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Small Business Success And Survival: 10 Tips on How to Improve Efficiency And Cost Effectiveness

During an economic downturn it is important to trim away the excess from your small business so that you can maximise your productivity and help ensure its success and survival.

Here are 10 tips on how you can cut costs and improve your cost-effectiveness, economic efficiency and productivity.

1. Travel

Eliminate excessive or unnecessary travel. Aim to plan trips well in advance to take advantage of lower fares.

Use resources such as teleconferencing and teleseminars where possible to replace unnecessary travel to meetings.

2. Post

Use second class postage where appropriate. Again, with advance planning you can often get away with not sending postal items first class. Naturally, you’ll still want to use services like Recorded Delivery or Special Delivery for urgent and confidential items of mail.

Where possible (and appropriate) send items electronically.

3. Printing and Stationery

This is an area where expenses can easily creep up. Keep printing down to a minimum. Review your stationery suppliers to see if you can get your stationery elsewhere at a cheaper price. Could you use recycled materials such as paper and ink cartridges without compromising quality?

4. Telephone Calls

Be efficient with your calls. Be very clear about the outcome of each call and keep calls concise. Aim to group telephone calls together so that you don’t allow telephone calls to repeatedly interrupt your working schedule.

Compare telecommunications service providers to see if you can get a better deal elsewhere.

Investigate using online text messaging services to reduce calls to mobile/cell phones. Ideally, you want a SMS service that will not add their own promo message to end of your text messages.

5. Insurance

Examine the level of your insurance cover. Is it appropriate for your needs? Are you getting value for money? Is it possible to reduce the level of cover and still be adequately insured?

6. Premises

Review your location and premises. Would you be better off in smaller, less plush premises? If you have surplus space, could you sub-let part of it? Is it possible to share equipment such as photocopiers to reduce costs?

7. Promotional Expenditure

Are your current promotions as effective as they can be? Chances are that you may be promoting your business the same way as you always have. If it is working then fine but if the returns on your investment are dwindling, how could you do things differently and reduce costs at the same time.

Are you fully exploiting the many online opportunities to promote your business? Many of these opportunities are inexpensive and many are even free. If this is not an area of your expertise it may be worth hiring a consultant to at least give you an overview of different online promotional strategies that you could use.

8. Reduce Waste and Rejects

Aim for top quality first time, every time so that you cut back on waste and rejects. Where possible recycle your waste and rejects.

9. Economise on Electricity

Many individuals still do things like leave their computers on overnight. They use artificial lighting when a room is flooded with natural light. Lights are also left on in areas which are not in constant use. Air conditioning units are left on in empty rooms. Look to see how you can use electricity and other energy more economically. You’ll not only reduce your energy bill you’ll be doing the environment a favour as well.

10. Get Everyone Involved

Ask everyone in your business for their ideas on cutting costs overall and ask everyone to consider how they could be more economical in their own specifically operations. Staff members are more likely to be more enthusiastic in their involvement if all the suggestions are not coming from the top down.

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