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Is your business running efficiently?

Running a business is all about the bottom line. If your organisation has hit a point where significant expansion isn’t yet possible, don’t simply wait for more orders to roll in. There are countless cost-effective ways to improve your business in terms of efficiency and productivity - whether it’s motivating employees to perform better or cutting down on material costs, remaining aware of all aspects of your company’s expenditure, both in terms and time and money, means you can cut costs in small ways that add up to big savings.

There are a variety of innovative ways to increase your business’s efficiency –

• If you’re renting office space, be sure to choose it wisely. Opting for a flexible lease will allow your business to respond quickly to changes in the market, and holding internal meetings in coffee shops rather than paying thousands more per month for your own meeting rooms will result in huge savings.
• Business transport costs should be kept to a minimum. Arrange off-site meetings well in advance to ensure you get the cheapest train fares and never travel first-class – it simply isn’t worth the extra cost.
• Be aware of which new technologies can help your business, and which will soon be redundant. Utilise cloud storage instead of spending money on large external hard drives or computers with huge amounts of memory, and don’t feel the need to provide every member of staff with a company mobile – only those that will be fielding lots of calls. When upgrading your hardware, sell it rather than send it to landfill. The money raised could be enough to pay for a morale-boosting office party, which is sure to increase productivity.
• Use time-tracking software to ensure employees aren’t procrastinating on company time. Every hour an employee is paid to be working should be accounted for, and if they aren’t, consider purchasing software which blocks certain websites on your network. The labour time regained from using this means it will soon pay for itself.
• Cut down on practices such as printing non-essential documents and wasteful use of stationery. Encourage staff only to print documents that really need to be printed and if they do, to do so on both sides of the paper.
• Certain essential business functions can be outsourced in order to increase time spent on more important tasks. If you have a skilled member of staff spending their valuable hours doing something like document shredding and recycling of paper, consider employing a mobile document shredding service such as Datashredders to take care of it for you, leaving your staff free to perform more profitable tasks. Datashredders provide secure waste containers into which all sensitive documentation should be directed, and can regularly visit your premises in their mobile shredding truck to ensure it is securely destroyed on site, issuing you with a certificate of destruction there and then.

Besides being cost-effective and efficient, shredding compromising data and confidential information will help to ensure the future profitability of your business by keeping its secrets away from competitors. Taking this step, along with the others detailed in this post, will help your business to grow.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Datashredders .