How to Lower Your Small Business’s Operating Costs

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Operating costs |How to Lower Your Small Business's Operating CostsIt can be difficult yet rewarding to keep a small business up and running. There’s a lot of work that goes into keeping things out of the red.

Whether you’re looking to reopening or just need to cut down your current operating costs, there’s much a small business owner can do. Keeping your operating costs down is the number one thing any business can do to help ensure they can stay in the green and continue to grow.

Would you love to spend less? Read on and we’ll walk you through a few key suggestions on how to cut costs and run smoother as an operation.

Embrace New Technologies

Are you still running archaic old systems and doing everything by hand? Isn’t it time to take a few steps forward and be part of the modern age?

There so many different software programs out there that can help to streamline your business operations. What area of your business operation is slowing you down? There is more than likely a program or online system out there that can help you out.

Accounting, website hosting, marketing, payroll, on and on. If you have a problem, there’s probably a technical solution that you can embrace. From the TurboTax to the free paystub generator, someone out there has created a solution for you.

Why embrace tech? Because tech creates efficiency. A computer can do something at triple the speed we can and often at a higher rate of accuracy. If you can reduce the need for direct labor, you’ll cut back on the time needed for various tasks.

You’ll also be able to eliminate some needed manpower and that can decrease the amount of money you’re putting into wages as well. Tech might even be able to improve the way you approach certain processes in your business, cutting out unneeded steps and providing cheaper alternatives.

Consider Outsourcing

It can cost a lot to keep employees on your payroll the whole year-round. On top of wages, you’ve got health insurance and various budgets to worry about. It might be enough to sink your whole budget outright.

It doesn’t have to be, however. If there are certain departments that you don’t really need to have year-round, you could always outsource them. Many companies do this for a variety of departments: tax accounting, human relations, or even customer service.

Instead of hiring someone full-time, outsourcing allows you to pay for these services only when you need them. That can greatly help to lower your overall cost and to raise the efficiency of each dollar that you spend.

Advertising and marketing is another area that you could benefit from outsourcing. For many business owners, running an entire marketing department isn’t worth the investment that it provides. It can be a real headache.

However, outsourcing your marketing and advertising needs to another company can help get the results you want at a fraction of the cost. This can really pay off as time goes by.

Look for Better Rates

Have you been working with the same shipping company for years? Maybe you’re not doing the work at finding a business partner who will really provide you with the kinds of prices you need to stay profitable.

One way to cut operating costs is to take a serious look at your vendors list. Where are you spending the most money, and might it be possible to get the same product or service from another entity for cheaper?

Even if you’re considering leaving, the current vendors you work with might consider negotiating down in order to ensure you’ll stick around as a client of theirs. If you compare prices from different vendors, you might be able to pit them against one another and get them to bring the price down.

Getting new quotes if it’s been a while since you’ve done this kind of research can ensure you’re getting the price you really deserve.

Create a Green Workspace

Did you know that creating a green workspace can do more than helping out the planet? It can also provide a positive impact on your bottom line.

It’s true! One of the benefits of many green practices is that they are more energy-efficient. Energy efficiency as it relates to your budget means cheaper bills.

Switch out all the light bulbs in your office for green-friendly fluorescent lighting and you’ll be surprised at how much you save on a yearly basis. Improving your heating and cooling systems cans also help to shave dollars off.

If you can cut your office’s reliance on disposal products you’ll also be able to save money there. Recycling and reusing products lessen the need to buy more. Encouraging multi-use water bottles, mugs, plates, and so forth will help Earth and help your wallet.

Swapping back to a normal coffee pot as opposed to those single-use coffee cups can provide big savings as well. A normal tin of coffee can produce hundreds of cups of coffee as opposed to the very few that a pack of cups will create for the same price.

It may be difficult to get your team to adjust to these kinds of changes right away. With a little work, however, you can create great change and cut some of your costs.

Learning to Lower Your Operating Costs

It can be hard to run a small business, especially in the current climate. However, embracing some of the above tips and tricks can help you to lower your current operating costs.

If you can successfully keep these costs down, you’ll be well on your way to a brighter tomorrow. Need more financial advice for the office? Keep scrolling our blog for more.

How to Streamline Your Business and Reduce Expenses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Streamline your Business|How to Streamline Your Business and Reduce ExpensesStreamlining is in every business’s best interest. Operating a clunky business is costly. You need to pay to keep all the essential components together and juggle with operations. It’s a nightmare both for outright costs and for time wasted. Despite what many businesses may think, there is a very good chance that they are inefficient in at least one way.

