If you want to get your business up, running, and growing as soon as possible, then being light on your feet certainly helps. All too often, new business owners get bogged down by costs that see them struggling to turn profitable months into the game. Though it might not be best suited for every industry, here are a few tips to keep your costs low and your business flexible so you can pick up and go much quicker.
Build a digital workforce
For almost every startup, it’s the staffing costs that are the hardest to handle immediately. But nowadays, there are plenty of ways to get around some of the costs associated with hiring your own team. Hiring a virtual team of employees to work remotely can save you on all the costs of housing them and providing them with the tech equipment they need to get their jobs done. Don’t forget to ask yourself how much you need a certain member of staff and whether or not it might suit you better to outsource instead.
Be open to alternative workspaces
If you’re able to get your business up and running from a home office or a garage, it’s easy to recommend it as a starting point. There’s no way to keep your costs low until you’re ready to scale and expand healthily. Otherwise, if you simply need a separate space or you have a small team of employees, you might want to consider looking at coworking spaces near you. It can be much cheaper than even renting a small office and keeps you accessible to commercial areas where you might have meetings to make.
Borrow more flexibly
Unless you’re taking on the efforts of bootstrapping, you’re going to need to find your startup funding from somewhere. Funding off credit cards can be expensive in the long run but traditional lenders like banks don’t tend to lend small loans that might allow you to keep costs low and not have to worry about paying off hefty loans. There are all kinds of more flexible borrowing options, like smaller business loan providers and startup incubators that can much better suit the scale of your operations. If you borrow a little less, you keep your overheads down, making it easier to reinvest in the business.
Don’t get stuck on the web
Your web presence matters, but it’s all too easy to end up spending a bombing on web developers, designers, marketing consultants, and so on. Working with pre-existing site builders such as e-commerce platforms can help you set up a shop without having to pay to build it from scratch. When it comes to digital marketing, there are tons upon tons of free resources teaching you what you need to know about search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing without having to pay a dime. You just have to be able to put in the time.
Start with low costs can make it easier to start reinvesting into the business all the sooner. Just make sure you identify which costs are essential and don’t skip investments that are necessary.