Here’s How Your Business Can Cut Costs Without Cutting What Matters

For some, cost-cutting is a dirty word. This is especially true for startups. New entrepreneurs enter the business with the highest of hopes and dreams. The last thing they want is to compromise and downsize those dreams. This can lead to a lot of mistakes such as getting too elaborate a workspace, hiring too many people, and overspending on desk chairs that are all the rage.

Then, there are those startups that too readily embrace the cost-cutting mantra. They are underfunded and need to save every penny they can. They start out with cast-off computers from a bygone generation of hardware and never upgrade them. They contract with the lowest bidder on everything. And they see customer service as an unnecessary and annoying expense.

In an ideal world, money would be no object. But in the real world, cost-cutting is a necessary evil. It is a matter of finding the balance between reducing expenses and maximizing that which is most important. Once you have determined what is most important, it is much easier to determine how costs should be optimized. Here are a few suggestions to help get you started:

Communications

Overspending on corporate telephony is a rampant problem in the startup space. New business owners have no idea how much telephony they will actually need. It can be a rather expensive guessing game. It is a costly mistake to confuse business telephony with the consumer variety. They are most definitely not the same.

You need to make the right decisions about capacity, needed space for the hardware, and ongoing costs. The better plan is to go with one of the business VoIP solutions that eliminate the guessing.

VoIP provides more flexibility so that you can pay only for what you need without the need for exotic amounts of space and equipment. Service tends to be a lot less expensive. And you can make use of the phones you already have rather than spending $200 a seat. VoIP is just one of the ways to cut communications costs without cut-rate communications.

Workspace

You don’t need an elaborate workspace to do great work. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore it either. If your employees are not comfortable and happy with their space, it will show up in their work. Hoteling provides the best compromise between a great workspace and cost-savings.

Hoteling is a type of desk and space sharing that uses a scheduling system much like a hotel. Thus, the name. Employees do not have an assigned space. Not everyone has to be at work at the same time. In a traditional workspace, that would mean empty seats at any given time.

Alternate workspace solutions keep the desks full for as many hours as possible. Telecommuting, virtual office and workspace, and desk sharing are just some of the options available to the startup that needs to curb workspace spending without reducing workspace quality.

Staffing

It is more expensive and risky to hire than to use a staffing service. Whether you need untrained labor for a day or highly skilled professionals for 6 months, there is a staffing service that can provide you with the people you need for the job you aim to complete.

You can get project managers, hospital administrators, nurses, app developers, IT specialists, salespeople, office workers, and any other kind of workers you can imagine. You pay the staffing service. And they take care of the rest. An employee is a long-term commitment. That can be problematic for startups.

It is not so much that you need to be worried about crashing and burning. You need to be light on your feet while maintaining maximum flexibility. Things change fast, especially in tech. You need to keep your longterm commitments to a minimum and be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. Professional staffing services can help you stay on a budget while utilizing top workers in your field.

Communications, workspace, and staffing are startup necessities. You can’t skimp on them. They are too important. But you can cut costs without cutting what matters by selecting strategic alternatives.