Making your small business profitable overnight isn’t as easy as it sounds like. Being a business owner, you got to indulge in all the required planning and organising in order to make your business perform well.
According to Sheikh Saj Tajir, founder and president of Sheikh and Sheikh Bahrain, a firm that specializes in marketing and distribution of shipping goods, small business owners need to adjust their methods to focus more on profit.
Nearly two-thirds of small firms fail to generate a profit or fail to improve profits from the previous year, according to Sheikh Saj Tajir.
Here, Sheikh Saj Tajir suggests six important tactics for small company owners to minimize expenses, enhance earnings, and improve their bottom lines.
1. Modify your operating procedures
You need to increase revenue while lowering costs. Cross-selling—offering new services or commodities that complement your present offerings—can help you grow your sales. A chiropractor, for example, may also sell vitamins. Incentivizing new clients to test your product through special deals, discounts, or short-term giveaways is another operational improvement that might boost earnings.
Sheikh Saj Tajir adds that you must switch to a relationship-based sales approach that keeps clients coming back to you by offering monthly or yearly service plans, or a package of visits at a discounted price—for example, a series of ten gym sessions.On the other hand, if you want to save money, look into auditing your administrative tasks.
2. Maintain a visible and connected presence
Accreditations, licenses, and certificates for your company or individual personnel may help you stand out from the crowd. Take your reputation online by connecting with clients and forming strategic relationships using social media, your website, and a blog.
Sheikh Saj Tajir further adds that to bring new consumers to your site, one must share advertisements with comparable businesses, identify strategies to leverage referral selling, and use affiliate marketing tools. Remove any outdated, ineffective alliances that are holding you back.
3. Make the Most of Your Cash Flow
Sheikh Saj Tajir also advises that offering pre-paid retainers or continuing payment plans to your clients is one of the finest strategies to ensure a steady revenue flow. Instead of a one-time consulting contract at $125 per hour for a full day, you might change your offer and offer a discounted 20-hour retainer plan at $100 per hour. While your hourly rate will be lower, you'll be invoicing for a higher total dollar amount and tying your customer into a longer-term contract.
This may not appear to be as lucrative at first, but it creates a connection and keeps the door open for future business. Another option to generate additional revenue for service-based firms is through maintenance contracts.
4. Reduce Management Expenses
How productive are your workers? How many leads do you get from customers? What is the amount owing to you in accounts receivable? Sheikh Saj Tajir says that these are the kinds of questions that need to be answered right away, and you'll need to automate your business to do it.
He further recommends that you must create a system for staff to access and upload data, and be sure to include back-office administrative time in your project costs, hourly rates, or recurring expenses. Automation makes your organization function more smoothly and allows a smaller crew to complete more back-office tasks.
5. Raise the Bar on Marketing
Cocktails and handshakes used to be the norm when it came to networking. It's all about immediacy these days. Use social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn to give your company an immediate online presence.
Sheikh Saj Tajir adds that you can use webinars to organize group meetings, sales presentations, and special promotions. Provide webcasts or podcasts with courses, demonstrations, or new certification sessions for rapid download. Measure the effectiveness of all of your marketing initiatives to determine which are the most cost-effective. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solution linked to your accounts receivable system can help you achieve this.
6. Bring out the salesperson in you
Every employee has the chance to share your company's message and engage in possible sales-generating activity via phone, email, and face-to-face meetings. Cutting expenses, selling, networking on the internet, marketing, and more are all things that everyone can do to help.
You'll be well on your way to developing an organization that is based on boosting profits if you can get your staff involved and motivated to sell your message by fostering self-development through roundtables, conferences, lunch meetings, and webinars.
Remember, rewarding your workers who pursue continuing education or go above and above to represent the firm both within and outside of the workplace pays well.