As a business owner, it’s natural to want to cut spending and make your operations more efficient. However, sometimes, to achieve significant cost savings and improvements, you need to invest a little money upfront. This change in mindset can be beneficial for your business in the long run.
Listening to salespeople and considering whether their services can genuinely add value to your business is a wise approach. It allows you to evaluate whether a service can help you save money or enhance the quality of your product or service. Similarly, seeking advice from other business owners who have successfully implemented cost-saving measures can provide valuable insights.
For example, if another business owner has found success in wrapping up their costly customer service department and outsourcing those tasks to a PCI compliant call center or similar experts, it’s worth exploring as a way to reduce expenses without compromising on service quality. Keep in mind, learning from the experiences of others can help us make informed decisions that benefit our business’s growth and success.
Similarly, if you in the health care industry, you may notice that others in your industry often outsource various operational tasks. These tasks may encompass administrative functions such as billing, coding, and data handling. Some hospitals may even opt to hire companies that specialize in Medical Answering Service in San Diego, CA. By utilizing these services, hospitals can ensure that their operations are more streamlined, ultimately delivering top-notch support and care to their patients. Outsourcing these tasks might offer a higher return on investment. This is probably because the hospital wouldn’t have to divert valuable resources, both human and financial, to handle these non-core functions internally. This can allow them to focus more on their core mission of providing exceptional healthcare services while reducing operational costs.
Furthermore, if you are seeing other businesses using a management software to track data across production, inventory, sales, and accounting, you can implement that too and manage business costs. This software is like the digital backbone of any modern business. If you own a wine business, for example, you can keep track of every grape, bottle, and dollar that flows in and out with the help of a brewery management system. It simplifies your life by automating tedious tasks, like calculating profits and losses. Plus, it can provide you with valuable insights, like which wine varieties are selling like hotcakes or when it’s time to restock the cellar. Apart from breweries, it can help other businesses such as a bakery. It can keep tabs on your ingredient costs, help manage inventory (no more running out of chocolate chips), and even predict when you might need to hire extra hands for those holiday rushes.
While there are various other ways to reduce business spending, below is a list of the services that I have started to use over the past year that have actively saved me a lot of money by having me spend a little bit of money. I hope that you find them useful!
1. Sugar CRM.
Sugar is a CRM (Client Relationship Management System). Essentially it allows me to keep all of my business contacts in one place, with extremely detailed notes, and monitor my and my team’s entire relationship with these clients.
Furthermore, it allows me to monitor all of the activity of my sales team, from the moment that they make contact with a potential lead, right the way up to the deal or no deal point. It then lets me compile all of this sales data into very slick charts and spreadsheets for quick reference at the end of the month, letting me see at a glance what sales have come in and what sales are predicted to come in. Importantly it also allows me to identify which sales people are under performing.
2. QuickBooks.
This goes without saying, but it is amazing how many people send their entire book keeping off to an accountant when they are more than capable of doing it in house.
If you are a small to medium sized business then you should be using Quick Books. It is a little time consuming, but it will give you a very good idea of what is going on in your business finances every day and will save you money in the doing so.
3. Exec Runs.
This business provides by the hour personal assistants to do everything from admin work to collections. If, like us, you cannot afford a full or even part time PA, but wish to spend less time doing the mundane and non-growth related jobs, then look no further than Exec Runs. They are by the hour and are one of the most efficient, affordable agencies for PA London has to offer, and will have someone with you within an hour of booking them… not bad!
4. Toggl.
This simple yet ingenious little desktop widget is a time management system. It keeps track of every job that you and your staff do, and keeps a record of it. At the end of the week (or at any time for that matter) you can see exactly how much time has been spent on every area of your business. Not only does it help in charging clients for the right amount of hours, but it also lets you see very clearly if there are any processes that are taking longer than they should, allowing you to quickly identify which procceses are effective and which are too labour intensive.
5. Invoicera.
This is an excellent Invoicing system that keeps track of all of your outbound invoices, sending automatic invoices on invoice day and giving alerts of any payments due. Definitely worth the cash as it saves us a lot of time otherwise spent writing up, sending out and chasing up invoices.