Managing a Small Business in Australia: The Complete Handbook

Managing a Small Business in Australia is a practical, reference-style handbook by John English and Babette Moate aimed at Australian small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, structured around the full lifecycle of building and running a business — from initial decision through daily operations to financial management. English, an academic in entrepreneurship and the author of the earlier bestselling How to Organise and Operate a Small Business in Australia, and Moate, his frequent co-author, wrote this as an updated, expanded successor aimed at both people getting started and people already running a business who want to sharpen their operation.

The book opens by acknowledging that small business owners are, in the authors' words, often "the rebels of the business world" — people driven by independence and a desire to put their own ideas into practice, but who don't always come equipped with the practical skills a business actually requires to survive. Part A works through the earliest decisions: the different pathways into starting a business (buying an existing business, starting from scratch, or buying a franchise), how to think through business strategy at the outset, and the baseline legal obligations an Australian small business owner needs to understand from day one, including checking for existing liabilities when buying an established business.

Part B is a distinctly Australian-context section covering where new business owners can actually go for help — government assistance programs and private-sector advisory resources — treating this as practical, not optional, information given how much support exists but goes unused because owners don't know where to look. Part C moves into marketing, covering how to build a marketing strategy, generate sales, and, for businesses ready to scale beyond the domestic market, the basics of export marketing.

Part D addresses operations: choosing and establishing business premises, building an effective day-to-day operating strategy, and the practicalities of employing staff, including obligations that come with taking on employees in the Australian regulatory context. Part E closes the book with financial management — reading and using financial information, managing working capital, sourcing finance, and understanding taxation obligations — closing with the authors' pointed reminder that a business can, counterintuitively, "go broke making a profit" if cash flow isn't managed carefully.

The book's strength is its comprehensiveness and its specifically Australian regulatory and institutional focus, which distinguishes it from the many small-business books written for a US or generic audience. Its limitation is one inherent to any hands-on regulatory handbook: specific legal, tax, and government-assistance details date quickly, and a reader relying on this book years after its edition date should verify current rules rather than treating the book's specifics as up to date.