A Perth salon owner has revealed the pressures facing small businesses, as she hits out at the government for pushing owners across the country to the brink.
Krystal Solera is the owner of Luxe Label, a hair extension and colour salon in Cannington, and has amassed a huge online following for her hair and beauty tips and transformations.
Having spent decades in the industry after starting out as a 14-year-old with a passion for styling, she has built Luxe Label over the past 12 years into a bustling salon employing a team of seven.
But despite garnering rave reviews, a loyal customer base and a hefty online following, she admits it’s never been more difficult time to run a business.
“I’m f****** terrified and angry. For my business. For the millions of other businesses out there hanging on by their fingernails,” the 34-year-old stated in a recent Instagram post that’s since gone viral.
In the post, captioned “f****** terrible time to be a business owner in Australia”, Ms Solera revealed she had gotten so fed up with rising costs that she sought out to seek the figures that were making it so hard for her to operate her business.
“Every quarter there’s another deadline, another bill, another increase, another f****** thing we have to comply with and a penalty waiting if we don’t,” she wrote in the post in which she tagged the Prime Minister.
“Payday super. 12 per cent super. Payroll tax. Workers comp. More f****** insurance. Award increases. Business Activity Statements. Single Touch Payroll – f****** enough.
“And god forbid you get behind or go through any kind of hardship yourself. That’s when you get hit with another director penalty notice.
“They come after you personally. Your money. Your assets. Your f**king home.
“We employ people. We pay wages. We pay super, We pay tax. We collect GST for you. We pay payroll tax for the privilege of employing more people.
“What the f*** do you actually want from us?
“We’re already drowning in costs and apparently the answer is to just keep f****** taking.”
Ms Solera pleaded with the government to “stop pretending” to care about small businesses while “absolutely slaughtering us and bleeding us all dry”.
“What I want is a system that keeps up with reality,” she told PerthNow.
“The Payday super obligation is fair but the timing assumes a cash flow certainty most of us don’t have, and the penalties for being days late are brutal.
“Our pensions and welfare are indexed. Tax brackets aren’t. Cost changes with no lead time we budget 12 months out. When something lands mid-year it comes out of the owner.”
The mum-of-two admits the ongoing pressures will have a flow-on effect on the number of apprentices hired.
“You cannot scream about a labour shortage while making it impossible for the people who train the workforce to stay open,” she wrote in the post. “You’re not solving it. You’re causing it”.
Ms Solera’s experience paints a starkly different image to that of the government, with the Treasurer Jim Chalmers stating small businesses were booming.
“We already saw before the budget that average new company registrations were higher under this government than any previous government on record, and today’s data continues this trend,” the Treasurer said in August.
“There have been only two times since records began in 1999 that more than 40,000 businesses have been registered in a month and both times have occurred under the Albanese Labor Government, with the biggest two months for business creation being the two months since the budget.”
He said there have been more than 1.3 million new companies registered under the Labor Government and more than 1.3 million jobs created.
“An average of 900 companies have been created each day of this Labor government while just over 30 have become insolvent,” he said.
“There’ve been around 30 times the number of companies opening than closing each day on average on Labor’s watch.”
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