Perhaps you even go that extra mile of ensuring the office has the perfect furniture, modern finishes, and a well-stocked kitchen just to keep your staff happy.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with doing all these things and even more…
We’ve seen companies provide pet care sections for their employees and even resting areas for breastfeeding mums. So yes, comfort at work is something of great importance.
But as a small business looking to grow, it might not be sustainable to compete with the multinationals in terms of spending on business operations.
A line has to be drawn between what is necessary and what simply amounts to wastage of resources.
Perhaps what makes things even worse is that many small businesses don’t stick to their weekly, monthly, or annual budgets; instead, they end up spending until they are too tight. You can refer to it as a lack of discipline, misplaced priorities, or anything else. In this article, I will show you three key areas where you’re likely to wasting your business finances so you can avoid running into cash flow problems.
1. Focusing on big one-time campaigns
It’s true that there are plenty of marketing ideas to try out; a number of them have worked for some businesses and changed their fortunes immensely. But at the same time, other tactics simply don’t work for any business today. In fact, if your budget only allows you to try out a marketing tactic once, then the chances of failure are quite high.
Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t have much money to keep trying this and that marketing strategy. In most cases, this results in a big unsuccessful campaign that ends up draining their business resources with minimal to no positive impacts on the business.
We highly recommend that you test out your strategy using smaller budgets first before throwing all your marketing resources behind it. Chances are that if it does yield much using $1,000 or less, it’s unlikely to make much difference with ten times that budget.
2. Fancy office space and furniture
Yes, yes! We all love sitting around in offices with the best fabric our money can ever afford us. And don’t we all love spacious rooms just in case the team “suddenly” grows?
These are things that most small businesses get themselves into without thinking much about the likely impact they may have to the business.
But don’t get this the wrong way, we’re huge fans of the happy employees create happy customers slogan. However, if an employee is going to stay in your company simply because they are comfortable, then prepare for their departure when times get tough, as they always will.
The point is, as a small business, you’ve got to be prepared to forego comfort now for something bigger in future. If you’re not one of those businesses that charge hundreds of dollars per hour for your service, then you might need to keep it low for now. Better times are always ahead of businesses that sacrifice today.
3. Don’t be a pancake!
Right!
Have you seen those businesses that get into anything and everything that seems like a way of boosting their revenue? If today, they hear that Facebook ads are the way to, tomorrow they pour hundreds of dollars in it. And if the day after, it turns out their neighbor realized a huge improvement in customer service of another business strategy such as organizing weekly staff hangouts in fancy hotels to motivate them, then they are there too.
The problem with trying anything that comes your way is that you end up spreading yourself too thin, pretty much like a pancake. You won’t ever focus and get value off anything you do. To realize any tangible results from anything, you’ve got to do it consistently and to its entirety.
There you have it, there are tons of other areas that businesses waste their resources in.
As usual, we’d love to hear from you about some of the areas you seem to be wasting money on or those that you once did.
