Learn. Adapt. Overcome.
Many organizations and people use these three simple words to motivate their strategies, outlook or planning. You always want to be an open book and continue learning. While you keep learning, you may find new ways of doing things, thus forcing you to adapt. When you adapt and evolve, you can overcome or improve on your past actions.
Today, you can’t just say “that’s the way we’ve always done it” as an excuse to keep the status quo. The best businesses are the ones that adapt and are able to make the necessary changes they need to survive.
Below are some ideas of how you can adapt your business to the modern day while cutting costs as well.
Get Familiar With Telecommuting
In this day and age, it’s just as easy to communicate with the person sitting next to you as it is to talk to your friend who’s on vacation in Australia. Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, Slack, Google Hangouts, Telegram, Jabber and good old email are all ways you can communicate with someone at the drop of a hat.
Why not extend this to your business model as well?
While some companies balk at the idea of letting their employees work from home (or wherever for that matter), telecommuting is on the rise in the United States. More and more companies have employees scattered across the country, or globe, and are still able to complete their tasks and get their work done on a regular basis.
Telecommuting has a number of benefits. First, you’re not going to have to pay for an office space. That takes away a lot of your overhead, everything from rent to utilities. Secondly, you’ll be helping the city you live in by taking cars off the road, lessening the carbon footprint and reducing congestion.
There are, of course, negatives to this side. Building connections and real relationships are a bit harder and isolation can be difficult for some. If that’s the case, then you could always switch to a hybrid model, letting your employees work from home once or a few times a week.
Not only will your employees enjoy the shorter commute, but it shows that you trust them enough to have them work unsupervised.
Share the Load
It’s almost impossible to find someone who hasn’t taken an Uber or Lyft in the past few years. What’s better than having an affordable taxi service come to your door and drop you off where you want to go? Especially if you’re not using your car all the time, you don’t need to make the investment for something that will be sparsely used.
You can take that same idea and apply it to your business. While it would be great to have a company car on call at all times or a company truck to move things around, why not just pay for it when you need it?
Hold off on making a big purchase and try renting or sharing the big item you need. Consider it a trial period. If it turns out you’re going to be using an industrial shredder, company car or something else on a regular basis, go ahead and buy it. Until then, go ahead and open your heart to sharing.
The Cloud
Chances are you’ve heard about “the cloud” before, what but exactly is the cloud? Essentially, it’s an off-site storage facility to hold all of your digital data. Chances are your phone, laptop and computer use the cloud to store your documents, photos, and other files. Some popular services are Google Drive, OneDrive, and Amazon Web Services.
While you might be hesitant about trusting your information to a third-party, these companies usually go above and beyond to protect their information. Are there chances of hacks or leaks? Of course, there always is, but you run the same risk by putting your email account with Gmail, Yahoo or any other service.
In addition, you’ll be saving a lot: both money and physical space. You won’t have to pay for the hardware to store all necessary files nor will you have to maintain a physical space. You’ll also save by cutting down on maintenance and electricity, putting that money back into your business.
