How do you minimise cost, the trick is to make a list of everything you pay for such as, rent, salaries, utilities, supplies, storage room, stationeries, the printers that you use, the receipt paper rolls, the value of wastage etcetera.

Now list these ‘expenditures’ separately on separate pages and list down the processes that you go through to get them, the reasons as to why they need them, the costs involved and how to minimise its use, see if you are able to save, man hours, turnaround time, direct costs, indirect costs and the likes.

By doing this to every element or component of your business you will be basically tweaking your business’s value chain which would bring about invaluable long term benefits and reduce your overheads tremendously if it is done to every single factor of your business structure.

As an example let us take a retail store or even a grocery store for that matter, among the most important aspects of these businesses are inventory. How you manage your inventory could make a significant difference on your bottom line, for instance if you had too much inventory, it takes longer to sell them or clear them, meaning that your turnaround of funds for the money invested in inventory takes longer.

In other words, when you have inventory or stock sitting about in your store room, it means money is just lying about in your store when it could be in a bank account collecting interest or invested in FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) products that turnaround much quicker and generate more revenue within short periods of time.

Other aspects of cost savings could come in the form of little things that most business owners tend to overlook. How much does your business spend on stationeries? How much do your energy bills cost?

How can you reduce these expenses so that they may accumulate to result in significant savings in operations that could be used to give higher bonuses for your employees or lower prices for your customers? A simple example of improving your level of cost effectiveness in a retail store could be given at the POS terminals. What kind of paper roll receipts are you using at your Point of Sale. What kind of printer? Are you using Dot Matrix, thermal?

Find out the prices of thermal paper rolls and compare them with dot matrix 2 ply or 3 ply bond papers, you will find that you will be saving quite a bit monthly and when you multiply that by 12, the financial years savings could get to be substantial enough to give your employees some morale boosting cash rewards that you would have wasted.

Convert these savings into cash vouchers that could be spent in your own store which would increase your bottom line regardless. You would be able to achieve all of this without incurring any extra cost, the business is optimised, employees get happier, their satisfaction increases and when these things start to happen, you most certainly can expect your business to boom!