The sequence
In 2022 I was an engineering student at UQ with no capital and no contacts in manufacturing. My mate Marcus and I researched the prefab market ourselves, found our own suppliers, and learned the National Construction Code from scratch. We never borrowed a dollar, because we had nothing to borrow against. Four years on, Neo Living Australia does A$6M in revenue and still carries zero debt.
Nothing about that was clever. We just did things in an order that kept us alive long enough to get good. This page is that order.
Test the idea before you spend anything
The instinct is to register the company first, because registering feels like starting. It isn't. It's the cheapest, easiest part of the whole process, and doing it early buys you nothing except a feeling.
Before you spend, find out whether anyone will actually pay. Call twenty people who have the problem. Quote a real price and watch what happens to their face. You are not looking for encouragement — friends give that away free. You are looking for someone reaching for a wallet.
Registrations cost tens to hundreds of dollars. The months you spend building something nobody wants cost far more.
Get an ABN
An Australian Business Number is free and usually issued the same day through the Australian Business Register. Get it before your first invoice.
Here's the part people learn the expensive way. If you invoice a business and you haven't quoted an ABN, that business is generally required to withhold 47% of the payment and send it to the ATO. You eventually get it back at tax time, but "eventually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence when you're starting out and cash is the only thing keeping you alive.
Sole trader or company
Decide this on two things: how much personal liability you're exposed to, and how much you realistically expect to earn in the next year. Do not decide it on which one sounds more serious on a business card.
Sole trader is free, instant, and simple. Your business income is your income, and your personal assets are on the line if something goes wrong.
A Pty Ltd company is a separate legal entity, which limits that exposure. It also costs money to register, charges an annual review fee every year whether you traded or not, and needs its own tax return. Current fees are published by ASIC and change on 1 July each year, so check them there rather than trusting any figure you read in a blog post — including this one.
We started Neo Living as a company because we were manufacturing a physical product that people live in. If you're doing consulting from a laptop, that calculus is different. Talk to an accountant before you commit — it's an hour of their time against a structure you'll live inside for years.
Register a business name — only if you need one
You need a registered business name only if you trade under something that isn't your own legal name. If you're Jane Smith trading as Jane Smith, you don't need one. If you're Jane Smith trading as Brisbane Bookkeeping Co, you do.
Registration is through ASIC. Registering a name does not give you trademark rights and does not stop someone else using a similar one — those are separate questions, and worth understanding before you print signage.
Check whether you need a licence
This is the step that quietly ends businesses. Trades, food, building work, transport, childcare, security and plenty else all require licences before you can legally operate, and the requirements differ by state and sometimes by council.
The Australian Business Licence and Information Service takes your location and activity and tells you which licences apply. It's free, it's the government's own tool, and half an hour there is cheaper than a stop-work order.
In our case the National Construction Code governed what we could build and how. Learning it was not optional and not fun, and it is the single biggest reason we're still trading.
Deal with GST at the right time, not early
GST registration becomes compulsory once your GST turnover reaches A$75,000 in a 12-month period — and that's a rolling 12 months, not a financial year. Once you cross it, you have 21 days to register. For non-profits the threshold is A$150,000, and taxi and ride-sourcing drivers must register regardless of turnover.
Below the threshold, registering is optional. Plenty of new businesses register straight away because it feels official. Think about it properly first: once registered you add 10% to your prices or absorb it, and you take on a BAS obligation every quarter forever. If you sell to consumers, that 10% is a real competitive question. If you sell to GST-registered businesses, they claim it back and barely notice.
Current rules and thresholds are on the ATO's GST registration page. Check there before you act — this is the kind of number that moves.
Get your first paying customer
Steps one to six are admin. They make you legal. They do not make you a business.
The first customer is the only step that proves the whole thing works, and it's the one most people delay longest, because it's the only one where someone can say no. Registering an ABN cannot reject you. A prospect can.
Our first real sale was a A$30,000 product that came through a free Facebook listing. No ad budget, no funnel, no agency. Just an offer put in front of people who had the problem, and enough conversations to find the one who was ready.
The whole sequence, on one page
I put this into a free checklist — every step above with the registrations, thresholds and decisions laid out in order, plus the Four Machines one-pager we still run the business on.
What comes after the first customer
Once money is coming in, the job changes. You stop asking "will this work" and start asking "why is this breaking". Every business I've seen, from a lawn-mowing round to our factory, runs on the same four machines: marketing gets attention, sales turns attention into money, operations delivers what you promised, and admin keeps the money and keeps you legal.
Most first-time founders build one machine brilliantly and let the other three rot. That's what the full course is about — 44 short lessons, each ending with a real action, built entirely around Australian rules.