in the recent federal budget, small businesses with an annual turnover of under $2m will able to claim any asset purchase made between budget announcement night last week and June 30 2017 as an immediate tax deduction. But that doesn’t mean small businesses should go on a spending spree because, while the budget may have been very generous to small businesses, there were unpopular cuts to paid parental leave, along with changes to childcare subsidies.

The scariest thing about promises made by politicians is that they are announced to demonstrate how much a political party care, but the announcement is often just the first step in the ensuing process that any decision needs to go through before it becomes law.

What if the budget doesn’t pass through the senate?

This could be problematic if the budget fails to pass through the senate. Though it looks likely that Labor will support the small business tax breaks, they’re unlikely to support some of the other unpopular reforms, which makes banking on the tax breaks a bit dicey.

There’s every chance the terms of the tax breaks could be revised or that it possibly won’t even pass at all; there’s also a chance of a double dissolution, which has been lingering over Prime Minster Abbott’s head ever since last year’s disaster of a budget.

With such uncertainty around whether the budget will pass through the senate, it would be unwise for small businesses to make asset purchases above or beyond what they could reasonably have afforded before the tax breaks.

Don’t let the tax breaks influence your spending

Don’t go out and buy three top-of-the-range computers if you only need one. In fact, if you weren’t planning on spending many thousands of dollars on an asset purchase for your business (or new business), it’s still wise to shop smart and, if necessary, be frugal.

If you’re thinking of starting your own small or home-based business, we offer a number of online training courses to help you get your business idea off the ground, including a Small Business Management Course and training courses in MYOB. For more information, visit our website or continue reading our blog.

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Why Telstra’s Wi-Fi Hotspots Are Good For Business

Telstra likes the Internet

Telstra and wifi in phone boothsIf you’re like me, then the only reason you still have an account with Telstra is because you need the phone line for your broadband Internet connection. I replaced my Telstra ‘wired line’ with a VoIP service years ago, which I still use to this day as my business phone, though my mobile picks up most of the slack being that I’m often out and about.

For years, I’ve wondered about the future of Telstra. As more companies entered the telco space and then the ISP space, Telstra seemed to becoming less and less relevant. Funnily enough, just the other day someone asked me if I knew where the nearest payphone was and, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of one. It turned out, there was one just a few metres away.

Telstra offers Wi-Fi hotspots to 7.5 million smartphone users

It seems that perhaps Telstra had been thinking the same thing, because this week they’ve launched free Wi-Fi hotspots in payphones right across Australia. I thought this was a pretty genius move, given some 11.9 million Australians own smartphones and, of those, 7.5 million are accessing the Internet from them. Now there’s a reason for people to head to those little orange and blue phoneboxes again – only now they’re kitted out with a pink cube on top and a white Wi-Fi logo.

Of course, there’s a catch: the Wi-Fi isn’t really free. If you’re a Telstra home broadband customer, then any ‘free’ Wi-Fi you use at a Telstra hotspot counts towards your overall monthly broadband allowance, while non-Telstra customers will have to pay for a guest pass to access the network. Telstra will still make money, just as they did through their payphones until everyone started using mobile phones.

Telstra’s marvelous act of reinvention

Catches aside, though, using phoneboxes to offer Wi-Fi is a marvelous act of reinvention. Developing new concepts – or putting a twist on an old concept, at least – is something we cover in our Small Business Management Course, because it’s something every business owner will need to consider at some point during the life of their business.

Indeed, EzyLearn might not be offering training courses at all if I hadn’t done a similar thing a few years ago when I realised face-to-face learning was becoming a thing of the past. When we eventually closed out training centres that could have been the end of my business had I not made the decision to move our content online.

Every business should pull a Telstra

Keeping up with trends and making changes to your business model is what makes a business successful and gives it longevity. Though it doesn’t necessarily have to be something as radical as Telstra’s free Wi-Fi approach. It could be something simpler, like streamlining your business processes and taking advantage of cloud apps, as Rohan Calvert from Men in White has, for example.

Even though I probably wouldn’t use Telstra’s Wi-Fi unless I was in a real bind – perhaps when I’m on holidays and in need of an Internet connection, but I don’t want to use too much of mobile data allowance – I do think it’s a great idea. What do you think?