Cost Savings Ideas for Business
Saving money as a small business can be tricky—if you’re a startup especially, money might be tight already. You probably don’t have a big portion of your income that you can tuck away as savings, and you welcome opportunities to make your operations more cost-effective. We’ve compiled a list of money saving tips—ways for you to trim overhead here, and increase efficiency there, until you’re on your way to better financial health.
In this list, I will cover:
- Nearly-Universal Tips
- Office and Home Business Related Tips
- For Those Outside The U.S.
Nearly-Universal Tips
No matter your industry or location, you should be able to apply most of this advice, even if you need to tweak it a bit to suit your needs.
1. Go green
You’ve heard it before and it’s still true: going green saves green. Whether it’s a home business, office, storefront—whatever kind of space your business is using, the more energy efficient your space is, the lower utility costs you’re going to have. So go out and buy those compact fluorescent bulbs already—they can save you three quarters of your lighting bill per year! For more information on greening your spaces, check out Energy Star, a program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
2. Use open source and cloud computing
Every startup will use some kind of software, for things like book keeping, word processing, and presentation. Sourceforge has an index of open source options. For most things you need to do, you can find an open source and/or cloud version of it. “You do not need to buy that expensive office software and servers when you can switch to a cloud vendor—Google is an example—at a fraction of the cost, ” says Ali Asadi of A Profit Maker.
3. Use own-brand or generic brand goods
It’s always tempting to buy name brand, but it’s almost never worth the money. If you’re looking at buying goods for your business, just go with generic (or as they say in the U.K., own-brand); the box may not be as pretty but the product will be the same.
4. Sponsors for events
There’s a wide range of reasons why a business may need to throw an event, but you likely will need to at some point, and they can certainly be costly. Joining together with another business as a sponsor to throw an event can mean a higher quality event and more press for all involved.
