A lot of attention is paid these days to the big cost sinks in small businesses, but it’s often the little ones that actually do the most damage. The recent economy downturn hasn’t been especially kind to small businesses that tend to suffer the most in such times, so it’s even more important now that small businesses owners find the small money leaks in their organization. Here are a few ideas.
Switch to VoIP
By using VoIP solutions for business phones, you’ll cut a little bit off of every bill that you get. This will also save a little bit of money at a time off of costs when it comes to sending text messages as well in many situations. Additionally, international business rates tend to be better than traditional phone service as well. This means that every phone call you make to a client overseas will be just a bit cheaper. But after a while, this can really add up to a huge amount of savings.
Use Open Source
Let’s be honest, products like those from Microsoft might be great but they are often also more expensive than is necessary. There are a lot of alternatives available out there for open source products that essentially do the exact same thing as a more commercial product. An example is Open Office. This is almost exactly like Microsoft Word, with the exception being that you don’t have to pay a fee for every single individual computer that uses it. Instead, it’s completely free to use as much as you want on as many computers as you want.
Use Free Marketing
While it’s certainly possible to market your brand using paid solutions including ad agencies, TV spots and so on, social media means that you can do a whole lot of marketing for free. There’s twitter and Facebook now, so you can get the word out organically instead of relying on nickel and dime tactics from marketing agencies. Even Adwords can drain all of your money slowly, after all.
Lose the Paper
Many small businesses are still using paper to keep track of things like HR, accounting, invoicing and so on. It might not seem like it, but costs from paper can really add up after enough time. Paper isn’t free, whereas digital solutions are pretty close to free. You can issue invoices online now fairly easily, and keeping track of employees digitally is pretty easy now as well. You don’t need to waste money putting everything down on dead trees that happen to cost money.
Use Distributed Solutions
If employees are all at locations with the Internet, then you don’t need to spend extra money on cellphone service. There are a lot of different programs that will let you do video conferencing, voice and so on completely for free. The extra cost of even one conference call among employees can really add up given enough time.