Times are hard for businesses. Everyone is looking at cost savings to reduce overheads, and usually the first reaction is to cut marketing budgets and IT expenditure. If done incorrectly, you could seriously jeopardise your business. Done properly and cost savings can be achieved through careful reuse of your existing assets and minimal spend in the right places.
We know a lot of pressure is put on businesses to cut costs wherever possible, but it doesn’t mean you have to make do with any less of a service. See our top 4 tips that can help you:
- Re-assess your current suppliers. This includes your website and email hosting provider, your web design company, and the hardware or software you purchase. There are lots of suppliers willing to give good deals to you without sacrificing your service levels. Get it right and you may even find the levels increase giving you better value for money.
- Spending your budget more efficiently. It’s easy to get carried away spending your cash on lots of nice to have features for your office and business. We’ve all done it, and before you know it you can’t afford the essentials. Instead try and prioritise what things you really need to keep operating in your business. Spending your money on a website to encourage more customers to buy with you maybe more important then you realise.
- Don’t cut your costs totally. A lot of businesses take a knee-jerk reaction to the spending on IT and marketing. This can be a fatal mistake. Without any investment, you risk making your business operation less organised, slower and less effective. It will impact on the service you provide your customers; and with poor customer service comes a bad reputation. Without any marketing spend you stop any way of getting new customers to notice and spend with you. The message here is not to cut costs, but to get the best value out of what you do spend.
- Digitalise your business operations. Your business won’t reach its full potential if you spend most of it searching through pieces of paper looking for old orders and invoices. Let us give you an example. We see customers who still run a paper based booking appointment systems. While on the surface the cost of setting this up is minimal, within a month bookings were getting lost, people within the business couldn’t read the hand writing of the appointments and there was no coherence between the booking and the details of the customer (because this was stored in filing cabinets in a separate room). All this adds to your stress and your employees, wasting time and money. Moving your appointment system across to your own simple database system means all your information is together in one place. The system does all the hard work, the searching, the checking of appointments and even the communication.
How can Productive Inbox help you? We provide a series of great products and services that can help you get the most out of your money. Our consultancy services help you re-asses your businesses needs and what elements of IT you can improve, get rid of and re-supply with more cost effective suppliers.
We also provide great website and bespoke development services to help you automate those manual processes.
Productive Inbox is a great partner to have with your business, whether you are an one man band or have 250 employees+.
