Running a business is one of the costliest endeavors a person could possibly imagine.
In addition to its personal and managerial challenges, there is also a whole host of expenses required to operate an enterprise.
Business owners have all kinds of things to pay for like:
- Rent for the workspace
- Means of production which facilitate the sale of goods and services
- Salaries for employees
- Marketing
- Licenses and other related fees
- Taxes
Anyone would get a headache trying to calculate the total of all of these baseline operational expenses.
But small business owners are in a particularly vulnerable position when it comes to covering these costs and getting their enterprises off the ground.
Without a wealthy corporation backing your business interests and providing initial capital, it can be hard to make ends meet, let alone start earning a profit, when your small business is in its early stages.
That’s why it’s so important to look for ways to save money in your business procedures. Here are three ways to cut back on expenses for your small business.
1. Hire Independent Contractors
Independent Contractors are individuals who do work for other people or companies on a contractual basis without being hired directly as an employee.
For positions where this is applicable, hiring independent contractors rather than traditional employees can save employers a lot of money on employee salaries and taxes.
For work that is project-based rather than hourly, it makes sense to use contractors because they can be paid on a case-by-case basis. They also won’t need to be paid when there is no work for them to do.
Employers are not obligated to pay FICA taxes for Medicare and Social Security for income paid to independent contractors. This means even more savings for small business owners. Make sure to have all contractors fill out a W-9 form for tax purposes.
If it makes sense to have any of your existing employees converted into independent contractors, you can have them take the ICC exam to get their contractor’s license.
2. Rethink Your Advertising Strategy
Traditional advertising methods can be costly, especially for small businesses. One way to cut back on these expenses is to stop paying for Internet ads and market your services via other means.
One way to drive customer engagement is by incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) techniques into your business’s web content. This is essentially a strategic way of including keywords in content to make a web page appear higher on search engine results pages.
This is an efficient and cost-effective way to engage potential customers who are searching for keywords associated with your business. You can learn to use SEO techniques yourself, or hire an SEO company to handle your web content.
3. Hire Interns
This is another way to cut back on salary expenses. If you can justify that the work provides valuable job experience in a relevant field, you may be able to hire interns to do various tasks for your business.
Most internships are unpaid, as the intern is thought to be compensated in experience, so this is a great way to increase productivity while decreasing lost revenue.
Consider hiring marketing or computer science students as interns to help with your social media engagement and search engine optimization. That would take care of two cost-saving strategies at once!
Conclusion
Small business owners have to endure a lot of financial stress to make their operations run smoothly. But by incorporating these strategies, you can relieve some of the financial burdens and be on your way to making a profit even sooner!
