What You Can Do to Reduce Your Small Business Expenses

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The cost of running a small business can be surprisingly high. This is mostly due to the reason that as a small business owner, you often lack the funds to buy in bulk (and achieve a significant discount this way) and you don’t have the influence to leverage a better deal in your favor. However, there are more than several ways to reduce the expenses even without these two factors and here are some of them.

1.     Sublease your office

Getting a small office space is only in theory a smart way to reduce your overhead, in practice, it’s something that will cost you a small fortune in the long run. This is due to the fact that you’ll soon have to relocate to a new office, which will cost you a small fortune in logistics such as packing supplies, cleaning agencies and hiring moving trucks. Aside from this, it will cause a no small amount of branding issues, seeing as how you’ll have to change all your contact information online, while still having a trouble with promotional products with your address on it. Instead, you can take a slightly larger office and sublease it.

2.   Automating your business

The more tech-savvy your team is, the more productive they get. This means that you can make your smaller team outperform companies employing several times your manpower. Keep in mind, nonetheless, that this is not as simple as it may seem at first, due to the fact that the bigger investment you make, the further you set the break-even point. For example, if your company needs cell phones for employees, you can automate that part of business by finding a provider like Orange and have everyone using the same hardware and software. Another benefit of choosing a single provider is having an option for establishing a business account for multiple lines and save some amount of money that way.

3.   Cut down printing

An average office worker prints about 10,000 sheets of paper every year, which comes down to a massive waste in material, especially in the digital era. By scanning, sending email memos and storing files in the cloud rather than printing them and placing them in a drawer, you’ll save money both on paper and on printer ink. Moreover, you’ll be able to get by with even less storage space and save a huge sum on office supplies, which is a clear and undeniable win-win scenario.

4.  Outsourcing

The choice of whether you should outsource or not can often be brought down to a simple equation. On the one hand, you take the cost of starting an in-house department. The cost of hiring and training new employees, the cost of outfitting the premises for this new department, as well as the cost of their day-to-day operations. On the other side, you put the cost of outsourcing (which is often a fixed cost). This can help you determine whether this is a cost-efficient solution or not. Apart from the costs, outsourcing also gives you the benefit of not having to wait for your team to become proficient enough but instead getting industry veterans to represent you right away.

5.  Marketing

One of the areas where you stand to save the most is marketing. Here, you have so many money-saving options in both digital and traditional marketing. For instance, printing promotional products in bulk can reduce the cost of a single promotional item to a minimum. With digital marketing, savings and ROI are even greater. Low-cost and DIY marketing methods have never been more accessible than they are today, which is why ignoring them might not be the best course of action.

6.  Hire telecommuters

At the end of the day, with all the collaboration tools out there, you can rely on telecommuters instead of having to bring every single one of your employees to the office. This reduces your overhead drastically, seeing as how you can keep your telecommuters on performance pay, often as freelancers. In this way, when the workload decreases, you don’t have to cancel any contracts or lay people off, while, when it bounces back, you have a reliable workforce base to work with.

Conclusion

The best thing about adopting frugal trends is the fact that you condition yourself to pay less in the long run. This means that even as you scale up, increase your profit and workload and switch to more expensive business platforms and processes, you’ll keep the habit of choosing a more cost-effective option. In other words, these trends don’t benefit your business just in the short run but also ensure its financial stability and reliability over a prolonged course of time.