Your business is important to you, and so is the money you make from it. That’s why it makes sense to save as much as possible and find business savings.
7 Business Savings Tips
Saving is fundamentally about being smart and practical. Here are 7 smart, practical business savings tips to get you started.
1. Get Smart About Business Meetings
It’s surprisingly easy to waste money when scheduling a business meeting. You don’t know where to go, so you choose the first venue that you stumble across and that sounds appealing, and they require you to book for the whole day, and the catering is expensive – and before you know it, you’ve spent far more than you should.
Do meetings the smart way: use an online enterprise solution that will help you find the best location and rent it for a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable rate.
That’s exactly what platforms like Meetinkz offer: access to thousands of meeting rooms all over the world, and tools to help you budget and customize (learn more about Meetinkz here).
2. Don’t Be a Price-Taker
We’ve talked before about finding ways to save, and a lot of it comes down to finding lower-cost options – cut back on entertainment, cook at home, take public transit.
What all of these things have in common is a refusal to take the ostensibly more comfortable, but pricier, option. There’s a general principle here, and it’s called Don’t be a price-taker.
A price-taker looks at the price, shrugs, accepts it, and decides whether or not they will pay it.
But not you, not anymore: now you know you have to not settle until you have the best deal.
Finding the real value of something is fundamentally always about persistence. Start with your landlord: shouldn’t your willingness to commit long-term to your office warrant at least a bit of a discount?
3. Online Advertising is Your Friend
Online advertising is relatively cheap and relatively effective. It’s a no-brainer to prioritize it in these increasingly interconnected and networked times.
If it’s a choice between online advertising and any other form of advertising, the answer is always online advertising. That’s where people are, more and more. Are you really going to prioritize cable and radio and national TV at a time when these things are increasingly eclipsed by social media?
4. Replace People with Software
These days when everyone is worried about AI, the Singularity, and “robots taking our jobs”, a recommendation to replace people with software may sound insensitive.
To those of us in the adult world, it is no different from replacing people with machinery during the Industrial Revolution.
Human labor is increasingly about intelligent, high-end skills: customer service that would have required numerous operatives can now be substantially automated by chatbots, and project managers can be replaced by pieces of software.
This is simple, easy, smart math, and it’s the kind of thinking you’ll want to engage in to be competitive.
5. Put a Premium on Employee Experience
There’s a converse to the last point: employee experience is a valuable resource which you should prize.
It’s a good idea to prioritize experience when promoting people and hiring people, and it’s an excellent idea to try to grow together with your employees.
Encourage your employees, give them new challenges and opportunities to develop and add to their skills, and you will be rewarded by more productive, more valuable employees who will also be more motivated.
The more you can grow with your employees, the less time and money you will lose on employee turnover. And, too, people who are very experienced tend to be underpaid, and to perform less well as a result: the more you can encourage them to perform at their best, the better it will be for everyone.
6. Sensible Security
This may go without saying, but protecting your assets is a good and sensible investment. Think about security cameras, a plan to cover your smartphone in case it is lost, broken, or stolen, and having contracts for everything you do is smart and sensible.
The more you can protect your assets from theft, damage, loss, or lawsuit, the more secure you will be and the less likely you to face a significant loss that will be difficult to recover from.
7. Price-Check & Buy in Bulk
Are you getting the best prices on office supplies and equipment? Are you sure?
There are numerous apps and sites that can help you find the best deals and make the most of them.
Shop around, and you’ll be able to ascertain for yourself if you’re getting the best deal you could be. Buy in bulk whenever and wherever it is practical to do so and yields savings.
Approaching business savings the right way means thinking in terms of how you can cut waste and find the best deals. Think outside the box, shop around, and make sure you keep a strong eye on how much you are spending and where.