When budgeting for your startup, it’s easy to pre-empt huge expenses and become intimidated by the prospect. However, while you absolutely shouldn’t cut corners when putting together a business plan and building your brand, you may be surprised at how affordable certain elements of your business can be made. In this article, we look at some of the ways in which you can make savings while getting your company off the ground.
Company Vehicles
If you deliver products, it’s likely that your first port of call will be a pre-existing courier service. However, there are also highly affordable ways to run your own vehicles. By investing in a good fleet management platform, you can focus on growing your business with improved efficiency, thereby reducing overall spending. The available real-time GPS tracking solutions are vital for fleet optimization, helping everything to run like clockwork with no unnecessary expense.
Marketing
It’s no secret that you need to invest significantly in your marketing strategy – but this can mean a range of different things. By putting as much effort as possible into your intent SEO and social media approaches, you can cultivate a large and active audience with very little expenditure at all. Take time to research relevant keywords and insert them into regularly updated copy on your website. Create a detailed social media plan and carefully schedule your posts. Edit your company’s Google My Business account meticulously and intelligently. Get your business listed on review sites. You can do all of the above for free, and, if you do them right, you’ll quickly become more discoverable and appealing than many of your competitors.
Financial Management
It’s a little ironic that most companies pay quite a considerable amount of money to ensure they remain fiscally healthy. From accountants to finance departments, the costs of keeping track of your money can snowball significantly. However, there are various highly affordable apps and platforms that are capable of doing a great deal of the work for you. From keeping track of expenses automatically in real time, to collating a complete tax return and sending it directly to the relevant authority on a certain date, you can save a large number of man-hours by automating this responsibility.
IT Management
One thing you don’t want to do at the start of your business’s life is to spend extortionate amounts on full-time wages for staff members whose jobs do not yet constitute full-time hours. For example, an IT team may be generally sitting idle in the first few months of operation. To avoid investing considerable amounts in a department that then provides very little return, why not outsource your IT support? There are specialist companies that will manage your IT for you on an ad-hoc basis for a single flat rate per month.
Human Resources
You can also outsource your human resources department. This is extremely useful for small startups, as you’ll want to ensure that all of your employees are having a good experience and that all of your personnel-related paperwork has been properly taken care of, but these elements are unlikely to constitute a full-time job at this juncture.
