When you are running a business, you will constantly have to worry about your bottom line. You want to make as much profit as possible and accrue as few costs as you can. With that in mind, here are some ways that you can save your business money.
Always negotiate
Whenever you get the opportunity, you should negotiate. Even if it only means that you make a minor saving, you are still making a saving. A small amount across a lot of costs can add up to a large amount saved for your business.There are plenty of things that your business buys that you can negotiate about. There are also some other things that you simply cannot.
For example, you might be able to negotiate the rent for your offices.This might save you a little bit extra each month. Whereas, you likely will not be able to negotiate with the utility company around how much your gas and electric are costing. You need to learn to pick your battles.
You also do not want to negotiate too hard. The aim is to save a small amount of money, not to alienate one of your suppliers or someone who is important to your business. When you are negotiating, make sure that you are doing so with some kind of grounding and evidence. You will likely fail to get the price drop you are after if you go in just asking to pay less.
Instead, give a reason why they should charge you less. Perhaps you will use them as your sole supplier. Maybe you have found that your offices have a leak and your landlord hasn’t fixed it in months. You need to make sure that you are on solid ground when negotiating.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is another excellent way to save your company some money. You do not need to do everything for your business in-house. It can, in fact, but much cheaper and more effective to outsource certain business areas and tasks. For example, you might want to outsource your marketing department to a company like Berbay Marketing & PR. This way, you have professionals in their field pushing the best possible strategies.
You pay a single cost, instead of having to hire an entire team. You get the benefit of having a team, without the cost. Another thing that you might want to outsource are the smaller one-off jobs. Instead, of having an employee who takes this one, you can hire a freelancer to complete it for you.
They know what they are doing and will only complete this single job before moving on to their next job. You can find freelancers on websites like Fivver and Freelancer who can do anything from content writing to graphic design. Outsourcing could save your business a lot of money each year.
Go digital
Another great way to save your company some money is to go digital. This means getting rid of anything physical in your office. Instead of printing things out and using paper, you can use tablets and computers. You can also become greener through doing this, so it is doubly good to do.
However, you will be able to save yourself money on costly equipment like printers and photocopiers. If you go digital, then you will not need to buy or lease any of these. Instead, you can either take that saving, or you can reinvest in better digital equipment.
Take advantage of economies of scale
Economies of scale are the savings that you can make through buying large quantities of things. Plenty of supplies will offer individual items cheaper the more you buy. This can mean that it is far better to stock up and store things for later, then buy fewer items more often.
Economies of scale can be applied to plenty of different situations, and it can make your company massive savings. However, you need to be careful. If you are buying large quantities of stock or other things, you need to make sure that you are actually going to use or sell them. If they are going to spoil, then you need to make sure that you can use them by that time limit.
You also want to make sure that you can afford the initial payment that allows you to take advantage of economies of scale. If you can, then you will find that at the end of the year, your company will have reduced its costs and this will, in turn, mean that your company has made larger profits.
Switch to free alternatives
There are plenty of free alternatives to paid products. Many of these are in the form of software. You have the option to forgo using expensive software and instead rely on ones that are free. Instead of using things like Microsoft Office, you can use OpenOffice or even things like Google Doc. Unless you strictly need all of the extra things that Microsoft Office offers, then you can easily get away with a simpler word processing program.
There are other examples, too. If you are finding that you don’t need to pay for Twitter promotions, you can simply not use them. If sending out tweets and communicating with your followers is producing the same or better results than your paid promotions, then you can afford to not pay for it. If you find that you are paying for software that you rarely use, then the chances are that there a free alternative that does something very similar that you can use instead.
If you desperately need to use that specific software in the future, then you can always buy the license again. For example, you might be able to get away with using Microsoft Paint or GIMP when it comes to image editing. This can mean that you do not need to purchase Photoshop each year.
It is a good idea to reassess each year and take a look at all things that you are buying and ask yourself if you can find a free alternative. If the answer is yes, then you could save your company a lot of money.