As a small business owner, you are always looking to improve your bottom line. Many business owners find themselves working constantly, trying to manage all of the details that go into running your operation. You may think that you are saving money by doing everything yourself, but you may actually be costing yourself more than you save.
When you made the decision to work for yourself, you probably wanted to spend your time doing something you love. Unfortunately, once things get going, you may find yourself spending way too much time doing things you definitely don’t love, like accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, and other tasks. As an Irving Appliance Repair owner, for example, you may find yourself spending less time actually tinkering with machines and more time sending invoices to customers. The time you take away from doing actual repairs, though, cuts down on the number or orders you can take. As a professional, you may bill customers at $50/hour or more. If you hire a bookkeeper at $15/$20 per hour, you are freed up to spend more billable hours doing what you do best.
To a Buffalo lawyer, maximizing billable hours is vital to the profitability of his business. Time spent on billing clients, bookkeeping, and marketing are not billable. Attorney time spent on those tasks, therefore, is wasted money. Hiring a part time or even full- time employee to handle these tasks will result in higher profits and less stress. Besides, a person with the education and training to do those tasks will be able to do them in a fraction of the time you would have to devote to them.
An often-overlooked task in small and solo businesses is marketing. Small business owners usually believe that marketing is a luxury rather than a necessity. In fact, the opposite is true. When money is tight, it may be tempting to cut back on advertising and marketing, but doing so may prevent your business from growing, and may even lead to failure. If your competitors are actively marketing their business, your customers will find them first. When a client needs a specialized attorney, is injured in an incident at work, or needs to hire someone to paint his house, the first place he will probably go is to Google. He will click on one of the names that appears at the top of his search list. If you are on page 10, or not there at all, he will never find you.
There are probably plenty of opportunities to cut costs in your business, but cutting back on marketing should not be one of them, nor should trying to do every little task yourself. When deciding if you should do a task yourself, always ask if someone else can do it better or more efficiently, and ask if the rate you charge for your services is greater than the rate you might pay to outsource a particular task.