You’ve found a niche, molded your idea, and launched your new business. It’s going well, but as with any start-up, money is tight and you’re wondering “How can I boost my bottom line?”
Thankfully, we have more than a few tips that can help pad your income, stretch your dollar, and make the journey as a small business a little easier.
Fail Early
You might have heard this one already from a little start-up company called Facebook whose motto is “Move fast and break things”.
So, what does that actually mean? The entire point of failing early is to fail cheap. Finding flaws in the process before you’ve invested too heavily into them. This applies to everything from design to pricing. It’s much cheaper to fix something in development than it is to fix it after it’s already been deployed.
This doesn’t mean setting yourself up for failure. It means giving yourself the necessary space in case you do.
Adjust Your Pricing
Finding the right pricing can be a tricky balancing act between keeping clients or customers happy, and making sure you and your employees are being fairly compensated.
This can mean both lowering or increasing your prices. If you’re overvaluing your product or service, sales can begin to drop off as return customers are rare. On the flip side, undervaluing can mean too much work for not enough pay.
For the latter, many people worry about losing customers if they increase their price. However, think of it like this: If you double your price and lose half your customers, you’re still making the same amount of profit you did before and now you have all that extra time to hunt for new clients.
Better Than Nothing
You’ve taken on all the clients or volume you can handle, but aren’t quite ready for a price adjustment yet. You likely don’t want to handle managing a third party through subcontracting the work either.
The simple solution? Commissioned referrals. If you’ve built up trust with customers and have a strong relationship with another company in your market, offer them referred business for a commission. Many will happily snap up the work. After all, 90% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
Again, just make sure it’s a company you know does good work. This will not only build more trust with your customers, but will also help nurture useful business relationships.
Smooth Out The Cash Flow
Not knowing when or where your next payment is coming from can be a stressful uncertainty.
One easy way to keep things more consistent is by offering discounts for prepaid or monthly subscriptions. Having a certain amount of cash coming in on a regular basis can help even out those low dips and high peaks.
Trust us, your accountant will thank you.
Refinance Your Loans
Loans for a new business come with higher interest rates than those for more established ones.
If you’ve been doing business for a while, have solid yearly revenue, and good credit, it might be time to refinance your business loan. Reducing the amount you’re paying on interest can be a fantastic way to infuse some extra cash into your business.
Automate Everything
This applies to people who are running a business themselves and for those managing a team.
If you’re spending 15 minutes on the same task, every single week, you should be figuring out a way to automate it. Listen, we’re not all software engineers. However, there are tons of tools out there for automating different processes. For example, Mailchimp can make managing emails much easier.
If you can cut out, even just ten minutes, on three weekly tasks, you just opened up over 25 hours to fill with something else.
When it comes to questions like “How Can I Boost My Bottom Line?” There are plenty of ways to do it. Many of which consist of pumping up the top line, so it trickles down.
Another fantastic way to boost your bottom line when doing any sort of research and development, is through SR&ED incentives.
If you want to know more about SR&ED programs, Maxim Innovation we’re here to help.
