Reduce business overheads survival guide and advice

REDUCE BUSINESS OVERHEADS SURVIVAL GUIDE AND ADVICE

Reduce business overheads survival guide and advice for recession hit businesses to continue making money and profit from the credit squeeze.

If you are in business you are most likely seeing your overheads go up, sales falling and clients dropping off the books because they have either gone bust or have found cheaper suppliers out of necessity. You must now look at ways of reducing your own overheads and finding new clients in order to survive this recession.

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REDUCE OVERHEADS

All businesses, no matter how big or small have to be managed by their cash flow. When trading conditions are difficult, many companies will delay paying invoices and expect other businesses to act as their bankers. They will be holding onto their cash to reduce their bank charges whilst expecting you to have to foot the bill for your overdraft. Consequently, many small businesses will be forced out of business by having too many bad debts on their books.

FACTORING

If you haven't already done so, you should look at factoring as an excellent way of ensuring that your cash flow is maintained at all times.

Factoring also ensure that you don't get caught by business who owe you money going to the wall. In a recession, many businesses that were perfectly healthy can find themselves in financial difficulties because they have to write off significant debts owed to them by companies who have been forced into liquidation.

UTILITY BILLS There are certain business overheads like telephone, electricity and gas where it is difficult to cut down consumption and when business trading conditions are tough, utilities like use of the telephone tend to go up. It may seem like you are saving small amounts of money but every cost saving, when added up can make all the difference. These people may be able to help you reduce your utility bills.

You should also encourage staff and clients to install MSN and Skype or a similar service on their PC's both of which can greatly reduce telephone costs.

PETROL COSTS

Obviously you can't do anything about the cost of petrol but you can do something about unnecessary consumption. More and more companies are arranging for staff, especially sales personnel to work from home not necessarily on a full time basis but on certain days of the week when it is not essential that they frequent the office. This can also lead to desk sharing which cuts down on office space required.

Better planning of sales calls so that sales representatives are not dashing around the countryside, confirming sales appointments to avoid wasted calls and even placing order forms online so that clients can easily make repeat orders will all save sales trips. Is the sales visit necessary if an order can be obtained over the phone or online?

Unfair bank charges

Asset Finance

Commercial Mortgages

Bridging loans

OUTSOURCING SALES STAFF

When trading conditions are tough, it often means your sales staff have to work harder to get fewer sales. Cold calling is often required but this means taking sales staff away from actually making sales. You should look at telesales as an alternative. A good telephone marketing and sales team can prevent the need to reduce or increase the costs of employing more sales people.

WEBSITE DESIGN

When business conditions determine the need to make your website work harder for you, it usually means having to employ a website designer to implement changes to your website. This doesn't always mean that more people will visit your website and buy your products or service. A cost efficient and most likely more profitable solution is to build a number of web pages on Utopele.com to drive more traffic to your website. Just because the market is in recession doesn't mean there are no clients out there, it just means that there are fewer looking and you should expose yourself to the danger of doing more business.

Advice on how to succeed in business during a recession