Audit Your Business

Any efforts you make before auditing your business have the potential to have been a complete waste of your time and resources. You might know of a problem, yes, but without that audit, you don’t know why it is a problem or what the best method is to go about fixing it. The best solution might be to improve a different area of your business entirely. Until you do an audit, you will never know.

Automate Your Business

Auditing your business will give you a clear idea of what needs to be done. In most cases, automating specific tasks will immensely improve your business and employee relations. You just need to know which tasks to automate to see the most significant improvements. Data management systems are incredibly clever and can help make steps that took minutes or even hours and days take seconds. HR, inventory, and data collection are three areas that often see the most significant improvement in productivity when automation is introduced.

Invest in Closed-Loop Systems

Waste is waste. If you manufacture items, you want to make use of the scraps and cut-offs just as much as the main bulk of the virgin material. If distilling is included in your process, then you will want a closed-loop system that will reduce loss and help you optimize your manufacturing process. Do try to choose items that work together. Your new pdx.gold extraction unit should work with the rest of your system, for example.

Make Money Out of Your Waste

Following on the closed-loop suggestion is to make money out of your waste. You won’t always be able to recapture raw materials in a closed-loop machine. Instead, you will want to look at creating a closed-loop business partnership. Find businesses that need your scrap and waste and are willing to pay for it. If your scraps are metal, paper, or other similar raw materials, then you can make money back on an item you used to have to pay to dispose of.

Invest in Regular Training

If you want your workplace to be efficient, your employees need to know the best way to do that. This applies to those working on a manufacturing floor and your office. Train on optimal data input, on how to operate machinery, and even make an efficient system so that all items and equipment have a place and can be easily located in seconds.

Go Paperless

Try to reduce the number of materials you need. Going paperless is just one of the most apparent routes you can take. Today, computers can handle important tasks like document comparison, redlining, and similar tasks. To put into perspective just how much you can save, consider that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at savings in $1.5 billion in the next decade just by going paperless. Though your business likely isn’t cutting down 2 million trees each year to feed its paper habit, the savings are still there, and you can and will see a difference for your business.

The Best Marketing Strategies for Young Companies

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Marketing Strategies|The Best Marketing Strategies for Young CompaniesYoung companies should have only one thing on their mind: growth. Growth is almost always achieved by getting new customers, and new customers are almost always achieved by reasonable, effective marketing. That’s why marketing is such an essential thing for startups to nail. When looking for funding at any stage, a strong customer base will make the whole process infinitely easier. Here are some strategies your company needs to be considering getting customers at that early stage.

PR

PR can be much cheaper than advertising and is perfect for establishing credibility and getting new potential customers to hear from you. Good PR needs to be creative and involve exploiting the brand niche that you occupy (if you haven’t identified your niche and done solid branding work do so before you do any marketing at all, it’s essential). Take the case of Patrick Finnegan. He was a 17-year-old who wanted to do venture capitalism in New York City, so he went to the PR and marketing company Big Machine Agency. They realized that they could position him as the business face of GEN Z, somebody who was young enough to know about all the youth trends that many consumer companies want to hop on. After spinning this, they paired him up with a celebrity photographer to build a story for him that caught attention in lifestyle and finance blogs.

Email Marketing

This is at the other end of the spectrum to an exciting PR campaign, but email marketing is still essential because it’s still so effective. It allows you to boost customer loyalty and attract customers to your startup for almost no money at all, especially if you’re a good writer. You can gather email addresses from people who visit your website by offering incentives or by directly asking potential customers you meet for their emails. It’s essential to offer more than just free advertising – offer free guides, infographics, content – whatever you think will bring potential or existing customers value. You should also make it easy to unsubscribe, as that way, only those who are genuinely interested in your niche will attend to the emails, becoming more loyal customers, and focusing your marketing efforts.

StrategyDriven Online Marketer & Website Developer Magazine


Online Content

Start a blog. If you are dealing with customers and 99% of businesses (unless you’re sure they won’t find you online), you need to start a blog or offer some form of content regularly. Bill Gates said it in the 90s – content is king. It’s the reason that most people use the internet if not to look for a solution to a problem. Make sure that those interested in your niche have access to both by making your site as valuable as possible to them. Regularly posting fresh, engaging, and original content is essential for modern SEO, too, as Google is changing its algorithms frequently with the end-goal of delivering valuable content to customers. That means relying on keywords and SEO ‘tricks won’t last you very long and will have an opportunity cost as instead of bothering with those, you could be attracting real readers with good content.

