When I started my first business, back in the 90s, it was out of necessity, I wanted to stay at home and raise my family.

But like so many others, our family needed two incomes and so I had to find a way to work. There was no work from home back then, definitely no freelancing, but with the help of the incredible authors I worked with at the time, I convinced the men in suits to let me do both of those things - work from home and be a freelancer! It was a great way to start a business. It was simple. Do the work, bill the hours, and sign off on my days off!

But in 2002, I decided to complicate my business and my life. By then we had four boys under seven and my hubby and I opened bricks and mortar toy stores. As if that wasn’t enough, we decided to add an e-commerce arm too. Those were the days a comma crashed the whole site, we knew little about business, even less about e-commerce and there was nowhere to go to get help, but we forged on regardless.

The big tax bill

While we loved being business owners, it became clear pretty quickly that there were some things we didn’t do well, like the numbers. When the jobs got divided up between us, I got the finances and while I thought I was doing an ok job, in 2004 I got an email that changed my life forever. That tax bill totalled $42,000, we had a six week payment deadline and no savings to fall back on. In the blink of an eye, we went from feeling like smug business owners to failures.

I had to confront all my biggest fears and insecurities - that I was hopeless with money, that I didn’t do numbers, that I had no right being in business. And while I wallowed for a while, I soon realised that the only way out was through.

What I did next

So, I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and was determined to learn all that I could about business finances. I studied, became a Registered BAS Agent (that qualification took a lot of study and 1000 hours of supervised Business Activity Statement report prep) and worked with some of the finest finance professionals to build my knowledge bank.

While David and I eventually said goodbye to the toy stores, I was excited to start my next venture - a bookkeeping and compliance business - where I was privileged to work day-to-day with other business owners to help them achieve their business dreams.

Throughout that time I worked with so many incredibly talented and creative business owners who didn’t start their business to do numbers. And while their lack of financial knowledge was ok at the start, as their businesses grew, it often became the thing that brought them to the brink of financial and business disaster.