Businesses are always looking for ways to make more money. At times, their efforts to make money end up costing them the very resource they were trying to increase. If sales are low, you don’t necessarily increase sales by hiring more salespeople. If you have a deficiency in training, you will just pass that deficiency to a new crop of trainees. In trying to fix the problem, you have made it worse in the most expensive possible way. It doesn’t have to be that way. Before you can solve the problem, you have to know what is causing it. That can be an expensive lesson to learn.
Sometimes, less really is more. You can make more money by reducing waste and inefficiencies. It can be hard to know what aspects of your business are truly wasteful. You might look at the amount you are spending on condiments and decide that you can save a lot of money by switching to cheaper products. But if none of your workers like the alternative, they might stop eating in the cafeteria and start eating out, making them either late for work or rushed and out of sorts. Perhaps you should keep stocking the good catsup. Instead, try cutting the following.
Reduce Electricity
By switching to something like demand management, you can not only cut your energy costs, but get paid just for being willing to reduce power during high-demand events when the grid is undergoing too much load. On those scorching hot days when no one is questioning the concept of global warming, every air conditioner connected to a wall socket is running on full. This leads to those rolling blackouts that constitutes a bad day for everyone. Some of those blackouts don’t have to happen. There are ways to budget one’s power and save big on the bill.
Electricity is not the only way. You can also utilize solar. There are still deep tax credits for homeowners and many benefits for businesses that invest in solar. One of the greatest benefits is diversification. If you know you are doing business in an area where the grid can’t handle the load, solar gives you another option when the lights go dark for everyone else. There are ways to deal with the upfront investment. And the long-term savings benefits are hard to deny. By cutting wasteful energy use, you will save a lot of money. And the planet will thank you.
Reduce Hazards
Safety saves money. By making your business safer, you can save thousands almost immediately. You will always have to pay your workman’s comp taxes. But you will not have to spend as much money settling claims when fewer people are injured. When people are not sick or injured, they can be at work and remain productive.
Safety measures might seem like an expense rather than a savings. But you will always save money when spending on safety measures. There are the fines and penalties you face for not including safety measures. There are the business-ending lawsuits you will almost certainly lose when safety is neglected. And there is the loss of person-hours and the loss of reputation inherent in an unsafe environment. By cutting corners with safety spending, you are not getting ahead but falling behind. Reducing accidents and injuries is within your ability as a business owner. And it will always save you money.
Meetings
Business meetings are never seen as a positive interruption of one’s workday. Taking a team away from the task at hand to talk to them for an hour about something that could have been shared in an email is unproductive, frustrating, and costly. If you must have team meetings, make them short and include only one or two relevant pieces of information. Have managers do individual and small group consults for training. Make training videos that workers can access as their schedule permits. Facilitate discussion over business chat, video chat, and other tools used for remote work. The fewer times you pull your employees away from their desk, the better. Make sure your meetings are not costing you money.
Reducing waste makes you money. Some of your biggest savings are gained by reducing energy use, safety hazards, and unnecessary meetings.
