A lot of entrepreneurs often forget that in order to save money you either have to A) cut some corners or B) choose more cost-effective options. The first method makes direct savings but it compromises your business on another front. By using fewer supplies in manufacturing or downsizing your team, you’re also making your business less efficient, which, in the end, might mean that the end result simply won’t be worth it. On the other hand, if you were to pick more cost-effective solutions, you would stand to spend the same amount of money, while receiving more. Here are six ideas to show you exactly how this works.
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Use online courses
This is, by far, the best way of investing in the education of your employees and the advantages of this model are numerous. First of all, they don’t have to be absent from work due to the constant back and forth travel. Second, they don’t have to spend money on the commute. Third, they get access to courses that aren’t necessarily available in their home region. Lastly, online courses, both their model and curriculum, are highly pragmatic and designed for someone who wants to acquire a new skill without putting their day job on hold.
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Migrate to the cloud
Migrating your business to the cloud can make some of the most important and most common processes around the office much simpler. It can also provide your team with simple, direct and secure access to their work files, regardless of where they are. This will provide them with the ability to change something from home without having to return to office in the middle of the night just because there’s a crisis that needs to be tended to right away. Moreover, more and more tools are cloud-based, so, the sooner you catch up with the trend, the better.
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Outsource your web hosting
The thing you need to know about web hosting is that it’s a complex yet important process. This is why it’s best to find professional web hosting services to team up with. Web hosting, on its own, is incredibly important but it’s the support that comes from outsourcing that you need to care about the most. Other than this and the reliability that comes from a work well done, you also need to think about the way to increase your security and having an iron-clad hosting system is definitely the first step towards achieving it.
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Rely on online invoices
Using online invoices can do so much for your payment system. First of all, it’s much quicker and smoother than traditional payments. Second, it gives you a direct insight into how far away you are from your next payment and provides you with a detailed report of your payment history. Due to its automation, it makes the overall process a lot easier and minimizes the chance of error. Finally, you get to minimize the fees involved in the transaction processes. In other words, it’s a win-win scenario for everyone.
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Use remote workers
The most reliable way of increasing your productivity lies in hiring new people to join your team. However, paying these people, providing them with adequate equipment and finding space for them is not as easy. What you should try to do is turn to remote workers to efficiently handle this situation. Other than giving people a chance to work from their own home, you’ll also have an easy job handling short-term increases in workload without having to bring in more in-house employees.
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Productivity platforms
The last thing you need to do is find the right way to give your in-house team a productivity boost by finding adequate platforms for their work. Straight off the bat, you need to invest in a collaboration tool in order to help them be more efficient when working on major projects. Other than this, you might want to invest in an employee monitoring software, just so you can see who in your organization is actually doing all the heavy lifting. Other than this, specialized remote access tools like TeamViewer can be quite useful in helping new employees out. Finally, there’s the issue of picking the right niche-specific tool for your industry.
Conclusion
As you can see, each of these methods gives you a chance to get more than your money’s worth for each business decision that you make. The difference that each of these methods can make is quite sizable and, when combined together, they can make your business drastically more frugal. In other words, instead of investing more in order to grow your enterprise, you need to learn how to invest smarter.
Dan Radak is a marketing professional with eleven years of experience. He is a coauthor on several websites and regular contributor to BizzMark Blog. Currently, he is working with a number of companies in the field of digital marketing, closely collaborating with a couple of e-commerce companies.