When running a business, you can boost your profits in two ways: increasing your revenue and reducing your outgoings. The first of those can, frankly, be the much more difficult – as it could necessitate boosting sales, which you might not be able to pull off without being very careful and clever with your planning and strategy.
Trimming expenses, however, is typically much easier – provided that you are patient. It often involves simply identifying, and then halting, outgoings that you realise aren’t actually necessary. Here are 8 clever methods of putting this approach in action.
Move your workplace to somewhere more affordable
Given how many business operations around the world now take place over the Internet, you might decide that you didn’t need to be so fussy about the location of your corporate premises after all. Entrepreneur notes the common situation that, particularly in larger cities, commercial rent can be less expensive the further from activity the building is.
Of course, your business might remain heavily reliant on walk-in customers – in which case, you might still want to continue paying through the nose for that city centre location. However, if your customers are not walk-in or even local, you should have more flexibility regarding location.
Use spare office space for subleasing or co-working
Maybe it’s not strictly your office’s location, but instead its size, that seems peculiar at the moment. Why continue renting a particular space if a third of it often seems untouched by any of your workers? One good reason to keep renting this space is that the unused portion could be subleased or made into an area where people can co-work.
Doing this could enable you to share your lease’s cost, while new business opportunities could arise from co-working. However, before going ahead, check the lease or contact the landlord to see if subleasing or co-working is even possible with this space.
Reduce the distances that you drive
Reducing the average new car’s mileage from 15,000 to 10,000 yearly miles will save over a tonne of carbon dioxide, says The Guardian. This saving is 15% of the average person’s yearly carbon dioxide output. To significantly lower how far you drive, you could move home to much nearer your workplace; perhaps even close enough to be able to do away with the car altogether.
Be careful how you source your car insurance
You might eagerly resist being too fussy about how you obtain that car insurance. This could be due to a fear that your search for the insurance would otherwise drain too much time that you could instead spend on other aspects of your business.
However, finding not merely an insurance policy, but a cost-effective one, can take surprisingly little time when you know what kind of approach to take. UK-based? Then get in touch with the insurance broker Call Wiser, which can take only 10 minutes to find an attractive policy for you.
Replace energy-hungry halogen lights with LEDs
It could surprise you how cheap LEDs have become in recent years. However, these light-emitting diodes remain effective for illumination purposes; furthermore, they are more energy-efficient than halogen lights, which might currently be installed in abundance at your business premises.
It’s not just with your energy bills that LEDs could bring appreciable reductions in your running costs. An LED can last at least a decade before it needs to be replaced; by contrast, needing to replace a halogen light every few months is not unheard-of.
Make more of your operations paperless
If your work desk is often cluttered with an array of paper documents, keep in mind that using digital documents in their place can help strip out such disorganisation. Lifehack cites various ways that your company can go paperless. It could, for example, sign contracts electronically and store vital documents in the cloud. Cloud storage services that we have greatly benefitted from using for corporate purposes include Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, and we also found this solid document software for scanning physical copies and organizing them.
A paperless routine could even enable you to downgrade to an alternative office that is smaller and, therefore, cheaper. That would, in itself, save you further money.
Recruit versatile employees
By picking up employees who each have multiple strengths, you can do more with less. To this end, you could opt to employ someone capable of both writing press releases and tinkering with aspects of your computer when it has become affected by an unforeseen technical glitch. Being able to draw upon various skills while paying only one salary for all of them is a major financial win.
Turn clients into brand ambassadors
Advertising can be a notoriously risky and unreliable endeavour; there is the constant possibility that you pour huge amounts of your budget into a TV or print campaign only to attract few new customers. However, by getting the word out while spending little money in the process, you can shrink the financial risk of advertising.
You could, for instance, set up a “refer a friend” scheme, whereby you offer discounts or free services to customers who refer new people to you. Alternatively, you could recruit brand ambassadors who will talk up your company via a range of public channels.
While there will be certain costs that your business almost definitely has to keep paying, you could be pleasantly surprised by the extent to which many of your operating expenses can be reduced or completely removed. This can help financially cushion your business, too.
