Six brilliant cost-cutting hacks for small businesses
Looking for clever ways to make your business more profitable? Here are are six brilliant cost-cutting hacks for small businesses.
The financial objective of any business is to make as much money as possible, while minimizing its expenses. Unfortunately, many business owners and administrators get overly engrossed in the sales front and forget they have expenses to keep tabs on.
A good business owner should pay as much attention to cash outflow as they do with inflow. This way, the company will make the most out of its efforts and ensure its headway isn’t slowed by invisible expenses. Read on for six ways to minimize business costs without impacting your workforce’s efficiency or compromising your business objectives.
1) Reduce your internet bill
When it comes to monthly expenses, one that always seems to be at the top of the list for most small businesses is the internet bill. Decades into the digital era, there is simply no circumventing that you ought to have an internet connection to compete favorably. However, that’s not to say you have to part with a fortune every month just to keep your business’s network running.
There are numerous techniques you can adopt to trim your internet bill, including buying your own modem router, reducing your broadband speed, and bundling your services. You can visit review sites to check out routers and broadband providers for a more guided decision. Side-by-side comparisons are ideal if you want to find the cheapest and most suitable solution for your business.
2) Adopt helpful technologies
Technology is here to simplify work, and staying abreast of the trends can reduce your business costs and put you head and shoulders above your rivals. Consider installing customer relationship management (CRM) software, management software and using free digital tools such as Trello, Basecamp, and Google Docs to organize your company documents.
Any software or digital tools that you opt to use should be both flexible and scalable, as well as easy to integrate with any other systems and tools that your business already relies on. For example, if you opt to invest in payroll or expenses software for Management staff card payments, this should work in tandem with your employee tracking software and should also operate smoothly on months when you have both a large number of ingoings and outgoings, as well as months where business is a little slower.
For conferences and business meetings, consider installing tools such as Skype and Zoom to avoid costly and time-consuming in-person meetings.
3) Switch to digital marketing
Many businesses are still reliant on conventional marketing techniques, which are not only ineffective but also costly. Digital marketing approaches save you on labor costs as you only need a small team of personnel to formulate and run the campaigns.
As marketing is a continuous factor in the contemporary corporate world, it is best to assemble an in-house team rather than hire an independent marketing agency. This will reduce your costs in the long run and ensure your marketing campaigns are run by people who know your business and have its best interests at heart.
4) Create a budget
Budgeting is one of the simplest and most effective ways of cutting back on personal and business expenses. A budget gives you a picture of the amount of money coming in over a specified period of time, helping you decide how much you can allocate to costs without compromising your profit objectives. A good budgeting approach focuses on avoiding simple mistakes that can add up to set the business back a fortune.
5) Adopt a BOYD policy
IT infrastructure can be expensive to obtain and install for a business that is still in its infancy. Many businesses have gone around this problem by adopting a strategy where employees can use their own laptops and phones for work.
To try it, all you need to do is ensure that everyone is happy and comfortable with the policy and you have a robust cybersecurity strategy to curb data breaches. Studies show that most employees actually prefer using their personal devices for work, meaning it shouldn’t be hard getting your workforce to accept and ease into a BYOD (bring your own device) policy.
6) Outsource nonessential services
For functions such as payroll management that you need once in a while or on an ad-hoc basis, having an in-house department may not be the wisest idea from a cost standpoint. Full-time employees require a monthly wage, whether they work or not, as well as insurance and other rights that anyone who falls under the definition of “employee” is entitled to.
Independent contractors, on the other hand, work on a per-time basis and send invoices for payment rather than work for a predetermined salary. Perhaps the best part about hiring independent contractors is that you can change them anytime you want.
How can you save money in your business?
Keeping business costs low should start with identifying unnecessary outflow channels and formulating ways to patch them up without affecting the normal running of your business. The above tips provide an excellent place to start if you are looking to do away with the most obvious unnecessary expenses first.
Photo by Clayton Cardinalli
