“Dot your i’s and cross your t’s, make sure that you’re in business for the right reasons.”
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This is the advice Brad Davis would give to anyone looking to start a small business like his, which won a Yass Valley Business Award for Excellence in Small Business earlier this year.
The Yass Valley Tyre Service, which opened nearly three years ago, has taken a lot of work to become recognised as a trustworthy service provider in the community.
Mr Davis, who previously managed Beaurepaires, assigned a large part of his success to being in small business for “the right reasons.”
“Going into a small business isn’t just something you can walk into and six months later if it fails you can walk out,” he said.
“You’re in it for the [long] haul.”
The business was started three years ago, as what Mr Davis described as a local solution to the closure of Beaurepaires.
He was painfully aware that, after the closure of a chain-brand company branch, any local business that followed would need to raise its standards in order to reassure its customers that they could match or improve on the old service.
“So we sort of worked pretty hard on presentation and appearance, our service and trying to get people back,” Mr Davis said.
“Probably the first 18 months was hard, [that] was the hardest bit.
“And then from that two-year mark … we started to gain a bit of momentum, people started to understand what we were about.
“Just being a part of the community has helped us a long way.”
One specific part of the community which has helped Yass Valley Tyre to prominence was the Business Chamber, which Mr Davis could not thank enough.
“Getting involved with the Business Chamber and getting to know more people around and just networking and putting yourself out there has definitely helped us a long way,” he said.
But many other entrants in the Business Awards were also a part of the Business Chamber, so Mr Davis described the crux of the business’s success.
“If we didn’t have that mindset that we wanted to broaden our horizons a bit, we probably would have been stuck in the rut of just doing the day to day thing,” Mr Davis said.
“Thinking outside the square I guess [is the key].”
Mr Davis will travel to Sydney this Friday, where he will represent the business in the NSW Business Chamber Awards.
The state award nomination comes as a result of Yass Valley Tyre’s win in the local and regional categories.
