Norris wants Black Hops Brewing to be one of the early businesses listed on equity crowd-funding platform Birchal, which launched in Melbourne on Tuesday night. Alan Crabbe is the founder of Pozible and Birchal. The platform is being spun out of Australian rewards-based crowd-funding platform Pozible and is founded by Pozible co-founder and chief executive Alan Crabbe and former Ashurst lawyer Matt Vitale. Birchal will be applying to the Australian Securities and Investment Commission for a newly created "crowd-funding service" licence. From September 29 ​ASIC will be able to grant these licences enabling unlisted public companies with annual turnover and gross assets of up to $25 million will be able to issue shares to the public.

This will enable retail or so-called "mum and dad" investors to take equity in small businesses and Birchal aims to provide a platform for this. ​​Crabbe and his team have spent over a year, under $500,000 plus "a lot of sweat equity", building the platform which will be open for early access from Wednesday and should have the first company profiles available within a month. Building a loyal customer base Crabbe says there are two major benefits for businesses undertaking equity crowd funding. "Firstly you are building a very loyal customer base and secondly if you look at these consumer brands that are very successful they are able to build a community of ambassadors and that creates word of mouth and for every consumer brand that is very valuable."

Crabbe says there is a big opportunity for consumer brands and consumer businesses in Australia to leverage global trends. We have people coming to the bar and asking about it, they come in and want to invest but they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars so this sounds perfect. Dan Norris "We are seeing consumer brands are growing as fast, if not faster than technology companies globally," he says. "I think this is a space that tends to get overlooked and tech companies even like ourselves tend to get the spotlight." Crabbe points to brewer BrewDog in the UK which was an early adopter of the equity crowd-funding model and was recently valued at over £1 billion. For investors, Crabbe says the attraction is getting in early.

"They get access to early stage businesses as generally retail investors don't get access to these companies until they are at IPO stage." How it will work Crabbe says interested businesses can register on Birchal and set up a company profile with basic details of what the business does and the product and services it offers. Companies can create an online pitch for equity or reward-based funding. "When the legislation comes into effect on 29 September these companies will be able to run a campaign to either get expressions of interest to raise funds or raise a round of investment," he says. Birchal will take a 5.75 per cent success fee on successful raises and hopes to enable investors to invest as little as $100.

"With every raise there will be a minimum you have to raise and also a time frame in the same way Pozible operates with an all-or-nothing model," Crabbe says. Crabbe predicts within three years equity crowd funding will attract $100 million a year. But he acknowledges it's not all upside. "Of course these businesses are typically high risk, they are usually fast-growing scale operations and generally the founders may have less experience than some of the bigger companies," he says. "There is potentially a higher risk for investors." Risk for businesses

Norris has just closed a funding round of $400,000 to expand Black Hops Brewing and says equity crowd funding would have provided a great source for this money if it was available. Black Hops Brewing is three years old with five full-time staff and turnover of around $1 million a year. "We have people coming to the bar and asking about it, they come in and want to invest but they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars so this sounds perfect," says Norris. "We are at capacity at the moment, all the tanks are full and we have to expand to keep growing. I think it's a model that's going to be really interesting in Australia." Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.