How to Improve Your Entrepreneurial Skills

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship Article |Entrepreneurial Skills|How to Improve Your Entrepreneurial SkillsBeing your own boss may sound like a novelty, but it can be a challenging career path. Although aspiring entrepreneurs may have a concrete vision and idea for a potential business, there are vital skills needed to turn that concept into a reality. Unless you have worked in business before, it can be difficult to know how to become a successful entrepreneur; this is because there is no-one to support you from higher ranks, unlike typical employment.

If you require some advice on which skills are essential to become a successful entrepreneur, this blog will come in useful:

Attend business training and seminars

Unless you have carried out formal training, it is impossible to understand the basics of business. Enrolling onto a training program will give you an insight into theories and methods which could be applied to your personal business development. It will allow you to gain more in-depth knowledge into the responsibilities of becoming a business owner and how to enhance your productivity and performance.

Find a business mentor

In the early days of becoming an entrepreneur, you may feel as though you need a helping hand to make crucial decisions when it comes to your business growth. You can only learn so much from books and websites; however, a business mentor will be able to share first-hand advice of their own experiences and provide guidance when it comes to making crucial decisions. According to a survey by Sage, 93% of entrepreneurs believe that having a business mentor was the key reason for their success.

Travel far

If you have the determination to expand your business globally, it would be wise to travel to different countries to get an insight into which countries may be best suited to your business niche. Popular countries for business expansion include the likes of China, Japan, and India. Once you have decided which country will benefit your business, it would be wise to hire translators from globalcitizenstranslation.com to communicate with professionals abroad in the native language for effective communication.

Practice communication skills

If you’re not much of a social butterfly and find it difficult to communicate on a personal and professional level, you must work on your communication skills to succeed in business. You’ll be expected to deal with customers and clients both face-to-face, via phone call, video call, and email, to name just a few. However, being a poor communicator as an entrepreneur can result in misinterpretation of information and potentially even catastrophe. There are different ways you can develop your communication skills, such as:

Learn from your mistakes

Upon starting out in business, you’re bound to make mistakes along the way; however, you should turn the negative thinking into positive by learning from what went wrong and how to avoid these errors future. Ask yourself, ‘what could I have improved on?’ and make a list of pointers that you can refer to if you’re ever in the same position again.

How to Find the Best Prices for Your Old Gadgets

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Old Gadgets|How to Find the Best Prices for Your Old GadgetsWith so many of us holding on to several devices all at once, this is a little bit of extra money that you can make by selling your items with an online retailer. With several older gadgets still holding value, it is an opportunity to make money as a result. In this article, we will be providing you with insight into how you can go about finding the best price for your older gadgets.

Compare The Price Before Hand

When looking at your old devices, it is important to look at the price beforehand. This will not only give you insight into how much it can sell for, but it can also provide you with the knowledge you need about the specifications such as storage and overall screen size that can lead to an increase in price when selling the device as a result making it stand out.

Get Quotes From Multiple Places.

In addition to getting insight into the specifications of the gadget, it is important to get a quote from several different places at once. By using one of the many sell my gadget services, you can then get a quote from several different services. This will ensure that you are getting the best possible price for the devices that you have from multiple places at once. When you have the quotes from multiple places, you can then decide who you want to sell them to for the best possible price regardless of the specifications that you have for the mobile devices.

Look at Quotes For Multiple Devices

In addition to getting quotes for one device, there are a number of shops that allow you access to numerous quotes for several devices at one time. This is great for those that are looking to sell numerous devices as there are several bulk purchasing options. Though this can take time, this is a simple solution to get rid of all the old devices in your home and make a small amount of cash. With the internet, it is as simple as packing it in a bag and sending it off to receive a check just a few weeks.

Make Use Of Online Shops

The final way that you can do this is to make the use of online shops when it comes to selling your items. With shops on the highstreets and many online websites out there allowing you to sell your devices with ease. With so many of us holding on to multiple older games consoles as well as mobile phones and laptops, making the use of these shops can help to make some extra money. There are also several ways that you can sell CDs and other devices to ensure that they are disposed of correctly.

With this in mind, there are several ways that you can make use of online shops to sell the old devices that you have lying around your home and ensure that electronics are disposed of of properly.