A number of business related problems are due to management not delegating or saving money by not hiring support staff. What if I told you that you could make smart business decisions that won’t cost you anything? In fact these small changes can often allow a company to run more smoothly and even save money.
Count your Resources
What a number of companies are realising is you cannot underestimate the value of support staff. Not only will it minimise stress of your existing staff, and reduce costly mistakes, you can make easy business decisions without changing your expenditure. Yes that right- not costing you anything more.
Have a look at the functioning of your company and the personnel requirements. Can you turn a senior role of 250K, into 6- 40K positions managing small aspects of that senior role? I am not suggesting we ‘rid’ all of senior management. However, having a team of clever employees to manage a specific areas of a much bigger picture could be just what your business needs.
Assess your Business Development Channels
Recently, I sat with one of my clients who created a cost analysis on their business development channels. This client decided to developed an assessment of the costs associated with attending 2 trade fairs verses the cost of hiring 2 new sales employees.
First of all, costs calculations of: flights, accommodation, marketing, and trade fees would have costs in access of 200K to attend 2 trade fairs interstate. From there, this client estimated the cost of hiring 2 sales executives at approximately 60K each for that year, plus minimum expenditures and with a total expenditure of approximately 130K.
With the costs wages associated of these 2 new employees, this was balanced in relation to the estimated business development and revenue generation that these 2 sales individuals will create over the next year. It was also taken into consideration that these 2 hires would also provide support in account management throughout the year.
Using Statistics of new business generated from previous trade fairs created an approximate value of expenditure on the trade fair. However, the benefits of hiring the 2 new staff far outweighed the time and money into the trade far, not to mention the personnel support year round. This demonstrates the importance in managing your business development channels, finding out what is a value added business strategy.
Know your Strengths and Limitations
Another example of value added strategies involves knowing your strengths and limitations. Stretching the truth on your own capabilities can be a costly mistake and add hours tied to your desk and produce lack lustre results.
As a business owner, manager or as an employee- it’s important to spend your time on what it is you do well and delegating or outsource where viable. Often times this saves you time in researching, actioning and re-actioning things, manages risk, and the big one being the cost of hours you spend behind the desk trying to work it out. If your a senior manager or business owner, it often makes sense to outsource things you don’t enjoy doing or just knowing your limitations.
These are just a few examples on how you can be smart with your business decisions, often costing less than current practices.