John Bellamy

Australia 2026. Does it still make sense to live and run a business there?

There’s a lot of noise in Australia right now, and a lot of people asking questions they probably should have been asking for a while.

For us, the decision was made before the budget. Bec and I decided in late 2025 that we wanted to exit Australia and set up somewhere else.

We could see the writing on the wall. With quality of life slipping and more taxes and red tape making it harder to run a profitable business and get ahead.

I’m in Penang, Malaysia now (Bec’s on the way). This is our home base and where we plan to be for the foreseeable future.

For me specifically, Malaysia is also where my company is based and where my tax residency sits.

The question we kept coming back to wasn’t about politics. It was simpler than that. I’m 47 this year.

We looked 20 years out and asked: where do we want to be, what does cash flow look like at retirement age, and what structure gives us the best chance of getting there?

Malaysia answered that for now. We’re also looking at other residency options across Asia and South America as we think longer term.

If you’re asking the same questions right now, the suggestion is straightforward.

Do the math.

Work out what’s right for you and your family specifically. Not what’s right for someone else’s situation.

Have questions or want some help? DM me. I’m happy to help and make connections.

Embrace the baits that propel you towards your goals.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. 😂

Business can be tough.

This week I spoke with a lot of business owners. Some were having their best weeks in months. Leads coming in, conversions happening, team wins, bonuses paid.

Others were dealing with staff resignations, failed recruitment, a $10,000 technology failure, and one had been to multiple funerals.

That’s the reality of running a business. No two days are the same. No two weeks are the same. And most of the time, nobody talks about the harder side of it.

If you run a business, you already know this. You either make peace with the fact that this is part of the journey, or eventually the journey makes the decision for you.

This one is just a reminder that whatever you are dealing with this week, you are not alone in it.

Your inbox is not a workflow.
It’s a message delivery tool.

When leads, quotes, and follow-up all live inside email threads, visibility disappears.

You scroll instead of seeing. You remember instead of tracking. You react instead of planning.

That works while volume is low.

As soon as growth increases, it becomes fragile.

Clear businesses separate communication from control.

The Chat To Clients Growth Engine exists to help capable service business owners build a Client Flow System where opportunities are visible in one place, instead of buried inside inboxes.

If you want to see whether your inbox is quietly running your business, the next step is to watch this short video. From there, you can book a call if it makes sense.

https://lp.chattoclients.io/growth-engine

Every week, this business was running 90-minute onboarding calls with every new client. Ten of them. That’s 15 hours locked into a process that never changed.

We looked at what was actually happening in those calls and found that 75 minutes of every session was identical, the same process, the same information, delivered the same way to every single client.

So we pulled the recordings, stripped out the repeatable content, used AI to map the structure, and rebuilt it as a short micro-course inside their members area. Short videos, each covering one topic, ready to go the moment a new client comes on board.

Now the one-on-one time is reserved for what actually needs a human: reviewing individual results, answering specific questions. Everything else runs without them.

That’s the kind of efficiency that compounds. Less time on repetition. More time on the work that moves the business forward.

Wants some help? 👉 https://chattoclients.io