7 Ways To Grow Your Business – Step 7

Reduce overheads/fixed costs

“To achieve sustainable profits, we have to find a way to get all our costs under control” – Alan McCoy

The last step in this series looks at the fixed costs and overheads in your business.

To use the example of a restaurant, the fixed costs would be the rent, rates and insurance for the restaurant premises.

By eliminating or better managing your fixed costs, your business will improve its ability to be more profitable and also strengthen its ability to weather any storms – being lean is the name of the game.

Some ideas to reduce the fixed costs in your business could be:

• Regularly reviewing overheads.  How often do you currently review overheads and when was the last time you did this?
• Splitting out your overheads into those which are costs and those which are investments.
  • Marketing and advertising are fixed costs but cutting these may lead to losses in sales and customer engagement
  • Which of your fixed costs are strategic partnerships in your business?
• Which fixed costs are under/not-utilised?  Are you carrying costs that do not improve your business and which you could reduce or eliminate?  Review your monthly direct debits and subscriptions to highlight products & services you are not using.
• Are any of your fixed cost team under utilised?  Could you delegate some of your tasks to improve this or consider changes in their roles to use up spare capacity?

Click here for a downloadable actions and ideas list on Step 7.

Step 6 is available here to recap.

Get in touch if you’d like any help with reducing your overheads.