How To Boost Your Small Biz Profits With 5 Simple Changes

In business, everything comes down to the bottom line. That’s why it’s the bottom line. Even if you’re in business for creative freedom or the joy of providing a good service, you still need to make money to survive. Profit provides possibilities. You like to boost your small biz profits than continue reading.

What you need is a way to make more money without having to divert a lot of time and effort to the cause. Profit hacks, essentially, to yield maximum reward from minimum investment. As it happens, simple changes can boost your profits — and we’re going to look at 5 of them:

Trim your regular costs

Profit doesn’t need to be about bringing in more money: it can also be about spending less. And while you can’t directly control how much you’re paid, you have total control over your regular expenditure, giving you free rein to find ways to be more economical.

Take a close look at how your outgoings stack up: do you have any unnecessary money sinks? Maybe you have a ritual of buying an expensive lunch for every prospective client, but the conversion rate is minimal — if so, think about giving it up and working harder on your pitches.

Maybe you’re spending a lot of money on your infrastructure, this can effect your small biz profits.

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If you rent office space, there might be cheaper office space you’ve overlooked or even a coworking environment you could use. And there’s often room to save money when it comes to software tools: there’s a lot of free software out there that’s suitable for business, so why not take advantage?

Image Credit: Pxhere

Impress your biggest clients

You can’t be all things to all people, and you’ll exhaust yourself (and your savings) by going the extra mile in every possible case — but you do need to put every scrap of effort you can muster into impressing your biggest clients. “But I’ve already won them!”, you might object. True, but impressing them isn’t about winning them over. It’s about keeping them on your side (customer loyalty is huge), and it’s about everyone else.

The bigger the client, the more influence it has over other companies, both in its industry and elsewhere. A rousing endorsement from a big-hitter can radically change your fortunes in a second, leaving businesses of all shapes and sizes eager to work with you.

Focus on referrals for growth, and you can operate much more efficiently. This is an underutilized and eazy way to boost your small biz profits.

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Polish your processes

No matter how varied your business, you’ll have an average day: a set of tasks that you (and your team) must carry out during regular office hours. Since they’re the heart of your company, minor tweaks to them will have major effects. For instance, if you can shave 30 seconds off a 5-minute task that gets carried out 240 times each week, that’s a saving of 2 hours during that time. That amounts to 96 hours per year, all through simple process improvement.

So what can you polish most easily? Anything you can use a template for will be a great candidate. Invoicing is a strong contender since it’s mission-critical for every business with clients but often gets done manually in a time-consuming way. To free up more time, you can create invoices from a template — just throw in the details and you’re ready to go.

And if scheduling is proving a real drag, you can start using Calendly for handling appointments (yet another free tool!) without the typical organizational hassle. If a frustrating task is soaking up your time, do some online research — there’s a great chance you’ll find a free (or cheap) tool built specifically to make it less of a headache.

Image Credit: Pxhere

Get everyone selling

Since you’re helming the operation, you probably do most (if not all) of the high-level selling. You meet the CEOs and the upper-ups, representing the business in the most well-rounded way and having the authority to make assurances about potential performance. That’s great — that’s what a leader should do — but it isn’t enough. You need everyone selling.

Does that mean sending your new assistant to make the next big pitch? No, of course not. It just means using everyone in your business to help cultivate sales opportunities. Arm everyone with a basic pitch for the business (a few lines explaining what you do and how someone can learn more) and encourage them to make an effort when talking to someone who could be a client.

If your trainee’s mother’s sister’s husband’s colleague happens to be in need of a business like yours, you might just find that empowering said trainee to be proactive in hunting for sales proves surprisingly lucrative. This team is working hard and can boost your small biz profits very quickly.

Maximize each sale

How much is an individual sale worth? Ideally, as much as possible, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of making a sale that you just count it as a win and move on. Instead of doing that, try to squeeze more value out of each sale.

Imagine yourself as a car salesperson — you’ve already talked someone into buying the car, but now it’s time to talk about the seat covers, the wheels, the extra-care services, the advanced owner packs…

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You can mess this up, of course — push too hard and lose a sale. You need to be careful and read the room, only pushing to boost the sale if you detect sufficient interest. But you might be amazed by how often people will be willing to spend more if you give them a shiny product or service to consider. Once you’ve made the decision to buy, everything after that is just an extension of that fundamental decision.

With these 5 tactics, you should be able to ramp up your profits without needing to commit a lot of resources to the matter. Cut down your costs, smooth down your operation, and max out your sales — it’s all doable, so the ball’s in your court.