Hobart takes crown as the nation’s fastest-growing small business hot spot

A Tassie city has been named the most entrepreneurial in Australia during the pandemic, taking out the title as the country’s hot spot for small business growth.

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A TASMANIAN city was the fastest-growing small business hot spot during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report by demographer Bernard Salt.

Released today, the Xero Boss Insights report, authored by Mr Salt and compiled by the Demographics Group, analysed Australian Bureau of Statistics data and found Hobart was the most entrepreneurial spot in Australia during the pandemic.

During the year ending June 2020, Hobart grew its business base faster than any other Australian city in percentage terms – up by 6.7 per cent – bringing the city’s total to 17,616.

This was well ahead of Melbourne, which grew by 3.5 per cent and Sydney, which grew by 2.1 per cent.

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The industries with the biggest jobs growth nationally were logistics, technology, health and medical, and agriculture.

Despite one of the most difficult years in living memory, the report found in June 2020 there were 2.4 million small businesses in Australia, with the pandemic being credited as a catalyst for some people to go out on their own and start a business or reimagine an old one.

Demographer Bernard Salt. Picture: David Caird

Retired civil engineer from South Africa Gareth Bailey is doing the latter after first starting Tours Around Tasmania in 2015.

Originally based on showing tourists from cruise ships around the cities, COVID-19 put an end to his operations.

He has used the opportunity to restart the company as an entirely new business, bringing along his new business partner George van Deventer.

With a background in wealth management in Melbourne, Mr van Deventer took a career break, fell in love with Tasmania and took the COVID downtime to develop new tour offerings.

Relaunching on May 1, the business will come with a new product range and new branding, with an aim to give travellers a unique experience of Tasmania.

“There’s already a lot of companies in this area so we wanted to make sure we had a point of difference and to go deeper,” Mr van Deventer said.

“We’ve built a network of people who are already running separate businesses here – including ecologists, geologists, historians, kayakers, people with specialities – and we’ve incorporated them and what they do into the tours we will present.”

Tours Around Tasmania marketing director George van Deventer and managing director Gareth Bailey on the Hobart waterfront. Picture: CHRIS KIDD

Mr van Deventer said he was surprised to learn Hobart took out the title of fastest-growing small business hot spot, but that there may have been some very practical reasons behind how that was able to happen.

“Life afforded me the opportunity to go meet a bunch of people in the industry and work on this idea to bring in the subject matter experts and develop a platform to bring them to a more generalist market,” he said.

“Having the flexibility to go out and meet people because we didn’t have those subsequent lockdowns like other markets helped facilitate that.”

Last week, the latest Deloitte Access Economics report showed the state’s economy grew 2.3 per cent in 2020 and predicted a 5.1 per cent growth rate in 2021.

The report said Tasmania’s performance had been helped by being the “COVID fortress of the nation”, but warned further growth may slow as federal taxpayer support in JobKeeper and JobSeeker fades.