Optimising a business can mean a whole array of different things. When most people talk about optimisation, they are generally talking about the house’s financial side—in other words, maximising the income while slashing down on expenses as much as possible. Here are four ways you can do this for your business.
Photo by Christina Morillo
Be Smart With Your Funding
Liquid funds are an essential prerequisite for growth. However, the way you acquire funds can determine whether you’ll have optimal growth or if you’ll be entering a bad deal long-term. If you know where to seek funding from, you can purchase money for cheap. We’re talking about banks, different kinds of loans, and many other sources of financing. There are also alternative lenders that offer loans for businesses, such as Kapitus, and for some of them you can even apply online.
Suppose you’re wondering how any of this will help your financial situation. In that case, the answer is relatively straightforward — sometimes, the only way to optimise a business is to grow it using carefully sourced funding.
Some business owners tend to look for partnerships where they’ll offer a particular stake in the company in exchange for a money injection. As you might expect, entering such partnerships requires thorough planning. Additionally, this isn’t something you can do too many times. There’s only so much of your company when you divide it into shares.
Plug All Holes and Leaks
There are two ways to cut down on expenses — by plugging all the leaks or by slimming down your organisation as a whole. The former is something any business can benefit from, while the latter should be among the last methods used, given the severity of the consequences. Trimming any excess spending can be done through optimising payroll. Software engineers from zenefits argue that using payroll software is enough to tighten up the belt in all the right places. The idea is to leave very little to chance using many of the automated features this type of software offers.
But wait, there’s more. Specialised software includes apps designed to handle all aspects of leading a business. Anything from employee selection and onboarding to running daily operations can be enhanced using adequate software.
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Invest in New Technologies
Whether you’re a service-oriented business or one that is focused on manufacturing, there is a good chance that your operation can benefit from new technologies in your niche. Let’s say you’re running a paper production company. Your current machines and equipment is working fine, but you’re noticing a steady increase in maintenance prices.
Investing in a completely new production line means dedicating a large chunk of your assets or taking out a loan. However, it’s not just maintenance costs that will plummet if you decide to commit to this investment.
The new equipment happens to utilise 20% less energy while having an output that is 25% higher than what you’re managing right now. Once you add these efficiency benefits on top of the lower maintenance, there’s a good chance you’ll be in the green even with a semi-aggressive interest rate on your loans.
Assess the Market
Assessing the market is one of the critical steps necessary if you’re serious about improving your company’s financial situation. Knowing who your target audience is, what they want, and what they need, you can figure out how to tune up your prices.
If you’ve entered a slow period, lowering your prices could be the right thing that will attract more business. Reducing the costs of services or goods in most cases brings a positive reaction and an increase in sales. This move is also an excellent way to get rid of any inventory that you’ve been floating for far too long.
However, if your sales are at an all-time high and your services or goods are in high demand, you can boost your financial situation by increasing the prices. Of course, you need to be extremely careful when pushing too hard can bring negative and sometimes disastrous results.
Owning a company and running it can be a daunting task. However, most of the time, all it takes is a good work ethic and creativity to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
These four suggestions are just the tip of an enormous iceberg that hides all kinds of complex and straightforward ways of optimising your company’s finances. As you’ve probably noticed by now, great solutions aren’t always intuitive. On the contrary, they are sometimes anything but.