Running a business can be expensive, and depending on the type of business that you run, there could be solutions that could save you significant amounts of money. From investing in automation, to looking at alternative suppliers for your fleet of vehicles, the larger your business, the larger the savings you could potentially identify.
System automation
Many processes can now be automated, from email responses to replenishing ink cartridges. If you deal with a large number of customer enquiries then you may be able to find ways that the interactions can be automated, especially if you tend to get the same types of queries over and over again. CRM systems offer ways of streamlining how you work with your customer base, and if you don’t already have one, then maybe you should start looking into the benefits of having one.
Review your supplier costs
It is easy to stick with the same supplier for a number of years, especially if you have always been happy with their services. However, they could be increasing the prices year-on-year and have become much more expensive than their competitors. Even if you performed a very diligent tendering process at the time, you should regularly check to see how the prices compare to other suppliers.
Buy your own equipment
Many companies start off by hiring equipment to avoid huge startup costs, but over the years, this can end up being a lot more expensive than actually purchasing the equipment. For example, if you hire fleet vehicles such as cars, trucks or trailers, it could work out cheaper buying them outright. You can get lots of great deals on used vehicles such as peterbilt trucks for sale. Over the course of many years, hiring equipment can prove to be much more expensive, so spend some time calculating the difference between hiring and buying.
Use outsourcing opportunities
You can now outsource a great number of tasks from administrative processing to your entire IT support. You can outsource small, medium and large projects as one-off or long term agreements. There are a wide number of freelance agencies that can provide services to help you reduce the costs of paying for the same services within your business. For example, if you need to market your business, you can pay for the services when you need them rather than employ an actual team.
Reduce business travel
Again, depending on the nature of your business, travelling for business purposes can cost huge sums. Introduce a company policy to ensure that only essential business travel is allowed and try to encourage other options such as Skype and other forms of web-conferencing. Flights, hotels and meals can stack up, so trying to limit this as much as you can, could save the business a fortune.
Whatever industry you work in, there are lots of ideas for reducing costs and sometimes setting up some policies or a ‘gatekeeper’ for expenses can result in more savings than you could even imagine. If you always re-evaluate your costs and track them well, then you should be able to keep your running costs to a minimum.
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