“The most challenging thing was having the guts to do it when you’re asking ‘am I doing the right thing? Is it the right time?’ especially when I signed the contract for the lease.

“But people needed a new place to go, needed a new adventure and I think they were happy with the positive environment here, we never complained, we were always very positive.”

In Sydney, start-up owner Laura Mehanna also had her share of anxious moments after she and her husband launched Sand Society, their brand of environmentally friendly, sand-free towels just before COVID-19 struck.

But instead of shutting down the fledgling enterprise, the pandemic conditions helped propel Sand Society from a side hustle to a growing business with expansion plans for new products and markets.

“The more energy you put into something, the better it will be, and during the pandemic, I had so much more time on my hands,” Ms Mehanna said.

“My husband and I both had reduced work hours and we were stuck at home and so, you know, we really used this time to just double down on growing the business and the brand.”

Not that it was easy.

“With COVID, we had supply chain issues, lead times were just out of control, shipping was out of control. We’ve got stung quite badly – a lot of ecommerce businesses did – in 2020 and paid tens of thousands of dollars more than we would have on logistical issues.

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“But we promised ourselves that we would just keep on pushing through, knowing that, you know, hopefully it wouldn’t last forever.”

NAB small business executive Ana Marinkovic said on Thursday that the latest numbers from the bureau reflected the mood among the new or growing enterprises on the bank’s books as well as the research from its economics team.

“The pandemic has delivered a whole lot of new opportunities,” Ms Marinkovic said. “We’ve seen this extraordinary rise in e-commerce and people thinking about products and services that are conducive to this new way of living.

“Those people who have been super-entrepreneurial who have looked at trends overseas and have had the courage to start a small business, they would be the ones that are among that 88,000 figure we see today and I think that’s very encouraging.”

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