Starting a business in WA?

[Cath Lawson]

Hi - I'm just wondering how those of you who started a business in WA found it? Is it a lot different to starting a business in the UK? Which things have you found better than they were over here and which things were worse?

Also, are the local people over there happy to use your services? I'm guessing they will be as many are from other countries anyway, but it's nice to find out these things first.

Do they have VAT over there, or the equivalent, where you have to submit quarterly returns? Am praying not because I hate doing them!

[emi-great]

Hi

We have started three business in WA in the ten years we have lived here, I think it is much the same as anywhere in the world you have to look at the area you plan to start in & check out if your service is needed. There are quite a lot of good sites to help you with the legalities such as registering your name etc.

You do not say what you plan to do so it is difficult to say if local people would use your service but we have never had a problem & I think so long as you offer good service at a fair price you will always have customers.

When we first arrived we found it difficult to find suppliers & the people we did find were not always very helpful, as time went on we found we had to re-negoitate pricing, delivery etc. However things in WA have changed a lot in ten years & it seems easier to find information on things.

We had moved from our home town where we were well known for good service & didnt have any problem even from the outset running the business because my husband was well known & people he knew used him. Obviously that is not the case when you come to a place where you know no one. We did a lot of advertising, arranged leaflet drops with local papers & tried to do as much as we could to let people know where we were & what we did. The local papers here often do business profiles where if you pay for a reasonable size advert they will write a free profile on the business. The local papers here are delivered free to each house in the area & this was an excellent way of telling people we were here.

Unfortunately we are still unpaid tax collectors here in Australia the GST works in a similar way to VAT & you would usually do a quarterly return. The GST is levied to most services & is currently 10%

Here are a few sites which give general information if you tell me specifically what you intend to do I will try to find information on that industry for you.

Small Business Development Corporation
The State Library of Western Australia
business.gov.au home page
Chamber of Commerce and Industry Western Australia-CCI Western Australia
Australian Taxation Office Homepage

Good luck with the venture
Eve

[Cath Lawson]

Hi Eve - thanks very much for the great info and links to those resources. I'll check them out. What kind of business do you have? Do you run all three together, or have you had three different ones?

We've only just started researching so not certain what business we'll start yet - may not even decide until we get there. In the past have had service businesses - at the moment plumbing but probably won't do that in Oz. And last business was fire and flood restoration and carpet cleaning - I'm hoping that type of service won't be in demand in Perth, at least not the flood part anyway. I think I would like to do something that didn't involve 24 hour emergencies etc for a change.

I suppose it's 10% is better than 17.5% - it's just a real pain doing it!