Posts Tagged ‘Costs’

 
photo credit: lepiaf.geo

In today’s economy we are seeing so many people being put out of work only to find that the company still ends up going bankrupt. Why is this? A big reason is because often times no matter how many employees are let go, the costs that the company has still ends up being more than what their profits are. Here are some creative ways where you can start cutting costs rather than cutting your employees.

• Enlist the help of everyone who work’s for you to come up with areas where you can cut costs to equal up to or at least close to the amount that you need to cut. In the end you may still end up having to let a few people go, but it will be a smaller number then it was before the brainstorming took place.
• Think about firing some of your costly customers. American Express cut out 2.7 million accounts because they had no balance or were inactive, this means the company was spending money to keep up these accounts even though they weren’t making money off of them, as stated on Bnet.com.
• Take a look at some of the resources and products that your company uses, are some of them extremely costly to your company? Is there another product that does the same job but costs less? If so, try cutting out the extravagant lifestyle of certain products and down size to a cheaper version.

Go for cheaper tech. If your shop needs a tech upgrade but you can’t afford it, consider the cloud. Increasingly, businesses are finding they can do almost all of their computing with free or cheap services that store your data on remote servers — that is, in the cloud. Moreover, there is so much good free software nowadays, including office suites with word processing and spreadsheet software, that this is often a no-brainer.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: batega

We all know how prominent business debt is becoming in this economy. Granted we are seeing some relief here and there, but no where near enough yet. Below are two awesome ways your business can cut it’s debt and stay above water!

Be realistic on staffing. Although the last thing most business owners want to do is lay off employees, be realistic when you evaluate your staffing needs. You might be able to offer reduced hours or job sharing, or even cut back on benefits if it means employees can keep their jobs. But if you must eliminate positions, the first to go should be those who don’t contribute to the bottom line. Stated on Chron.com.

Your business could probably use a well thought out budget. Get out all of those monthly bills and expenses and look for several areas where you could tweak things around a little and improve your costs. Do you really need the highest quality of technology, vendors, supplies and more at this particular juncture? You may be leasing some equipment that is not really used all that often, or maybe some supply companies that charge twice the amount of someone else.

If you’re a company that provides several company vehicles, consider cutting down the number of people that you give this luxury to. Also take a look at the money you have coming in, it may be time to do some follow-up calls and letters to your past due clients.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
photo credit: sashafatcat

We often talk about steps to take to ensure better progress and success in business, but I also think it is just as important to discuss the steps to avoid that do have the potential to cripple your business. Read on for crippling steps to avoid in your business that were discussed recently on MyVenturePad.

• Blowing off customer complaints. The idea of ignore it and it will eventually go away is not always the smart thing to do. With customers when ignored long enough will start to take action that could harm your company such as bad word of mouth advertising or even filing complaints with the BBB.
• Using outdated office equipment and technology. By using outdated systems this increases the time it takes to accomplish all of your projects and daily activities and could end up costing you money and causing loss of vital information.
• Not having some sort of system to protect you against fraud. Fraudulent behavior is becoming more and more prevalent today. With all of the systems out there to protect you against this behavior, it is rather dumb to not obtain one of them.

Data denial. It’s not enough to merely track metrics and gather financial information about how your business is performing. You have to look at and interpret the information and heed what it’s telling you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.