In these challenging economic times, it can be necessary to streamline your business. With the current Covid-19 pandemic showing no signs of abating just yet, every business across every industry is feeling the financial pinch. Rather than pushing the panic button, you need to assess those areas of your business that you can streamline. Streamlining doesn’t mean offloading all of your staff or putting a halt to all of your expansion plans. You need to consider how you can save money without putting the quality of your product or service at risk. Take a look at how you can streamline your business in three simple steps.
Admin Tasks
When your business comes under financial pressure, the concept of outsourcing any business function may seem a little odd. However, allowing a third party to take control of your payroll, for example, at minimal cost, will enable you to have more time to focus on your crisis management strategy. If you are a healthcare company, why not outsource medical billing to a specialist offsite? If you are a restaurant, think about outsourcing your payroll capability to a food business wage specialist. Go with a firm that specializes in your industry sector to ensure they comply with sector-specific legislation.
Marketing
While you may not have as much money to spend on marketing, you can look at alternative and cheaper avenues to market your brand and business. Think about using your free social media feeds to enhance your business prowess online. Having a strong online presence is crucial if you are to attract new clients or customers during a financially difficult time. Relying on your current customer base can be too limiting to the integrity of your company. You always need to be looking at expanding your clientele no matter what the economic situation. As well as social media, think about more old school marketing ploys. Invite people to your site, for a free consultation or tour, or post free samples to those individuals on your email marketing list to try and secure their first order.
Staffing
While you might not want to lose staff, sometimes the economic situation calls for it if you are to save your business. Letting people go is difficult, especially if your staff are like family. To ensure that you streamline with empathy, look at the job market and give them pointers of potential openings elsewhere. Ensure that you provide the most comprehensive redundancy package that you can and always leave the door open for your staff to return at a future date. The chances are that they will prefer to move on to newer pastures without looking back. Alternatively, you could tell your staff that they will need to take a pay cut in an effort to keep them all in a job. While difficult, they will respect you if you explain your reasoning and set an example by taking a pay cut yourself.
Streamlining your business can be challenging but necessary to survive in these unprecedented times.
