5 ways to make your business more cost-efficient

Firstly, what do we mean by this? Making your business more cost-efficient means ensuring your internal day-to-day tasks and operations are running as efficiently as they can.

Are your employees redoing the same tasks multiple times? Are your processes not streamlined and you are manually organising a lot of things? Or are you trying to do too much yourself instead of delegating?

Here are our top 5 tips for how to make your business more cost-efficient:

1. Automate everything that you can!

Today, there are many handy software systems and tools to better streamline basic business processes. These will save you time and money by automatically working in the background or helping you work more efficiently as a team. Here are some of our favourites:

Quickbooks or Honeybook: These are accounting tools that enable you to link your business bank accounts, track your ins and outs, categories your expenses, invoice through, plus there’s even help when completing your end of year accounts.

ClickUp or Asana: These are work management tools which you can use internally with your team to set tasks and track progress of projects.

Calendly: If you’re a business who offers consultations, discovery calls, or you just want to make it easier for prospective clients to book a call with you, we suggest Calendly. This system allows prospective clients to book calls with you. Plus there are options for pre-call and post-call processes and reminders to be automated. The system syncs with your calendar and blocks off any time where you already have appointments.

Buffer: Managing several social media platforms? Buffer enables you to manage all of your platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest) in one place and schedule social media posts in advance. If you’re active on social media, this will save you a huge amount of time.

2. Learn to delegate

This is potentially one of the most important parts of running your own business (aside from paying your bills and taxes on time). As the owner of a business, it’s important to learn to delegate all of the tasks that can be done by someone else to your employees, freelancers and contractors.

Certain things you will need to take on and be responsible for. These should be your priority because you are the only person who can do them. However tasks that can be delegated to others, really should be! This will give you more time to focus on what’s really important. You can focus on ensuring everyone has what they need to do their job, to keep current clients happy, and think about how to bring in new clients.

3. Work with freelancers

Sometimes you may have temporary influxes in tasks or workload that you need someone to take on, but your team may not have capacity. This is where freelancers come in handy. Freelancers can work with you seasonally, temporarily, on a retainer basis or regularly. They offer so much flexibility.

Freelancers are also a great option if you’re just starting your business and aren’t ready to take on permanent employees until you become more established.

The world of freelancing has grown highly competitively, and many freelancers today provide agency quality services.

4. Offer a WFH or flexible-working environment

After the happenings of the Covid-19 pandemic, many employees now prefer and want their companies to offer WFH options. If you’re able to, this will keep your employees happy and will help to reduce your business expenditure.

Paying for office space is expensive. Many locations particularly in larger cities now offer flexible or pay-as-you-go renting of office space as and when your team needs it. You could rent an office space for only part of each month. Alternatively, you could rent an office space on a pay-as-you-go basis if that’s more suitable.

5. Hire an accountant

Accountants don’t only know what number to put in which box, but they are also experts when it comes to knowing what you can claim as a business expense, and how to lower your annual tax bill.

An accountant knows how to save you money. Your responsibility is to ensure you have an effective finance organisation system in place, for example something we mentioned above. Then let your accountant do the rest.