If your business is based in a big city such as London, the overheads will naturally be very expensive. Property costs alone will cost you a fortune and that does not account for parking or commuting to get to your office. For some businesses, being in a big city is a crucial part of their success – otherwise, they would all head for cheaper options in more rural areas. Some of these businesses have to find other ways of cutting their expenses to be able to keep trading.
The more automated your business is, the less staff you will need to run it. As salaries can be one of the highest expenses for businesses, being able to save on these can be worthwhile. Automation will also make your business more efficient.
When your bookkeeping, for instance, is automated, there is less likely to be errors and the work will be completed in a fraction of the time it would take a person to do. Automation is consistent in the tasks it does and will be reliable.
You can use it for follow up phone calls, to track where leads have come from, to manage your emails and a whole host of other things. Having a smart office could save you a lot of money even though you will have some initial outlay to contend with.
As AI becomes more advanced, the tasks it can undertake have become more complex, and in many businesses, it is now used to undertake all the repetitive and mundane jobs. This will free your employees time for them to be able to carry out more important tasks, which will, in turn, make your business more productive.
Utility bills are one of the things it is not too difficult to reduce, The first step should be to look at how much you would save by making a change to your supplier. In many cases, if you switch business electricity provider, you can get a better deal on the standing charges and the amount you pay for usage.
You can also reduce these bills by taking care of how your power is used. Make sure that lights are turned off in areas not in use. Of course, as much natural daylight as possible is the best, but if you changed to LED lighting it will be cheaper to run and can be on sensors so that any areas used occasionally will light up when it is needed only. They also last a lot longer so reducing your maintenance costs and are more eco-friendly when it comes to disposal of them.
Do not leave equipment on standby overnight, as the cost of this can amount to a lot of money over a year. Turn your heating down just one degree and no one will notice except for you when you get the heating bill.
Insurance premiums can vary greatly between different insurance companies. There is some insurance that is a legal requirement and others that it would not be clever to not have. Often, insurers will have a package deal that includes everything you need but you need first to check out the cost and then to make sure you are covered for all your requirements.
With insurance, the cheapest is not always the best but you may well be able to find a provider that will give you a lower premium than you are currently paying. Insurance companies also have some flexibility in what they charge. When you find a better option you should let your existing company know as they might give you an even better offer.
Some people seem to think that making their business eco-friendly will be more costly when in fact the opposite is true. Just look around your office and see how many printers there are using cartridges and paper. There are probably more than you really need, and if your office becomes paperless there could be none at all.
Technology and things like cloud computing have made this a simple solution. You do not need to have paper copies of everything any more because even if all your computers crashed or were stolen, the copies of all you have done would still be in the cloud.
Apart from making your business more environmentally-friendly, just look and see how much you spent last year on paper and printer supplies and then you may realize just how much money you could save by going green.
Your business may need a presence in a big city, but do all your employees really need to be there? If some of them worked from home, you could rent a smaller office and that could be one of the biggest savings of all.
It is no wonder that remote working s becoming so popular. From an employer’s point of view, it means they do not need so much space, they are not paying the cost of running the equipment but the same work still gets done.
From an employees point of view they avoid a daily commute which will save them money as well as time, so paying the cost of running a computer from home is not something they worry about. It also means that unless they are going to have a virtual meeting, they do not have to dress for work.
With platforms such as Skype for them to keep in touch, and cloud computing where more than one person can be viewing and amending the same document at the same time, working from home can be a winning situation for all involved.
You should also review all your overheads, as several little things you do not need could total quite a saving if you were able to stop paying for them. You need to check them very closely for the past twelve months as some subscriptions only show up once a year. Little things like treating the staff to their lunch on Fridays might not seem a lot, but when you work out the annual cost you could be surprised how much the annual total is.
You should talk with your staff about overheads too, as they could have ideas on ways to cut back on them. Some things could affect them but they will want to protect their jobs and usually will be happy to accept cutbacks to achieve that aim. It is from them that you could find out that no one bothers with the newspapers you provide every day, as they all look at such things online instead. This is just an example, but one that could save you some money by talking with your staff.
Running a successful business is more than just finding the customers, it also means that you have to run at a cost-efficient level or your business will be doomed to failure.
