How to Streamline Your Business Costs

Running a business can be a complicated task. Each new asset that you bring into your business has the potential to cause just as many headaches as it alleviates. If you’re not careful, a business’ infrastructure can become amazingly complex, which can make it difficult to manage, and even lead to losses. 

Because of this, there is a great amount of truth to the fact that sometimes simpler is better. Streamlining your business and simplifying its processes can generate more revenue, while eliminating the many of the stresses that come with owning a growing business...

Digitize your operations

There are so many digital tools to help business owners that it would be impossible to list them all in this article. 

To keep it short, being able to move as much of your operation onto a digital format will help you streamline your process, and enable you to get rid of physical property that is becoming dead weight to your office’s operations. 

Although the initial jump might be difficult, taking steps to digitize any aspect of your business operations will pay off in the long term, and can help set you up for future growth. 

In particular, check out this article about how cloud-based enterprise resource programming systems have enabled businesses to benefit from widespread inventory personnel management without needing to house their own servers (thus saving server and IT costs).

Understand that employees can represent your business

Marketing and advertising are both crucial aspects to running a business that many people don’t want to deal with. 

Because of this, many companies find themselves spending more to build their customer base than they actually have to. However, if you’re looking to improve your business’ image in the world, without adding significantly to your advertising budget, then don’t forget one of the most useful assets of your business: your employees. 

Understand that each of your employees is representing your business in some way or another, so why not follow this through to its logical conclusion and have them literally represent your brand by wearing it. 

Gifting branded swag to your employees makes them feel appreciated, while also allowing them to represent you when they are not at work (read more about how branding your employees can be a valuable tool.)

Improve employee engagement

As we stated above, employees are the most valuable asset that a business can have. However, failing to utilize your employees in an innovative way will ensure higher turnover rates, while also preventing your employees from reaching their true potential. 

Working to increase the levels of employee engagement in your business means that employees will take more personal ownership for the work that they do, and will often come up with creative solutions to problems that you might not have even realized were slowing your business down. 

Improving employee engagement, whether through bonuses, raises, or business culture, can help your personnel gain a better degree of independence that can remove headaches that you, the owner, have to deal with.

Let the internet find customers for you

Keeping a consistent consumer base is a crucial aspect of doing business, and also one of the most challenging prospects for a company. However, using the tools that are afforded by the modern world can make this process a lot easier. 

Using social media platforms and optimizing your business for modern search engines opens up your business to a wider range of customers than you could hope to reach without digitization. 

Properly utilizing the internet to bring in consumers can take a great deal of stress off of your sales team, and can streamline your sales pipeline.

Fewer, but more meaningful, meetings

Although meetings can be a great way to make everyone feel involved with what is going on in the business, too many operational meetings can slow everything down and make it feel like there is little progress being made. 

Cutting down on the number of meetings in your business will give people more time to make progress on their actual work. On top of that, focusing on making each individual meeting more impactful, rather than trying to have more meetings, will yield more efficient results.

How to Successfully Cut Your Business Costs

Business organizations can make approx. 20% savings by focusing on the reduction of operating expenses that are not related to the ‘core’ business. The key points when it comes to the cost reduction are the following:

- Reducing the number of employees should be the last resort for business organizations

- Everyone in the company should be cost-conscious

- Ensure that your suppliers are aware of the amount of money you are willing to spend and closely associated with your initiative to reduce costs

With this kind of thinking and planning, efficient cost cut can be achieved by controlling different aspects of business that are easily accepted by both employees and company’s clientele.

Reduce costs with flexible employment strategy

In the case of adapting working hours to the available volume of work, regular overtime in a given period of the week, introducing young people to the job, preparing for retirement, combining of professional and family life, working part-time can be of mutual benefit to employers and workers. 

Thus, the contract may only be concluded for the time required by the employer's needs - from 1 to 39 hours per week. Working hours can be deployed in a way that the worker only works one day a week, which certainly contributes to cost reduction.

Reduction of working time, whether it’s on weekly basis or due to distribution of work so that there are some ‘no-work’ periods, with a corresponding reduction in pay, or voluntary switching to part-time jobs, reduce costs and retain existing jobs. 

There should be mutual benefits for both employers and employees – employee still earns more even with reduced pay than when unemployed, and still has pension insurance; the employer doesn’t have to spend money on severance payments, and in the case of two employees sharing one job, the completed work is more effective than the work of one employee working full hours, with secured replacement in case of absence of one of them.

Lower hidden IT costs

Many organizations have hidden IT costs. Over the years, these hidden costs can increase, particularly where IT is not able to respond to business needs. These costs often represent mini-projects, non-standard software, hardware or tools used in business. 

Users often establish emotional connection with the solutions that they've created. Hidden IT costs are often in places where it is not easy to predict IT budget. Although it is not exactly easy, IT must identify, analyze and reduce these hidden costs without affecting the business value that they bring. 

IT must work to absorb these tools in standard IT environment and budget in order to manage, utilize and reduce costs.

There are many new ways to deliver IT services: outsourcing, cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc. The key is to have an open strategy for these new ways. As new features become available, check what savings can be made by applying or adopting one or more of these options. 

It’s wrong to assume that the way in which you have worked so far is the best. Many of these changes have an emotional component, but certainly they must be objectively reviewed. Revise costs and impact on services important to business goals to bring adequate decision which of these options is right. 

For example, the use of CRM as SaaS model may bring savings in terms of servers, software, infrastructure, human resources, etc. To be on the safe side, revise this option carefully because you might need it for other things.

Save up on your company vehicle

Choosing a quality car is an advantage from the start. Latest technology is used to create superior products with low fuel consumption and chemical values, which greatly reduces the registration cost as well.

When it comes to diesel refueling turn to quality again, for thrifty and long-term operating vehicle. Match engine needs with octane fuel rating. It is known that the fuel with a higher octane rating burn a little slower, which means that your car will spend less, have more power and go faster for the same amount of fuel.

Reduce unnecessary routes and optimize fuel consumption. Plan your trips to reduce costs and to get the best possible performance out of your vehicle. You can get a loyalty card and save on the fuel price even more.

Create a mind-set within your business organization where all of your employees would control costs, starting from the lowest-ranking employees up to the top management. 

Business Costs

Look forward to any reduction in business costs as much as you look forward to every business success. It is important that you start to worry about the costs before the situation becomes critical so that you won’t be required to make difficult decisions.