Funding & Finance

Finding yourself stretched thin to pay the staff wages this month? We offer a quick (and thoroughly outlandish) solution: Ring up Commonwealth Bank CEO Ralph Norris and convince him to hand over a small fraction of his annual pay. How about just an hour's worth, Ralph? Sure, the banking mogul says, here you go: $1,844.

You’ve decided to offer equity in your company to investors in order to grow your business — but what’s the next step you need to take? In the third of this six-part series on raising capital, corporate advisor Dr Mark Rainbird discusses the avenues you have to distribute your offer to interested parties.

Crowd-funding, while nothing new globally, is still in its infancy in Oz. Provided it can remain on the good side of Australia’s consumer protection laws, it has the potential to go gangbusters in traditionally underfunded segments, like the arts.

Seen from a distance, this video is just three inhumanly rich guys sitting in comfy chairs and chatting for an hour about philanthropy, luck and comfort zones. But then you move in and focus on the players. And ... wow. Warren Buffet. Jay-Z. Interviewer Steve Forbes. Watch and learn.

According to the latest BizExchange Index, the volume of businesses for sale is expected to increase in the future as many business owners seek retirement. However, younger generations seem unable to come to the party, already heavily in debt and are unable to access their superannuation.

Boy howdy, the Reserve Bank of Australia gave us a righteous scare, didn't it? All that hullabaloo about creeping inflation and the threat of rising interest rates. We were this close to expanding Beer O'Clock to three days a week. Plus holidays.

There are few fully paid up members of the ‘We Heart Gillard’ fan club among Australia’s small-to-medium enterprises, according to the April MYOB Business Monitor special report, which has found that a mere 23% would vote for the Prime Minister and her peeps if an election was held in the near future.

Being a member of Generation Y sure ain’t cheap. According to a new study by credit card big-wig American Express, Australians aged 18-24 have been priced out of owning assets that previous generations took as a given. Instead, they’re opting for the more wallet friendly renting, loaning and swapping.

Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, has announced, together with Premier Lara Giddings, CSIRO’s CEO Dr Megan Clark and Member for Denison Andrew Wilkie, that the Tasmanian ICT Centre will receive a $50 million package over the next five years to help Tasmanian’s development of information and communications technologies.

Amidst the heated rhetoric over taxes and the best way to achieve a surplus, one area of the budget may be getting overlooked: grants. According to one agency, "the budget seems to be a reshuffling exercise aimed at incurring no additional expense. Even programs cut last budget are counted as savings again, without much to replace them."

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of a day off from emails and deadlines and spent my time instead at the Anthill Capital Raising, Acquisitions & Exit Masterclass run by Domenic Caruso. Time outs have been rare in recent times but this one was well worth it.

Today, 99designs, the world's largest online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design services, announced a $35 million first-round investment led by Accel Partners. In this exclusive podcast for Anthill, 99designs co-founder Mark Harbottle speaks with James Tuckerman about the deal and what it means for the 26-person company based in Collingwood, Victoria.

Adelaide based SA Angels have completed a six-figure investment in local technology company Snap Network Surveillance. This was the third significant investment for SA Angels, with a similar sized investment in Windesal, an Adelaide based renewable-energy powered desalination company, being completed in 2010.

On Tuesday 10 May, InnovationBay will be holding the first of its Angel Dinners for 2011. Aspiring capital seekers are invited to apply by way...

Since making the transition from service provider to start-up investor, I've developed several criteria that allow me to quickly identify if a business idea is worth taking on. One requirement is that I believe a business must have three customers. Obviously I don't mean three individuals – rather, three distinct groups of customers that play an important role in a business' lifecycle.

Talking Business is a podcast review of the Australian economy, presented by seasoned business journalists Leon Gettler and Garry Barker, produced in association with the RMIT College of Business. In this podcast, RMIT economist Jonathan Boymal talks about falling housing stats and lending finance. He also looks at the durability of Japan's economy and how it may impact Australia in light of the tsunami and rebuilding efforts.

In my previous article, I discussed that companies with access to capital will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace, even though capital is going to be harder to come by. However, while capital raising can provide a myriad of new opportunities and strong competitive advantages for your business, it is not necessarily a panacea for whatever malaise your organisation might be experiencing. It might sound like an obvious statement, but getting people to invest in your company requires a great deal of preparation – yet there are still plenty of companies that eschew the necessary groundwork.

In this podcast, Sinclair Davidson presents his take on how the carbon tax could impact the economy. He characterises the tax as a ploy designed to change behaviour rather than generate revenue and questions the Government's proposed compensation to offset cost of living increases.

How can Visa Business help your business go forward? Manage cash-flow, control and track spending with VISA Business credit and debit cards.

Why are we so swayed by system-produced data even though there is a fair probability that it contains some degree of garbage? Data – and more particularly, spreadsheet data – gives an undeniable sense of authority. Take a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation, key it into Excel and suddenly there is an authority to the numbers that belies its origin. Why?