4 Easy Ways to Lower Your Monthly Expenses

Whether your business is a brand new venture, or you’ve been up and running for years already, it’s likely that you’re on the lookout to reduce your expenditure as much as possible.

A common fear that comes with saving money is the concept of “cutting back,” that a large-scale, dramatic change is necessary in order for you to start saving exponentially—and of course it’s more than reasonable that as a business owner, you don’t want to make sudden, drastic changes to the way you run your business.

Fortunately, though, you don’t have to. It is possible to save money and lower your monthly expenses without making just one drastic, sudden change.

Streamlining some of the processes currently in place, replacing others, and introducing new ways of working doesn’t have to be like turning off one switch and switching on another. Undertaking these tasks progressively with smaller changes over time is actually much more beneficial and likely to stick in the long term.

So, if you want to generate more expendable income for your business—whether to simply reduce your monthly expenditure, or have more time and money available to spend on new ventures, here are some easy, non-radical ways you can do so.

1. Lower your energy bills and consumption

Energy isn’t cheap, that much is clear—but it’s a necessary expenditure when you’re running a business, and impossible to cut out completely. Whether you’re running one small office or an entire warehouse, you will no doubt have lighting, equipment, and appliances to power.

Fortunately, it is more than possible to reduce the amount of money your business might spend each month on gas and electricity. In fact, it’s actually pretty easy.

One consideration is that you might not currently be getting the best possible rate for your business’s utility bills, because it’s often the case that the standard used by most energy companies isn’t necessarily the best price. It’s therefore a good idea to get in touch with either your current energy company or an energy switching service to find out if you really are getting the lowest cost, or if you could move elsewhere and ultimately pay less for your energy.

You could also consider the energy efficiency of your current energy outputs. Replacing your current bulbs for environmentally-friendly alternatives, and upgrading to low-energy equipment and appliances (which offer the same level of performance) are just two of the simple ways you can save your company from spending hundreds of what would otherwise be profitable dollars on unnecessarily high energy bills.

2. Review your insurance policy

By taking a little time to review the current insurance package or policies that your business has in place, you could potentially save yourself hundreds of dollars each year—or even each month, depending on the type and amount of policies you need.

It’s entirely possible that you may have opted for a policy or package which, by default, includes coverage for certain incidences that don’t necessarily apply to your industry or particular business. You might even find that you’re paying out for an entire policy that you don’t need.

By taking the time to talk to an expert broker, you could discuss your business’s particular circumstances and identify the coverage your company actually needs, and then have a bespoke package created which reflects this. This means that you then only pay for the insurance you need, and none of the coverage you don’t, which could considerably shave down your monthly insurance bills.

3. Refine your recruitment and employee management processes

Advertising new job positions, recruiting employees, and managing your current staff is a time and cost-heavy task from a HR perspective. However, there are numerous ways you can trim these costs down.

A huge time-saver can be sourcing an external company to handle your business’s HR and payroll responsibilities. This is much more efficient than tackling these issues yourself, or having an employee who perhaps isn’t schooled in this area of business informally take on these tasks, leaving room for errors and inaccuracies. This way, your employees can then also spend more time doing their professional duties, rather than HR tasks.

Depending on the size of your business, it can also be cheaper to outsource rather than employ someone new full-time to carry out the duties of a HR role—so it’s worthwhile considering the benefits of outsourcing before you employ someone solely to perform these tasks. After all, a new employee, or set of employees, will require their own space and resources, which could incur extra monthly expenses to you down the line.

When it comes to finding new staff, recruitment agencies are generally quite an expensive means of finding potential candidates for a job role—and they aren’t necessarily always successful, either. Advertising on job websites is a much more cost-effective route.

4. Invest in online advertising

Advertising your business is a significant area of expenditure. After all, if people don’t know about your business, how can they purchase a product or service from you?

The trouble is, marketing can seem like it is perhaps too expensive at times. As with virtually anything in the business world, though, there are ways that you can make this process much less costly without compromising effectiveness—namely, by putting the majority of your efforts into online marketing.

Whether you outsource your online marketing services to an agency, take a more hands-on approach and do it yourself, or start building your own in-house marketing team, there are many efficient and cost-effective methods for you to put your brand on the map and engage with customers.

Search engine optimization (SEO), for example, describes a number of different techniques used to increase the visibility of a website in the search engine results pages. If your company website is currently difficult for your target market to find, it is worthwhile finding out more about SEO, as many of these techniques are entirely free to implement and require little more than a few hours of research.

Social media marketing is a pivotal area you can’t afford to ignore. After all, every man and his dog has a Facebook or Twitter account in this day and age, and it doesn’t cost the earth to create your own social media accounts and start using these to connect with your audience.