Running a small business is always a tug-of-war between minimizing expenses and projecting an appearance of wealth and stability. When you’re able to reduce your overhead, you’ll have more money to invest in your marketing and products that are the core of your business. There are even ways to cut overhead without cutting into your image. Here are three things you can do to reduce your business costs without affecting public perception.
Go Green
Going green can be as simple or complicated as you have time and funds for. First, create a maintenance schedule for your equipment including replacement of HVAC air filters Richmond. When you take care of your equipment and building, you save on utilities and reduce emissions that affect the environment.
You could also change your energy source, moving to solar or wind power to fuel your business needs. This obviously has a significant cost upfront but once it’s there, you’ll start seeing the savings on low or no-cost electricity for your business. Once the system pays for itself, everything else is money in your pocket.
Cut Your Meetings
Meetings are important to get everyone on the same page, but too often there’s no one in charge and the goal of the meeting isn’t clear cut. When you allow the meeting to get off track, or begin without a defined purpose, you’re wasting employee time and your money. Cut back hour meetings to half an hour. Train your staff on how to create agendas and stick to them. Make it clear that poorly run meetings are a drain on the business.
Redefine Your Inventory Costs
Do you have old inventory taking up space? That’s not just money you aren’t making, that’s money you are spending for storage and insurance. Look at all aspects of inventory and decide where you can cut some fat. Keeping too much inventory of items that don’t sell well doesn’t make sense. Eliminate poorly performing items from your offerings and clear those items out of inventory, even if you don’t turn a profit. That space is then open to increase inventory on the items that you actually make you money.
Set your inventory levels and stick to them. Remembering to run inventory, especially as a small business can be difficult. Put it on your schedule. If you have high turnover run inventory once a week, otherwise aim for at least once a month.
Keeping your costs low doesn’t mean getting rid of your customer support team; it means finding smart ways to trim the budget so you can spend more where it pays off.