Storm Menzies started her business expecting product design to be the difficult part.
It turned out that making the product was the enjoyable part.
The Newcastle entrepreneur founded ByStorm Beauty, a business developing accessibility focused attachments for cosmetics. Her products are designed to make everyday beauty products easier to use for people who experience difficulties with grip, fine motor control or upper limb movement.
By August 2026, her story had become part of a much bigger Australian conversation.
ABC News reported that Storm had been learning much of the financial side of running her business through YouTube because, like many founders, she entered business with knowledge of her product but little formal preparation for managing business finances.
Her comment to the ABC was revealing: the financial side involved “a lot of trial and error”.
She is far from alone.
New Xero research published on 13 August found that 35 per cent of Australian small business owners do not often know whether they made a profit in the previous month. The study surveyed 750 small business decision makers and 500 accountants and bookkeepers.
That creates a surprisingly important question for anyone selling products or services.
Sales are not the same thing as profit
There is something psychologically satisfying about an order notification.
A customer buys.
Money arrives.
The business appears to be working.
But revenue alone cannot tell you whether the business is healthy.
A product business can be busy and still lose money once packaging, payment processing, postage, advertising, software, returns, stock, tax and the founder’s own time are considered.
The same applies to service businesses.
A fully booked appointment calendar may look successful until the owner calculates the real cost of delivering those appointments.
This is why one of the simplest questions an owner can ask each month is also one of the most useful:
What did it actually cost me to generate the money that came in?
Start there before reaching for complicated financial terminology.
Look at money received.
Then look at direct costs.
Then recurring business expenses.
Then tax obligations.
Then what is left for the owner.
That final number can tell a very different story from the sales total at the top of the page.
Your website can help make those numbers easier to understand
A website cannot fix financial literacy.
What it can do is make the customer journey easier to measure.
Imagine that somebody discovers your product on Instagram, visits your website, reads about it and purchases directly.
That journey creates useful information.
You can begin seeing which products sell, which pages generate interest, where customers abandon a purchase and which promotions actually produce revenue.
The alternative is often a scattered business where orders arrive through Instagram messages, email, markets, text messages and manual invoices.
That may work in the beginning.
As a business grows, however, fragmentation makes it harder to understand what is really generating money.
For a product based business like ByStorm Beauty, the lesson is not that every entrepreneur needs an enormous ecommerce operation.
It is that the systems underneath the business should become clearer as the business becomes more successful.
Know what each sale is doing for you
Suppose one product sells for $40.
That $40 is not automatically $40 of useful business income.
Ask:
What did the product cost to make?
What did its packaging cost?
Was shipping included?
What percentage disappeared into payment processing?
Did advertising contribute to the sale?
Was there significant time involved in preparing or supporting the order?
Once those questions become routine, pricing decisions become less emotional.
You can also use your website more intentionally.
Products with healthy margins can receive more visibility.
Frequently asked questions can reduce repetitive customer service.
Clear shipping information can reduce hesitation before checkout.
Bundles can increase order value where they genuinely make sense.
Repeat purchases can be made simpler.
Quiet Star Studio designs both business websites and online stores around that wider customer journey, rather than treating a website as a decorative page that sits separately from the business.
The goal is not more technology for the sake of it.
It is a business that becomes easier to understand.
Storm Menzies’ story is particularly useful because it exposes something founders rarely say loudly enough.
Being capable of creating something valuable does not automatically teach you how to read a profit and loss statement.
Those are different skills.
And both can be learned.
A useful place to begin
At the end of each month, give yourself one simple page.
Revenue.
Direct costs.
Operating expenses.
Tax provision.
Owner pay.
Estimated remaining profit.
Then ask what changed from the previous month.
You do not need to become an accountant.
But you should be able to explain, in plain language, how your business made its money.
That knowledge makes decisions about pricing, marketing, ecommerce, stock and growth considerably easier.
And if the systems customers use to buy from you are making that picture unnecessarily complicated, that may be a sign that the digital side of the business is ready to mature too.
Quiet Star Studio can help create a clearer website or online store structure around how your business actually sells.
Can you explain last month’s profit?
This quick check does not calculate accounting profit. It shows whether the basic numbers needed to understand it are currently visible to you.