Crucial Skills to Reduce Your Small Business Costs
Sure, you started your small business hoping to spread out your responsibilities to employees as the team grows. However, in order to get to that point, it is useful to possess fundamental skills to reduce small business costs and assist in development, especially during the first few years.
According to Greater Sacramento/ Sierra Small Business Development Center director Panda Morgan, small business owners place their focus on industry trends like social media marketing, while neglecting important business fundamentals such as finance. He also says that individuals who understand the ‘money end’ are going to stay in the business. This makes perfect sense to anyone who has encountered small business costs that were higher than expected.
Another stat that can make a new small business owner shudder: A survey conducted by Leadership IQ’s last year revealed that 46% of all new recruits are likely to fail in the first 18 months, and unequivocal success is only achieved by 19%, indicating that 50% of the staff has to be replaced after 18 months, raising even more unexpected small business costs.
Worse, the small business costs associated with training would be enough to offset business development.
Having these business skills doesn’t guarantee financial success, but it can improve the odds of reducing small business costs in the long run. Some of them include:
1. Sales
It’s as simple as tracking your expenses and comparing them against revenue. This may protect you from winding up like Wyncote’s iParents social network, which shut down in 2010 after spending spent too much money on the website hiring an $18,000 marketing company.
3. Communication
Communication skills, both written and verbal, are required to achieve long-term success. Effective communication is crucial when dealing with employees, managers, customers and investors.
Business owners need to select appropriate channels of communication to avoid poor results or possible business disasters. For example, announcing a pay cut or an employee removal would be more appropriate in an in-person meeting rather than in a single email.
Communication skills should be polished on a frequent basis, because even large corporations fail at effective communication. For example, HTC recently acknowledged that it had a communication problem with customers, while posting their operating loss (the first ever for a quarter).
While they may seem simplistic, most failed businesses ended up that way because they failed to implement these skills. These key skills can drastically reduce small business costs spent in buying resources and hiring recruits, and can also become a business life saver in critical times.
