With the high point of the 2015/16 Federal Budget wave breaking over small to medium sized enterprises, if you are a Gen Y entrepreneur, or small business owner, there has never been a better time to start paddling.

The Federal Budget influences the Australian economy in much the same way that oceanic currents affect the size and severity of an incoming swell. It sets the government’s political agenda for the year and, excluding global catastrophes, has the single biggest effect on the nation’s economy and the business environment. Unlike previous years, this year’s Budget has something different. The government announced the largest ‘small business package’ ever, coupled with changes to make crowdfunding more accessible for small businesses.

If you are an entrepreneur, small-business owner, or run a start-up, there is a strong undertow of benefits for you in this Budget.

Carving The Wave: Tax Rate Cuts For Small Businesses

The most notable budget item for small business is the tax rate cut of 1.5% (from 30% down to 28.5%), expected to take effect from 1 July 2015. Small businesses are classified as those with revenue of less than $2 million per annum – that’s around 780,000 Australian businesses.
Although it is less than ideal to have a tiered corporate tax system, which comes with its own complexities, it can generally be said that tax cuts to businesses are good for everyone. Income tax for individual taxpayers is automatically deducted by employers and, for the most part, this arrangement is well established and accepted. For companies, however, tax is a business cost and all costs ultimately flow on to the consumer.

For consumers, this reduction in tax for small businesses means that benefits will ultimately trickle on to you.

The Rip Tide: How Will The Small Business Rate Cut Help The Economy?

Small business owners will be encouraged to maintain, and continue developing, their businesses and new businesses will open. Many commentators agree that the focus on small business in this Budget is a move by the government to encourage Gen Y entrepreneurs to start new and innovative enterprises that will boost the economy.

This comes as increasing reports emerge of the great ‘brain drain’ where lack of venture capital investment is causing Australia to lose its start-up entrepreneurs to the lucrative shores of the US and Silicon Valley.

Big Wave Surfing: Accelerated Depreciation

Accelerated depreciation for small businesses was also announced in the Budget.

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in a scene from the 1991 motion picture “Point Break.” Photo by Richard Foreman, 20th Century Fox

This means that each and every new asset (for example, a car or kitchen) purchased by a small business owner, up to a value of $20,000, will be completely and immediately tax deductible from Budget night until 30 June 2017. If you own a small business, you can purchase as many individual items up to the value of $20,000 as you like.

This overtakes the current threshold of $1000, which can take years before a business can fully claim an asset for tax purposes.

Swimming Between The Flags: Employee Share Schemes for Start Ups

In small business, having access to the right resources can mean the difference between succeeding or wiping out.

Excitingly, the Budget addresses this by including changes to the Employee Share Schemes (ESS’s).

Typically, entrepreneurs and start-ups do not have a lot of capital floating around and may have negative cash flow. This means that they cannot afford the salaries commanded by the talented individuals needed to streamline the company and grow. The result is a negative feedback cycle that impedes small business development in the same way that a pro surfer’s progress would be crippled by not having a full sized surf board.

The operations of ESS’s have worked around this limitation by rewarding employees with shares in the company. This has had the two-fold effect of marrying employee risk and reward with that of the company. If the company succeeds, so does the employee.

Prior to a legislative change on 1 July 2009, individuals could defer payment of tax on their ESS’s until they sold their shares or the share gains were ‘realised’. Post 1 July 2009, employees had to pay tax on ESS’s upfront. So, individuals wishing to work for entrepreneurs and start-ups would not receive a wage or shares in a company that may go bust. The employee would also carry considerable personal risk while also being required to pay tax up front.

This Budget changes these measures so that employees who are issued with shares, or options, under ESS’s will generally be able to defer tax until they ‘realise’ the share/option value, rather than having to pay tax when they actually receive the shares.

Sudden Swells: Changes To Crowdfunding

Everyone loves the possible swell of financial support offered by crowdfunding platforms.

The Government has recognised these benefits and announced new incentives for start-ups, specifically around crowdfunding. $7.8 million has been allocated for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to remove obstacles to crowd-sourced equity funding by working-up and implementing a new regulatory scheme regarding the raising and access to crowd sourced funds.

Currently in Australia, only ‘sophisticated’ or ‘professional’ investors can invest in start-ups through crowd funding arrangements.

The Government will still be keen to ensure that an appropriate level of investor protection is maintained. However, it is envisaged that the framework will facilitate easier conversion to a public company as well as simplifying reporting and disclosure requirements, all of which will reduce compliance costs and support investment.

Sink Or Swim: What Is The Low Down For Small Businesses And Entrepreneurs?

Lower compliance costs and obligations, lower taxes, accelerated depreciation, easier access to capital, and providing business greater flexibility with ESS’s are all more conducive to a more hospitable business environment for small businesses and start-ups.

All in all, for the small business and start-up sector in Australia this is a very good legislative package.

Think we’ve missed anything? Let us know what ways the Federal Budget will benefit your business in the comments section below!

Further Information

For more information on the Federal Budget and how it impacts your business visit:
Budget 2015 website.

This is partly due to an ongoing cycle of denial that I am, in fact, a workaholic and partly because I love what I do. If you find a career you love then you will never work a day in your life, right?

Wrong.

The negative impacts of an imbalanced lifestyle can be far-reaching with subtle warning signs that are often difficult to identify. Here are some main ways you can determine if you are working too hard and some easy strategies you can use to achieve a better work-life balance.

