Even during a healthy economy, it is a good business practice to ensure that you are monitoring and actively improving upon your business overheads. These regular costs of your businesses operation can be significant when considered in annual reports and, without regular review, your expenditure may be much larger than it needs to be.
As the UK makes its way through a recession, there is even greater pressure placed upon businesses who must weather the difficulty in order to survive. During these times, it is incredibly risky for a business to increase its outgoing costs and most opt to reduce their outgoings, looking to streamline their operation instead. This can mean a number of difficult decisions, such as reviewing staffing costs. However, there are many ways that a business’ overheads can be improved, making it more robust in the wake of a recession, potentially staving off the need to make cuts elsewhere.
Running the Workplace
Even outside of striving for smaller carbon footprints, a business can save large costs on their energy bills.
Firstly, a business’ consumption should be monitored to ensure that it is running efficiently and without excessive use of energy. Lighting and heating are often large costs for businesses and by being stringent about their usage, installing timers, or replacing the actual product for a more cost-effective alternative, a business can save itself money.
Secondly, suppliers for energy are competitive and regularly change their charges. Your energy suppliers should be reviewed and potentially reconsidered annually. Often competitors will make appealing offers to bring you over to their services, which can be much cheaper alternatives than your current supplier.
Streamline and Outsource
The cost of a large workspace is becoming increasingly more difficult to justify. No longer is storage needed for physical documents as cloud-based data becomes a more secure and cheaper option. Even staff are able to work from home at a greater benefit to the business, working from home and managing most, if not all, of their responsibilities remotely. This has led to workspaces and offices being much smaller as the needs of dedicated physical space are stripped away.
To support this transformation, many businesses are outsourcing the departments that confine them to expensive spaces. For example, having a dedicated internal payroll department is not only an overhead cost but one that requires dedicated office space. While outsourcing to external payroll services has its own price, if it affords a business to downsize or eliminate its office space, the savings are potentially great.
Staff Responsibilities
Staff roles and responsibilities can be reviewed and potentially changed to support your business. Instead of hiring for a new position, it may be possible to rearrange and change existing staff roles to cover necessary tasks. While a business needs to be careful not to overload its staff, creating stress, merging existing responsibilities and creating news ones can be an act that replaces jobs that are no longer essential to a business’ operation.
Update Your Advertising
Advertising has changed dramatically in recent decades. No longer do many businesses need to afford huge media coverage to reach and grow their audiences but, instead, they can collaborate with influencers and ambassadors to reach specific demographics and grow their product or service’s audience in a much more targeted and cost-effective way.
While it is unlikely you will be able to give up your advertising budget altogether, simply reviewing your current needs and adapting your choice of platform, such as from magazine to social media, you will be able to save costs while improving your market reach.
