8 Ways to Cut the Costs of Your Small Business to Increase Profits

The rules of business and life are very simple, if you want to survive you have to earn more than you spend. It is obvious that the best way to keep this delicate balance in check is to simply earn more. The amount of money your businesses make is never entirely under your control. When difficult times arise, the only thing you can do is to manage the things that are of your making. Here are a couple of painless ways to cut the costs and keep your establishment viable.

Rethink Your Marketing Strategy

Burning money to buy expensive TV slots may be the most obvious way to promote your business, but it’s hardly the most efficient one. Instead, you should look for more money-conscious solutions like SEO, blogging, and guerilla marketing. Also, you will do yourself a great favor if you put more thought into customer engagement and retention (e.g. gamification) and ask affiliated businesses to split the marketing costs.

Don’t Buy In Bulk

Small businesses make the mistake of buying supplies in huge bulks in the hope of getting a discount from the vendors. The only problem is that, more often than not, small businesses don’t need huge bulks. If you want to come to terms with your vendors try to get the discount by offering to pay the supplies in advance, giving your products or services instead of rates, or by negotiating more favorable repayment terms.

Outsource

Developing all the departments that are necessary to keep your business going tends to be a quite long, exhausting, and expensive process. The best way to temporarily put this fire out is to outsource anything that brings your business to a halt until you acquire enough funds to develop the infrastructure in-house. The usual suspects are human resourcing, bookkeeping, customer service and IT department.

Take Advantage of Telecommuting

By offering your employees to work from home, you can save a lot of money on office rent and equipment. Besides, according to a study done by Staples Advantages, 76% of workers who were allowed to work from their homes felt more loyal to their company, while 80% of them said they achieved a much better work-life balance. This is obviously a win-win situation.

Send Printers on Vacation

Speaking of office equipment, have you ever considered just how much printed documents bite out of your annual budget? Paper, printers, cartridges, folders, document cabinets… When they pile up, all these costs tend to be very intimidating. The best way to address this issue is to go full-digital and store whatever you can on the hard drive. If you need to quickly pass documents, just use the cloud.

Rent Instead of Buying

There are some pieces of heavy equipment, like example an elevated work platform or forklifts, which are used on a daily basis. Buying such equipment makes a good long-term investment. There are things like mixers and cranes that are used very rarely and with a very specific purpose in mind. When the need for such equipment occurs, it is much better to simply rent it.

Open The Gates to Interns

You need affordable interns to cut your costs. If you open your gates to them, both parties can benefit from this situation. The only problem with interns is that they need time to adjust to business software and office environment. If they do simple footwork, they relieve a significant burden off the shoulders of your more valuable employees.

Don’t Travel Unless You Have To

That’s what Skype was made for. If you cut the business travels and unnecessary commuting to the bare minimum, you can save a lot of money. That can be used elsewhere. The same goes for simple errands. Your business vehicles will be best used when parked outside the office.

These were eight simple ways to cut the costs of your business. Some of them may be less pleasant than others but if everything goes well, these will be temporary solutions. It is advised to research the causes that forced you to tighten the belt and do your best to improve productivity in the process.