We are all aware of the need to be enterprising and creative to attract new clients in today’s competitive environment, but it is also important to ensure that costs are kept to a minimum to enable profits to be made. Here are our top four ways to control your bottom line in 2016.
1. Negotiate
Never take the first price you are given as the price you have to accept. This applies to all areas of your business. When you are setting up or renewing your insurance, it pays to shop around and negotiate a deal with the provider of your choice. This also applies to your suppliers; the first price they give you isn’t necessarily the only price they will give you. It can be a bit embarrassing at first if you are a novice at it, but the more you practice, the better you will become and the more profits you stand to make.
2. Marketing
Before social media we had to purchase flyers, letters and expensive adverts in the local paper to get noticed. These days, there are many free and low-cost ways that you can advertise your business. For example, an advert on Facebook can cost you as little as £3 compared to almost £100 for an advert in a paper. It is easy to see how savings can be made from changing your advertising focus.
3. Choose Your Machinery
This is an easy area to go overboard on spending and buy the latest, best equipment on the market. However, there is a shrewder way of purchasing your much-needed machinery. You can now find food machinery auctioneers across the UK such as www.clarke-fussells.co.uk/, who provide quality equipment for a fraction of the price of a new piece of machinery.
4. Non-Profit Making Activities
Sitting down and working out where you are spending your energies over a week can be a real eye-opener. It is a good exercise to mark out what you have done every hour over a week and then assess which activities are wasting your time and which ones are making you money. For example, you may find you are spending a great deal of time bookkeeping instead of marketing. Assess whether this activity can be outsourced, freeing you the time to bring in more customers that can really affect your revenue.
