Times are tough, and your current finances may be even tougher. The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has brought mayhem to the world of business – many of which have either had to close their doors, move to home offices, or had to re-think their entire business strategy.
It’s time to face the facts. As a business, this is just not the time to be spending money – it’s the time to be cutting your expenses in half.
Here at BusinessMobiles.com, we pride ourselves on helping our customers do everything that they possibly can to make their businesses succeed, and that includes during times of trouble like these.
We’ve come up with our very own cost-cutting plan that will ensure you and your business are saving pennies in all the right places – whilst still maximising on your potential to generate the most income that you can.
The difficulties that we’re all facing are a marathon, not a sprint – and it’s important to remember that cutting costs today will save you in the future. Check out our top tips to cut business costs below:
1. Make Sensible Choices In Order To Cut Costs
While you may be hoping for the best, it’s absolutely essential that you’re preparing for the worst. It’s entirely possible that even if you’re not desperate or struggling with money today – the truth is that we just don’t know how long this is going to go on for, or what the outcome for business will be like when everything returns to ‘normal’ – so make sure your choices remain sensible.
What does that mean? You don’t want to be maxing out your personal credit cards to cover bills, you don’t want to be missing payroll cycles because you think you can cover them at a later date. Those are all choices that you may not be able to crawl back from.
This could also mean upgrading your current outdated systems to more efficient, modern solutions. For example, a VoIP system is highly economical and proven to cut costs + optimise communications. See our VoIP phone systems for business now.
It’s so important to stretch out your money and cut out all non-essential costs, whilst making clear decisions on what’s really important for your business in the long term, and avoiding any potential debt.
Missed one too many payments? Learn how to get a business phone contract with bad credit here.
2. Go Back to Basics
Seriously consider before renewing any services, applications, or contractors that aren’t absolutely essential to your business right now. I know, I know – these may be valuable to you, but if you don’t physically need them right now – they can wait.
You don’t need frills, you don’t need to be spending money on trying out new things, you need functionality. That means, if you’re in the middle of implementing a fancy new referral service or paying £££ for someone to revamp your website – it’s time to stop and reconsider.
Take the time to build up a picture of your costs and evaluate what currently serves a real purpose. If your business was working just fine beforehand, chances are that they’re just unnecessary costs, at least for the time being.
3. Speak to Suppliers
If you’re a business that relies on suppliers, whether that means mobile phones like us, various services that are utterly essential to your business, products or stock for retail, or even IT systems – it’s a really good idea to just pick up the phone and speak directly to them.
Chances are that your suppliers will be more concerned with keeping your business and any long-standing arrangements. So they’ll be more than willing to hear out your individual situations and will be ready to negotiate. Now is not the time to be losing clients – even if that means minimising or delaying payments for the time being.
4. Take Advantage of Cash Resources – Cut Costs
This may be a long shot, but now would be a great time for your business to chase up on any outstanding payments that you’re owed. Whether that be for services you’ve provided or items that you’ve sold and not yet received payment for – chase up those invoices! You may have cash reserves to keep you afloat for a while – but that won’t last forever, so it’s important to gather up payments while you can.
You may also want to look into any resources that the government is currently offering to businesses. There are a whole range of support options that are currently being offered to UK businesses such as business rates relief, support grant funds, and help with paying employees.
We strongly believe that with a combination of readily available cash and government-offered support, your business will come out strong. However, it’s still important to consider your staff. Read how businesses are using slack to improve team communication, or read more about staffing options below:
5. Consider Staffing
As a last resort, you may want to consider reducing either your staff or their hours. It’s important not to rush into cutting down staff, bearing in mind the fact that when this pandemic is over – you’ll need to be ready to resume business as usual, but it’s still a good idea to consider the following options:
- Reducing hours: This isn’t ideal and definitely won’t get you a vote for boss of the year, but slightly reducing your employee’s hours is a far better option than leaving them unemployed.
If you were to even reduce all of your employees hours by just one a day (without causing any damage to profit) – you could save a relatively large amount of money when you need it most. - The Government Furlough Scheme: If you feel it necessary, you may consider furloughing some of your employees. Learn more about the Furlough scheme here.
- Individual Staff Offers: Take the time to discuss with each member of your team what’s possible for them and plan from there.
- Redundancies: This shouldn’t be necessary, but if you feel you’re left with no choice – this may be a last-resort option when you consider the business’s long-term survival requirements.
Want to ensure maximum efficiency among your team? Read through our list of the best work apps for management and connectivity!
6. Keep Calm (and carry on!)
It’s so important that you don’t panic when it comes to managing your finances – both for the current period of mayhem and in the long term. While it’s important to cut costs now, you need to focus on what’s going to help you in the long run, not just focus on short-term survival.
All the decisions you’re having to make right now will require you to be a strong leader – and it’s so important to remain empathetic, courageous, and take any and all data into account with your decisions.
As businesses, now is the time to stick together. With the correct cost-cutting measures, contingency plans, and business evolvements, along with continued support across the industries – we can all get through this together.
Make sure you find the perfect plan for your business. Find & compare the best business phone plans and the benefits behind them. After that, check out our list of the Top 10 Best Mobile Phone models for Business!
