When Storm Menzies started building her own business in Newcastle, Australia, she thought designing the product would be the difficult part.
It turned out that was the enjoyable part.
Storm is the founder of ByStorm Beauty, a small business creating adaptive attachments that make everyday cosmetics easier to hold, open and control.
The idea came from a remarkably ordinary moment.
Storm has cerebral palsy affecting her right side. After breaking her left hand, something as familiar as opening mascara suddenly became difficult. She started looking for accessible alternatives and discovered something bigger than her own temporary problem: mainstream beauty products were simply not designed with many people with disabilities in mind.
Instead of designing an entirely separate category of cosmetics, she listened to people with disabilities.
What she heard changed the idea.
People did not necessarily want special makeup. They wanted to use the same products everybody else was using, but in a way that worked for their bodies.
Storm eventually developed adaptive grips that attach to existing beauty products. More than 100 iterations were tested while she worked towards designs that could accommodate the many cylindrical products already on the market.
It is the kind of entrepreneurial story we tend to celebrate.
Someone encounters a problem.
They recognise that other people experience it too.
They create something useful.
But an ABC News report this month revealed another part of Storm’s story that receives considerably less attention.
Creating the product was not the hardest part
When ABC business reporter Adelaide Miller spoke with Storm, she explained that she had started the business without previous business experience.
Suddenly there was finance, cash flow and all the machinery sitting behind the creative idea.
Storm told ABC:
“All the financial stuff and the actual running of the business, I had no experience doing that.”
She ended up turning to YouTube to teach herself.
And she is hardly alone.
The ABC report cited Xero research suggesting more than one third of Australian small business owners do not know whether they made a profit in the previous month. A new taskforce involving representatives from small business, finance, education and politics has now been established to investigate how entrepreneurs can be better equipped with financial skills.
That makes Storm’s story interesting for reasons extending well beyond beauty.
Because there is a strange assumption surrounding small business:
If you are good at the thing, you will somehow know how to build the business around the thing.
But those are two entirely different skills.
A brilliant baker does not automatically understand Google.
A talented massage therapist does not necessarily understand online booking.
A plumber may know exactly how to solve a complicated problem inside somebody’s house and have absolutely no interest in learning how a website should guide a customer towards requesting a quote.
And someone capable of designing an innovative beauty product can still find herself on YouTube trying to understand the financial side of running the company.
Do small businesses really need to do everything themselves?
This is where Storm’s experience raises a question that reaches far beyond accounting.
How much should a small business owner actually be expected to learn?
Search for advice on starting a beauty business today and the list becomes enormous.
Choose your niche. Develop the product. Register the business. Understand compliance. Work out your margins. Develop branding. Create a marketing strategy. Build a website. Produce content. Manage ecommerce. Find customers.
A recently updated Australian guide to starting a beauty business covers precisely this mixture of commercial decisions, while Shopify’s 2026 guidance includes building a website as one of the core steps between developing a brand identity and creating a marketing plan.
Technically, an entrepreneur can learn all of these things.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they should.
What should a small beauty business website actually do?
For a product such as Storm’s, the website has a particularly important job.
It cannot simply look attractive.
Someone arriving there needs to understand very quickly what the product does, who it helps and how it works.
Accessibility becomes part of the website’s function too.
If a company exists specifically because conventional products exclude some customers, its digital experience should ideally reflect the same philosophy.
That means readable typography, understandable navigation, good contrast, sensible mobile behaviour, useful product descriptions and a purchasing process that doesn’t introduce unnecessary obstacles.
But the same principle applies to businesses without an accessibility focus.
A website should remove work from the owner rather than create more of it.
A salon website can answer questions before someone phones.
A trades website can help a prospective customer decide whether the company handles their particular job.
A consultant’s website can explain a service before the first conversation.
An online shop can make purchasing possible while its owner is doing something else entirely.
That is the part of web design that often gets lost when the conversation becomes obsessed with colours, fonts and homepages.
A small business website is infrastructure.
Your expertise should remain yours
There is something reassuring about Storm Menzies admitting that she had to learn parts of business as she went.
Entrepreneurship is frequently presented backwards.
We see the finished logo, the polished Instagram account and the product sitting beautifully inside its packaging.
We don’t see somebody typing a basic financial question into YouTube late at night because nobody ever taught them the answer.
Perhaps running a small business should not require becoming an amateur accountant, designer, photographer, copywriter, SEO specialist, web developer, marketer and IT department simultaneously.
You need to understand your business.
You do not need to personally master every system required to operate it.
That distinction matters.
At Quiet Star Studio, that is how I approach website design for small businesses. The aim is not to hand someone another complicated piece of technology they now need to learn.
It is to take one part of running a business off their shoulders and create a website that clearly explains what they do, helps customers find what they need and supports the business behind the scenes.
Because the thing you started your business to do should probably still get most of your attention.
And, as Storm discovered, there is already plenty else to learn.