One of our members has recently asked if I would give some information regarding our business history so I thought that I would start from the beginning. This is a long story so bare with me and it may need to be told over a couple of days.

 

I am Tiffany and I started Tippa's Tools half heartedly about 4 years ago on www.ebay.com.au . I found that I was selling items on eBay, but finding it very hard to pay the eBay and PayPal fees so I stopped. The other issue I faced was people saying that they had not received their items, when I know for a fact that they did. The first couple of times I resent the item making a huge loss, but soon realised I was being had.

LESSONS LEARNT

 

1. Send via registered post
2. Always have a disclaimer about postage so that way you can get out of resending if you think you are being had.

 

I then started selling at the markets every weekend. Markets are a great place to start selling items. You have a ready stream of people who have some dollars in their pockets to spend. We found that if we kept our stock levels up our market stall turned over an ok amount and we would earn about $200p/w for a morning work plus a day to restock. If we didn't keep restocking and left it for a week or two then we found we would only walk away with around $50p/w for the effort.

 

3. Competition is not a bad thing. Sell it cheaper or offer better service.

 

Often at markets people want a bargain. For example owe sell a 4pc keyed alike padlock set we usually sell for about $10 some customers would come in and offer you $4. Which is well below cost we didn’t often do discounts. You could however choose to mark up your products so you can offer a small discount. We would only offer a discount to people who didn’t ask for it and who would spend $50 or more.

 

Older people would come in and ask for a pensioner’s discount. My response would always be “a pensioner you must have more money than I and I need to pay for the fuel home, up the price by $5 for you my dear sir/madam”. They would often buy the item without any more discussion of a discount. If you are selling at the markets make sure everything is clean and clearly seen. We would have both of us there at all times one to keep an eye out for thieves and one to serve customers. Blake and I found that if we give each other a bit of curry people liked to get involved then they would stay longer making your stall look interesting so it would attract more people.

 

4. You know the saying a crowd draws a crowd.

 

While we were doing all of this on weekend we started our accounting practice. This was a hard task as the markets were not bringing in enough money to support our family so Blake would work on a roof tiling site labouring for a couple of days a week for my old boss and then do the accounting work the other 3 days. I went out and did some basic warehouse work while pregnant with our son. By the time I was too pregnant the accounting practice had enough clients to continue without my extra income. By this stage of business any money we had started with was gone and it was hard to advertise with little or no money. To combat this shortfall we had to look for other methods of promoting Dynamic Accounting Solutions one method that worked was to talk to customers at the market stall about our start up accounting practice. Hand made signs advertising cheap tax returns and that we would go to our client. I sat down and wrote a press release about our business and what we were attempting to do with regard to setting ourselves apart from our competitors.

 

I then circulated this around a number of different media outlets who mostly wanted to charge me a small fortune to advertise our business. A couple of small niche magazines did come back with some reasonable offers. One such magazine was called Brisbane’s Q News this is a magazine circulated through a tight nit community with a strong following. Q news offered to run a colour advertisement for a few weeks then do a write up about our business and run a number of advertisements in the following weeks. Q News was highly successful in netting us clients and helped me to identify what makes a good place to advertise. I was looking for magazines and forums that have a tight following; the magazine must have relevant and interesting content and set itself apart from its competitors. Using these criteria I was able to net a number of customers through Jimboomba Times which fits well within the above criteria. It is interesting to note that most main stream newspapers and magazines were expensive and completely useless at reaching potential clients.

 

I still came back to the fact that you can’t go past word of mouth and in an effort to get our clients talking about our services, we discovered another method was to give our clients beer coolers with our logo and contact details. I can’t take full credit for this brainwave, while Blake was doing his time at various accounting practices one of the most successful placed he worked for had issued him with a couple of these beer coolers. The beer coolers lurked around at home and I noticed that everyone who came around favoured those coolers over all the others, the reason for this was that the coolers hugged the top of the beer and had a base that stopped the table or surface it was sitting on from getting condensation. A quick phone call to Blake’s old work place put us in touch with Rubber Jungle on the Gold Coast. It is quite amazing how much value our clients get from receiving one of these $4 beer coolers. We believe very strongly in customer service and this is where a lot of businesses go wrong they say they believe in it but do they really or is it the dollar at the end. Everyone in business understands that you need to earn a dollar it's what keeps the world going but what does the client see they are getting for that dollar. If you look after your customers the dollars will flow.

 

One of our biggest business clients for the accounting practice www.dasolutions.com.au  owns a removalist business and he found us at the markets. He has told us that the reason he wanted us to be his accountant is because we actually know what it is like to run a business not just the theory. We have found since that this is important for most of our business clients. We understand how hard it is to make a dollar because in theory it shouldn't be that hard. People who aren’t in business themselves usually don't understand how much work it takes to get to this point where it's ok and things happen clients come looking for us not the other way around. We still have a lot of work to do before we can say that we are doing it easy.

 

The other thing that we do that most accounting practices don't unless you are paying them big dollars is go out to our clients and that’s for all clients from individual tax returns to larger clients paying a few thousand per quarter. We don't treat anyone of our clients differently because we don't see that someone paying more should get special treatment. They might get more of our time but that is what they are paying for.

 

Once we had established that our accounting practice was viable we moved out of my parent’s house and into a house that we had bought some 12months earlier. This was the next obstacle. Going from topping up the mortgage by $80p/w and paying for food and sharing electricity to having to pay full mortgage, food, elect, etc etc and believe me it was. Just when you thought that everything was going ok a rates bill would come in the mail. “Crap where are we going to pull that $500 from”. During all of this we kept doing the markets.

