Every business wants to make a bit more money right? The quest to boost profits is one that never ends for businesses. Yet no-one should be under any illusion that this is easy. If it was, business would never be forced to close – and 40 per cent of businesses wouldn’t fail in their first five years.
Review your operations
Don’t change anything before you’ve conducted a full review of your operations. You need to have an honest assessment of what you do well and what you don’t do well. Fail to do this and you could easily harm productivity by changing something that was working fine. You need to pinpoint one or two areas in which you could improve and zero in on those.
Do this by going through your finances and looking at your expenditure – as well as looking at your key performance targets and which you have struggled most to meet.
Also take a step back and look at your working practices. Are you happy with the way in which you carry out tasks? Is there a new type of software that can save you time and money by speeding up your working processes?
Remember to look at your rivals too. If they’ve managed to steal a march on you, what has caused their surge in performance?
Cut costs
As well as looking for things you can do better, you need to consider things you can do cheaper. Every pound you spend as a business is a pound more off your potential profits.
Look at the suppliers you use and the bills you have to pay. Can you switch providers to save some money? Are there some functions you can take in-house to cut your bill with contractors and freelancers? What about your premises? Could you move to an office with a smaller rent?
Don’t rule anything out – be ruthless and look to take every chance you can to cut your costs.
Revisit your pricing structure
While you can look to spend less at one end of the spectrum you can also look to make more too. Revisit your pricing structure and see if you are under-charging customers for any of the products and services you offer.
Many businesses introduce a price when they first set out and are then nervous to raise this for fear of losing custom. While you do have to be mindful of this, you have to make sure you are being charged a fair price and getting the level of profit you deserve.
Refresh your marketing plan
What if you’re doing a great job and producing high quality products and services but aren’t quite making the profits you desire? In this case, it’s time to have a look at your marketing strategy. You need to reach out to customers – existing and new – and let them know what you’ve got to offer.
New tactics and techniques on the marketing front can give you the boost you need and help you to reel in the customers you need to boost your profits.
Explore areas for growth
Finally, is there anything new that you can do to improve your offering? You should always be on the lookout for new ideas to boost your business. This could mean an entirely new product range or service or it might simply be an add-on to something you already do which could bring in more money from your existing customer base.
New ideas are great fodder for your marketing efforts too – giving you something fresh to talk about and a new focus.
Whether you offer something new, market yourself better, charge more, cut costs or streamline your operations – or do all of the above – taking action such as this should help to deliver stronger profits for your business.
