If you are running a business, you will now how tough it can be at times and for every single £1 you spend, you have worked very hard to earn that money. So therefore it is important to be careful when spending.
Many businesses have failed because they haven’t kept a close eye on the numbers and not paid attention to where the money is spent, not looking on the return on investment of marketing, or not looking for a better quote and so on.
So we should all be looking to save money right?
Well actually…..NO
If you can’t afford to speculate and risk some money in the right areas, then really don’t go in to business, don’t become self-employed, freelance etc. if you are not willing to make some investment.
Should you get cheap business cards to save £50-£100? Think about the first impression, when your business cards are paper thin because you could only risk a tenner. Those kind of savings are all too common and just give out the wrong signals.
Should you have a Gmail account? Yes, but splash out an extra £3.99 per head and get Gmail for business, then your company’s domain will be on your email address not Gmail- so mary@successfulbiz.com and not mary@gmail.com
These are the small extra spends that are not even worth thinking about, amazingly you still see plenty of Gmail or Yahoo etc email accounts on business cards that look like they were made at home.
These kind of things tell your potential customers that you’re not really that committed to your business.
What about going to free networking events to save £10-£15 on a breakfast or a few £100s on an annual membership to a proper networking organisation? Again may seem obvious, but many go once to a free for all and free to attend networking and then wonder why they didn’t get any business.
Instead if you looked at a say £300 commitment per year, that would give you a year’s worth of networking and more than likely 10 – 20 x that in return. Perhaps may times more, however if you never try you’ll never find out.
It would put you in front of other business that were also serious and likely to generate opportunities that you wouldn’t get by going to an event that is free.
Then there is the working from home all day, every day, to save train fares and workspace costs. This is something I hear frequently from small micro business owners or freelancers.
This is a big one in today’s world of the mushrooming number of freelance/self-employed. Definitely you make big savings here…..train travel is expensive and so potentially is workspace.
However, this is one of riskiest savings of all. If you work at home all the time, sure you save money, but at the risk of missing opportunities. You have to buy a ticket to be at the show.
Not all business, certainly not the best, can be done in the ether or remotely. You need to be around others to find and secure opportunities, not just for the sake of money, although pretty damn important, but you miss so much shared experience and knowledge by not being there among others. You can never predict who you might have a conversation with at co-working space or a networking event, what you can predict is, that if you never go, you’ll never have any conversations.
So weigh it up, save a train ticket and the cost of a co-working desk for the day, or splash out, spend £40-£50 and unlock the opportunities that others will have for the ones who show up.
This doesn’t mean that you can never work form home again or make savings in your business.
Make smart savings, not the ones that inhibit your business’s chance to grow and succeed. But most of all make sales not savings.
Philip Dodson 