Are you trying to find a chance to take your business to the next level? Growth is not all the time easy to come by, particularly in a climate where consumer confidence is at its lowest point in years. Growth isn’t just about getting more customers and selling more products. It’s also about removing dead weights and cutting the extreme, wasteful, or unnecessary expenses related to running your business.
Of course you cannot grow your business without investing in it, and it is an economic fallacy to cut your way to growth. However, there are various ways in which you can make your business a little leaner and less expensive, allowing you to make the mandatory capital investments to grow your business in a sustainable manner. The problem is that too often we do not identify our overspending until we have… spent it. By then, obviously, it was generally too late.
Here are a few ways in which you can be a little more productive with regards to cutting business costs…
Invest in a Business Intelligence Platform
The very first thing you need to do is identify business costs as quickly as possible. And depending on your business structure, this may be easier said than done. Many legacy business structures depend on departments operating in their own quasi-autonomous silos.
Business Intelligence providing you with greater visibility of your business data in centralized storage, including departmental expenses.
Cut invisible expenses as a precedence
Some expenses are visible not only to your employees but also to your clients. Indeed, they can even add to your brand appeal, showing that you are ready to invest in being the best you can be. On the other hand, there are some unseen expenses and these should be your number one precedence. They may not necessarily make your operations more efficient or contribute to your added value. They’re there because someone, someplace, is guilty of wrongdoing. For example, an unused SaaS subscription is an invisible public expense, such as your own personal travel expenses.
Cutting your own salary may be less than desirable, but it can be a viable short-term strategy if you are thinking about growth.
Invest in keeping your employees safe (no matter where they’re)
Safe employees are happy employees. And ensuring they’re maintained can save you tons of costs related to high employee turnover. These range from the costs of finding, training, and placing replacement employees to the inevitable loss of productivity experienced when a new team member is on the rise.
Of course, this does not just mean taking care of your employees while they’re on site. It also means investing in an advanced GPS solution if you have team members on the road. These often include driver and dashboard cameras, helping you increase driver accountability and reduce the price of truck accidents when a third party is to blame. A safe and happy workforce is, obviously, its own reward.
Always haggle
Finally, your vendors are normally willing to sacrifice some of their margins in order to retain valuable customers like you longer. So you should all the time haggle with your vendors to arrange better rates and potentially increase your cash flow. Don’t worry, they will not be offended.
