New year, new start! The new year is a great time to change old habits and put yourself on a path of health and wellbeing, whether personally or in business. The new year can often be a quiet time for many industries and using this period to give yourself and your business some headspace is never a bad thing. Don’t wait until the spring to get your business in order. Here are some things you could be doing right now to cut your costs and improve your company’s profitability.
Do you want to make savings in your business right now? You can. It may be that you have to wait until the actual savings can be made, but it’s never a bad time to create an action plan for business cost saving.
There will be some business costs that are fixed costs and are fixed until a specific date. Rent on your premises is a good example of this. For these expenses, you should take note of when contracts are due for renewal and make plans to shop around or to renegotiate your deal in advance, if only to save you renewing your contract in a last-minute flap never knowing if you got the best deal or not. [Read more…]
There’s an age-old adage that time is money and it’s not wrong. While working longer hours doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be more successful, the fundamental truth is that you have to spend at least some of your day involved in productive activity – business doesn’t happen by itself! If you want to be more productive, you have to spend more time on productive activity and less on doing things that have no impact. When time is money, using your time wisely is helping you to save money in business. [Read more…]
For increased profitability, you can do one of two things; you can reduce your costs without it negatively affecting your revenue, or you can increase your revenue while not increasing any costs. Easier said than done; in particular where increasing revenues can mean unavoidably increasing costs in some way. It’s inevitable that increasing sales means rising costs – the trick is to not increase your fixed costs. [Read more…]
As cost reduction consultants we are a little obsessed with getting business costs down and improving profitability. We have done this for hundreds of businesses and there’s not been a business yet where we haven’t been able to find some sort of saving.
That’s not to say that we save money in business and recommend efficiencies without thinking about the possible implications. We know from experience that some cost cuts are more equal than others. Whilst we do recommend some ruthlessness in assessing your business costs, we do insist that you think carefully about which potential cost savings to implement and about which to think through a little more.
Here are three examples of where business cost cuts could be made but that may not work for your specific business in practice. [Read more…]
As specialists in reducing business costs, we know that cost reduction is not as simple as turning off all the lights and plunging the office into darkness. We know how a business operates and we know the right areas where you should be cutting costs, and where you should proceed with caution.
Business cost reduction is more than just negotiating prices with your suppliers and cost efficiencies can be found in all manner of ways you may not have considered. To give you an idea of what we mean here are 5 examples of how businesses reduced their costs: [Read more…]