The big leagues

Working in corporate finance for a Big Four (one of the four largest international professional services networks) means that the stakes are high, the pace is frenetic and the hours are long. While this is anathema to some, I love my job and enjoy being good at it. This is not to say that I neglect myself: I exercise regularly, eat a clean diet, drink moderately and do not smoke. I like to think I am a fit and healthy 29-year-old.

Which is why it came as a shock when my health suddenly deteriorated.

We want more

Like most people my age, I thrive on a breakneck daily routine. Early morning exercise, a full day of work, after work exercise, and a short break for socialising and dinner before opening the laptop to start on more work.

These days increased work pressure in the form of tight deadlines, high profile projects and understaffing across several industries has led many of us to develop unhealthy lifestyle habits. If a deadline looms, we find extra time to complete a project outside work hours.

For me, working weekends became the norm – an average of 7 hours overtime on Saturday and Sunday. Even then I would still have mountains of work waiting on Monday morning. Waking up tired was common (and to be expected with an average of 5-6 hours sleep per night) but this tiredness usually only lasted until after my first coffee.

Then something changed. Fatigue began lasting past the first coffee until lunch.

Unshakeable exhaustion is a shot across the bow as far as your body is concerned – and it should have been the first major warning sign that I was doing too much.

But, like most driven people my age, I brushed it all off as an anomaly and kept up the pace, using excuses to justify my position.

Promotion season is coming. I’ll just stick it out a little while longer.”

The next warning sign was not so subtle.

A deep ache in my lower back. It initially seemed like a pulled muscle, or byproduct of awful plane seats from regular work travel.  After a hot shower failed to ease it, I noticed a raised and inflamed patch (about the size of a fist) on my skin.

With a painful rash spreading in a uniform line around my back, the doctor took 10 seconds to diagnose the cause as shingles.

9 of those 10 seconds comprised surprise and incredulity on the part of my doctor as shingles are most commonly found in people aged over 50. The cause of shingles in younger people is prolonged periods of stress, illness or a where a person has become immunocompromised.

Proof is in the pudding

Even though I love my job and frenetic lifestyle I, quite literally, had overworked my body to the point where my immune system resembled a stressed out 50-year-old. A far cry from the relatively fit and healthy male I thought I was.

The truth is that we all work too hard. Whether this is in a job we hate, for work experience, career development, for a position we genuinely love or any number of justifications we use to prioritise work over other areas of life. The negative emotional, psychological and physiological impacts of working more than living are uniform and immense.

The first step is to admit that you have a problem

In my case, I am addicted to work because I enjoy it. However, as we’ve explored, workaholics come in all shapes and sizes. So long as you feel compelled to continue working beyond normal business hours, you may have a problem.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine if you are headed towards an unhealthy lifestyle:

1. Do you consistently work longer than others in a similar role in your workplace?
2. Are you the kind of person who has trouble ‘switching off’ after work?
3. Are your personal relationships strained? Particularly those with loved ones.
4. Do you become stressed if you’re stopped from working in some way?
5. Do you plan the rest of your life around work?
6. Do you spend more time on tasks than you had originally planned?
7. Have you been told by others to ease up on the amount of work you do – and have you ignored them? (Pay special attention to this sign, particularly if it comes from colleagues).

If you answered yes to more than three of the above, you may wish to re-think your current lifestyle choices.

How to reclaim your life

• Start small

If you are constantly working from home, start keeping a journal of how many extra hours you log each day. Then try to reduce this on a weekly basis. No need to go cold-turkey! Slowly ease back on your number of work hours by working one less hour per week and try to increase this steadily.

• Work smart, not hard

If you start to feel less productive as a result of your reduced hours, there are ways that you can optimise your time.

Software such as Rescue Time runs quietly in the background on your computer, delivering a report on which applications you spend your time on and how long you spend on them each day. It even helps you set and achieve goals in terms of your daily work efficiency.

Apps such as 30/30 also help your efficiency by keeping you on a task for a specific period, while Freedom disconnects you from the internet altogether – allowing you to work distraction-free.

• Learn to switch off

Set some work/life boundaries. If you maintain an almost 24/7 connection to work then you may need to disconnect work email from your phone or laptop. If this is hard to achieve then set yourself a goal of not checking email between certain hours or use an app such as EnforcedVacation that will automatically switch your emails off for you.

• Leave when everybody else does

If you are the first person into work and last person to leave, start keeping regular hours like the rest of your colleagues. Set yourself a drop dead time to leave by and do not deviate from it. If you easily lose track of time at the office then set an alarm 20 minutes before you wish to leave on your phone or set a vibrating alert on your wearable fitness tracker or have a friend or colleague send you menacing emails, texts or hover over your desk until you step away from the computer.

• Focus on your passions

Take up some hobbies that you have always wanted to try and spend more time with your family and friends. By incrementally reprioritising where you spend your leisure time, you will eventually get into the habit of passing over extra work hours and learning to switch off.

At the end of the day

The work will always be there but your health will not.

It is important not to feel guilty about taking time for yourself. Give yourself permission to relax and take some time away from the office to recharge. It will serve to strengthen your abilities, creative energy and problem-solving skills so that you will be more productive once you are back in the office.

What strategies do you use to cope with work-related stress? Think we’ve missed anything? Let us know in the comments section below!

Further Information

• To manage fatigue at work visit Safe Work Australia.
• For help achieving a sound work/life balance visit Managing Worklife Balance International.