3 Great Online Small Business Courses in Australia.

At Grow A Small Business, we are huge advocates for small business owners continually developing themselves and their team.

We call it PD, or Professional Development, and recommend at least 30 minutes each work day, that’s only 2.5 hours a week.

The great thing is, with so much content on audiobooks and podcasts, you can tear through your PD while doing low cognitive tasks, like cleaning, exercising or driving.

So there really is no excuse for why you are not expanding your mind and knowledge in at least one corner of the business you need to improve on (eg. marketing, sales, finances).

With most audiobooks 6 - 8 hours in length, listening at 1.5 speed as we recommend, means you can easily knock over a business book every two weeks.

That’s 22 books a year, if you take holidays out!

For more structured learning, and often with great templates, online courses can be a terrific way to develop yourself - and some come with an active community you can stay engaged with.

Here are 3 great online courses for small businesses in Australia:

As a bonus, we have one of the best free online small business courses in Australia, to help you and your team be more productive, focused and less stressed.

It takes you 30 minutes a weekday, over 2 weeks, reading a short daily email, consuming the lesson in the course for that day and a handful of actions you need to take.

The ‘Transform Your Performance’ course starts with the secret to guaranteed success.

While there are plenty of online courses outside of Australia, we thought we’d list the 3 best ones from our backyard.

Now, even though the first one is a course we wrote, we’re not biassed - we are just very experienced in growing small businesses, and helping others grow theirs (I’ve had 15+ businesses in 3 countries, with 30+ business partners working alongside me in those businesses).

Our recruitment online course is ranked number one as it follows what we believe are the 5 Growth Pillars when you are growing your small business with ease:

People is our #1 Growth Pillar, and the area we guide small business owners with the most, as we believe “people are the hardest thing in small business AND its greatest asset”, so therefore our second mantra is “recruitment is the most important thing a manager does”.

If you don’t hire A-Players, and let B, C-Players or worse - let toxic assholes onto your bus, you are starting way behind a competitor that has a high-performing A-Team.

While strategy is our second Growth Pillar, I chose this awesome marketing course as marketing is the second plank on the Growth Seesaw (the other being People - you nail marketing to increase sales, then need to walk to the other end of the seesaw to hire more people to manage the increased workload).

Yes, your small business strategy is an important and big piece of work, but it doesn’t change that often (and our ‘Effective Leader’ course in our 16 week ‘Business Transformation Program’ covers this in detail, including a 10 year financial model built specifically for your business).

OK, let’s get into a little more detail on each of the three online courses I recommend for small business owners in Australia.

As I said, we believe recruitment is the most important thing a manager does.

We also think that most of the training courses out there on how to become a better recruiter or hiring manager, are pretty shit.

So, we put together the ‘Ultimate Recruitment Toolkit’ online course to help busy small business owners and their managers.

It’s jam-packed with lessons from our days of recruiting for our own business.

In the course we recommend the 5 best books on recruiting, and we have heaps of templates and scripts for you to use when finding and securing your A-Players.

At the end of the 2 week course there is a Playbook you can copy and tailor for your business.

Like our free ‘Transform Your Performance’ online course mentioned above, our recruitment course needs only 30 minutes a day.

With the short daily email, you are led through the lessons we have written and the handful of actions you need to take each weekday, to become a Kick-Ass Recruiter.

That’s only 5 hours all up over the 2 weeks - a small investment of time to become better at the number one thing a manager does, recruitment.

And, you can put your other managers (including future ones), through the ‘Ultimate Recruitment Toolkit’ course too, at no extra cost (the investment is $800 plus GST if you’re in Australia).

Even if you, the owner of your small business, don’t own the marketing corner of your business, we highly recommend you invest some time in understanding the fundamentals of great marketing.

You will be able to challenge your marketing team or agency at times, and make better decisions across the business if you are armed with the marketing basics.

While the “Mini MBA in Marketing” course author, Mark, is British, he now lives 30 minutes south of Hobart (Tasmania, Australia), where I live.

His team of around 7 FTE reside in London, but we are calling this one an Australian course!

The Mini MBA in Marketing is an excellent course and Mark’s down-to-earth teaching style, with some swear words thrown in, is highly rated.

We have done his course, and I have had 3 business mates who had him as their marketing professor rave about him, and a further 2 marketing people I respect tell me this is the best resource to start with in marketing.

And all those unprompted testimonials was before the first time I saw Mark speak, in Hobart in December 2021.

We then had Mark on our podcast back in mid-2022, and it is both hilarious and very informative on his then 25 years as a marketing professor at MIT, London Business School, Melbourne Business School and consulting to big international brands like Subuar and Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) - the world’s largest and most profitable luxury brand business.

The course only opens twice a year, in April and September, includes 10 modules as well as some regular webinars Mark hosts for students.

As at April 2024, the investment for the course was $3,500 AUD, plus GST - tremendous value!

We had Alan, co-author of this course, on our podcast in mid-2021, and while he is South African by birth, he now lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The course will help you maintain healthy profit margins, even when the economy is down, by analysing your data and guiding you toward sound decisions based on tried-and-true methods.

After a successful exit of his tech business in 2009, and he is clearly a very smart bloke, Alan now helps small businesses understand and manage their cash flow, with their online software, Cash Flow Story.

If you know of other great online small business courses in Australia, please reach out - I crave more resources for our audience, to help them, their team and business grow.

If you want specific advice for other courses or resources to help your business grow, book a 20 minute Growth Chat with me and I will point you in the right direction. I always provide some books, podcasts, courses or contacts in my network to help you with your #1 growth challenge - I love talking everything small business!!

Remember to check out the footer on our website for other great resources we have to help small business owners grow their business with ease, so they can live the lifestyle they signed up for.

Cheers,

Troy | Founder | Grow A Small Business