 

We finally reached a stage that we needed to move the accounting practice and Tippa's Tools into a shop so that we could have home as home and have a day and a half off a week. We found a cheap shop for $300p/w however now the business has to support shop rent, mortgage, food, extra insurances, etc etc. To help boost the client base we asked our current clients to recommend us more and they did, helping bring more clients and revenue to meet the increased overheads.

 

Enough for now. I will write again soon and until then have a great week. www.tippastools.com.au

Well I wanted to talk about changing your business. People find that they reach a time in business that they say I have had enough with this struggle that never seems to end and the bills keep mounting up. If you are nodding right now don't worry I know what it feels like we have all been there and even now and again Blake and I do that. What we do at that point is stop have a look at our quarterly set of accounts and then have a look at the previous quarters and the same time last year.

I know that I am very lucky to have a partner that is not only an acountant but also owns his own accounting practice www.dasolutions.com.au . However what we do by looking back at the previous sets of accounts is no different to what our accounting clients are given because we work so closely with them, they get to see Blake every quarter and go through all of this type of stuff. We are very strong believers in business development as well as helping with taxation needs.

You need to look at your income first and ask yourself has that increased? Then have a look at your spending on rent, advertising, wages etc. Has that increased? Now you need to work out has your expense changed alot compaired to your increase earnings? When you do this you need to work out at what point has the business improved or not improved and why. You might have changed your product line or maybe your product line needs a revamp so that people feel it's new again. Can you chase old clients to see if they need an update could you add more product lines and take out some old ones that aren't performing anymore.

One tip stop and think am I flogging a dead horse. Be realist it doesn't mean that you failed or didn't make it. Business should never be taken personally. This can be hard though because you would have put many hard long hours into your business. You haven't lost though. You have gained much needed experience to start with something else or even chage the existing business.

This is where the whole marketing and advertising gets a little tricky. You can spend thousands apon thousands on marketing and advertising thats not working. Believe me we have done, and still do it at times.

We have worked out that you need to target your market. Who is going to want your product who will use your product. Then think about what that type of person would read or watch, maybe even what would they be doing after hours. Then once you have identified that you would be able to work out where to advertise. What we found for the accounting practice, that advertising in smaller local newspapers in area's that people will actually read the paper worked best so we advertised in Jimboomba Times however this did not work for Tippa's Tools. This advertising was only small but says what we do and that we will travel to the person this advert only cost us $30p/w and has gained us some valuable clients. We placed an ad in a larger local paper that delivers to the suburbs and we found that we had no responce at all from that advertising. We have also found that placement for your advertising is important, right hand side top right if you can. However this is very different for websites which I will talk about next time.

Hi everyone,

I thought that I might give you a couple of ideas about where to start a business. I know when we first started it was really hard to know what and where to go. My partner had more of an idea than I did because of his Accounting back ground.

Here is the first thing think about what you want to sell. It could be your time someone elses time, an item from hardware tools & hand tools www.tippastools.com.au that I do to stuffed toys. It could even be something that you have often though would be a great idea and no one has bothered to develope yet.

So now you have that idea this is when the hard bit come into play. When I started selling hardware tools & hand tools www.tippastools.com.au I didn't do this. Thats to write a business plan. I have since however because other wise you end up going around in circles and spend more money than you should be. It will also bring up alot of questions that you wouldn't have thought of so that you can make sure that you can budget towards these types of things.

You are not going to know what everything is going to cost you because there is always something that comes up you didn't expect. This is not a bad thing though because you need to learn to expect the unexpected in business because you will always be thrown curve balls. To find a business plan type into www.google.com.au business plans, Australia then you will be able to find some examples.

I better be going I will check in again soon.

Thanks Tiffany

hardware tools & hand tools www.tippastools.com.au

info@tippastools.com.au   

Hi Everyone,

 

Well I thought that I would update everyone in what has been happening this last year. We have had a heap of fun. www.tippastools.com.au has been going really well we have increased our business by 50% and many of our customers have started coming back several times so I really want to thank all of our customers for your business this last year.

Also our accounting practice www.dasolutions.com.au has been very busy with most of our new clients being referals.

This coming year is going to be one to remember. In 2008 we have large plans for the business. We are going to be increasing our wholesale section. As the whole increases we will be able to lower all  of our prices even further as we buy in more bulk so this will be a huge advantage for all of our customers wholesale and retail.

We will also be heading out to China ourself to find some tools that Australia doesn't get here because the market is so small compared with America and the UK. We are still going to make sure that our quality control is still high as we have an agent in China ready to go and do testing etc for us to make sure that the items we recieve over here what we ordered exactly.

I would like to wish everyone a wonderful New Year and will look forward to hearing from you.

 

Tiffany

Well hi everyone. I am sorry that I have not been able to get more items back onto ebay. We have been so busy at the moment with orders from the website that I have not had time to think about much else. We have been getting some really good feed back regarding our item and our service.

When you go into business you expect many thing and most of the time it doesn't work the way that you would expect it to. We have made sure that we keep our customer service as our number 1. We know without you that we wouldn't have a business. wwwtippastools.com.au has been better than we had thoght.

We are starting to have more bulk orders now and as we all know I will give discounts for bulk orders. I better head off now but every keep well. Do drop me a line if you like.