Being a business owner, especially for a small company, is not free from stress. In fact, as a small business, there will feel as though there are many more risks than if you were running a sprawling, corporate entity.
Larger companies have a habit of running themselves after a certain point, but if you’re in a position where you’re the only one holding the reins, it can be pretty daunting, no matter how much experience you have.
Managing a small budget on top of this can add to those stresses as you contemplate the risks of overspending or failing to account for certain expenses.
To help provide you with some guidance and peace of mind, we’ve put together some of our top tips for running a smaller business like this, as well as some ways in which you can be sure to keep spending a bit lower.
1. Understanding Your Industry
This may sound patronizing, but it’s not uncommon for people to start a business without expert knowledge of their industry.
Of course, this is perfectly fine and shows you’ve identified a good business idea to run with. But gaining this advanced knowledge should be an ongoing task for any business owner. This will help you realize the different methods of budgeting that other businesses use, as well as the general way that the marketplace operates within your industry.
While there is lots of advice online for creating a good budget, having this extra knowledge will help you plan your budget based on specific variables, such as the changing customer and client interest in your business throughout the year.
For example, many retailers experience much higher profits during the holiday than in the summertime.
2. Keep Track Of Your Budget
Just because you’ve laid out your budget for the year, this doesn’t mean you can forget about it and spend away.
At the same time, you also don’t need to have daily budget meetings to discuss every single purchase. Instead, find a healthy medium and perhaps host a monthly team budgeting meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page, especially if you have multiple people in your small team with access to the budget.
The last thing you need for your business is to overspend in unnecessary areas and be out of pocket when making actual payments.
3. Create A Quality Team
The most crucial piece of the puzzle for any business is your team. Without a competent group of people around you to help pick up the slack and drive you further towards success, you’re going to be struggling to stay afloat.
If your team is constantly dragging you down and making mistakes, it might have been better to do the whole job alone. However, having a team of experts around you that both understand the industry and have a solid working knowledge of their role and what is required of them will be highly beneficial to you.
Remember, though, with significant expertise comes more outstanding paychecks, especially if someone realizes their usefulness. The chances are, if someone is interviewing for your business, they’re interviewing elsewhere too and so may have the option to pick the best offer.
It could be worthwhile to consider hiring someone less experienced but with significant drive and determination to learn. Nurturing talent in the inexperienced is ideal for creating a great team while staying on budget. Just don’t forget about the risks.
4. Find Better Deals On Tech
Technology for you and your team can be one of the most costly parts of running a business, especially if you have an office space and need to populate it with computers for designers and pay for things like printer ink. It’s always important to search for the best deals possible, and this can include second-hand tech, as well as cheaper alternatives.
When it comes to supplying your team with their work phones, you could purchase some more affordable smartphones and pay for SIM-only plans like those offered by Lebara. Click here to see their range of options to find one that would suit you and your budget.
The chances are your team won’t need the latest iPhone to do their job and will merely need a simple smartphone to make calls and respond to work emails without these tasks interfering with their own devices. Having work accounts and client details stored on personal devices is also a risk when it comes to privacy, so it’s best to stick with work phones that can be returned if team members leave.
5. Set Goals
With this, try to be slightly more direct about what you want. We all have goals when running a business, but this can often be simply making more profit or getting more customers within a specific timeframe.
This may be a worthy aim, but it doesn’t give you or your team any direction. First, you should set some required goals and don’t bend them. For example, you could plan to save 25% of your budget by the end of next year so that you can use that money to upgrade your office space.
If you don’t keep that money, you may have to wait even longer, and you should hold yourself responsible for failing to hit that goal. It’s also worthwhile setting more demanding goals than usual as this can encourage you and your team to work harder to achieve this.
Many people work well under pressure, but don’t forget that everyone has a limit, and pushing people over the edge will be severely detrimental. Find a balance between challenging and reasonable when setting these goals.
6. Focus On Your Priorities
When you are setting those goals, don’t forget to lay them out in a way where you can identify your priority tasks and less important secondary ones. Decide which goals must be met, no matter the cost, and focus on those.
This might be having enough of your budget left to pay for essentials like rent and paychecks. Your secondary goals will be increasing the size of your audience and improving your marketing efforts.
While these are incredibly important, the survival of your business trumps everything else.
7. Create A Positive Company Culture
There is a considerable focus today on creating positive and friendly workspaces.
As a society, we have become much more aware of mental wellness and the importance of kindness in the workplace. There are many benefits to having a good company culture and some seriously damaging effects from the alternative.
Running a business with a toxic workplace environment could be costing you a lot of money. This will be down to increased staff turnover and even lawsuits, but generally, a toxic workplace will impact performance and, ultimately, your profits.
8. Customer Service
Another critical aspect of running your business successfully and saving some money is to make sure your customers are happy.
Not only does this increase the amount of custom you’ll end up generating with a larger, satisfied audience, you’ll also avoid losing customers as well.
Your budget is likely going to be based on how many customers and clients you have that are paying for services or products, and so to maintain a healthy income, you’ll want to take care of your customers.
