Biggest Opportunities to Reduce Overhead Costs

AdminAssist
AdminAssist August 10, 2020
7-minute read

The amount of overhead costs that a staffing and recruitment agency is burdened with is going to be a big deal since 29 percent of businesses end up failing due to a lack of funding. Therefore, if you’re not able to get your overhead costs under control, then you risk running out of money much sooner. That’s why this guide is here to help you discover the biggest opportunities to help reduce your total overhead costs and keep your business in good shape for as long as possible. 

Reduce Paper Usage

It is surprising just how much paper a small business will go through each month. In fact, it can be hundreds or even thousands of dollars in paper due to creating things like physical reports, flyers, invoices, and other types of paper products. 

But since these products are an essential part of business, you can’t simply stop making them. Instead, you should pivot towards things like digital invoices that serve the same purpose without the burden of towering paper costs. 

But it isn’t just paper costs and the price of ink or toner that will be saved by using things like paperless invoices. You will also be able to save on things like storage costs as well. All of these paper products are going to need to be stored somewhere when not in use, which is often going to result in rows and rows of cabinets. But what would normally take two or three large filing cabinets can easily be stored on a single computer or hard drive the size of a small book. 

This creates a domino effect where you are able to run your business with far less space, which means cheaper office space and even lower overhead costs. All of this is available to you by simply making the switch to paperless products in the office.

Switch to Digital Calling Services

Depending on the size of your company, you could have employees spending dozens of hours each week on the phone talking to various people. In order to do this, a lot of business owners like to have their own company landline set up, which can often cost a significant amount of money. Or even worse, they have employees use their personal phones, which means that the employer is typically on the hook for paying for the majority or entirety of their monthly phone plan. Either way, this is a big source of overhead expenses for many staffing and recruitment agencies. 

To help deal with this issue, it is important that you switch to a more reasonably priced digital voice calling service. A lot of the major voice calling platforms like Google Voice and Zoom offer services that are either reasonably cheap or even completely free. Therefore, if a business wants to find a way to keep their phone expenses down while still maintaining the same amount of contact with their clients. 

But if you do still want a more traditional phone service for your workplace, then there are options that are going to be better for your company overhead, such as a VOIP service. This will almost certainly be cheaper and more user-friendly compared to the regular services being offered by the local phone companies. 

Hire Well-Rounded Employees

A lot of businesses tend to focus too much on a person’s specialty and not enough on their overall experience level. For example, if you are trying to hire a new HR coordinator, it might be tempting to pick someone who has a degree or certificate in human resources and knows how to do the job quite well. But by making this your sole focus for the candidate, you might overlook someone who might not be quite as skilled at one thing but is significantly more skilled at a dozen other things that might be helpful for your company. 

With the hypothetical example at hand, this could mean overlooking someone who has moderate levels of human resource expertise but who is also quite experienced at doing things like writing blog posts or working in HTML coding. While these aren’t skills that typically come in handy for an HR coordinator position, it does mean that the individual might be able to wear multiple hats for the company. 

Instead of solely being an HR coordinator, they can also spend some time each week working on the content marketing or website management side of the company. As long as the workload for all of these things is manageable for one person, then this means that you can avoid having to hire a separate person for each of these roles. 

This will end up significantly lowering your overhead costs because you will have far fewer employees on staff while still having someone who can handle every element of your operations. So when making employment decisions, make sure to keep in mind that a versatile employee might be better than someone with a lot of expertise in a single area. 

Outsource to an Accounting Service

When someone thinks of ways that they can lower their overhead, hiring someone new may not seem like an obvious choice. But when it comes to accounting and bookkeeping, this is often the best option. 

This is due to the fact that most business owners think that they are capable of handling their own accounting needs but then make mistakes that could end up costing them hundreds or even thousands of dollars. But even if you are trying to handle your company’s accounting and are not making mistakes, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need help from accounting professionals. This is because professional accountants know plenty of ways to get even more deductions and help save your company a significant amount of money. 

If you really want to take advantage of this and help to lower your overhead costs, then you will want to make sure to outsource your accounting needs rather than hiring in-house. Luckily, you can get professional accountants and bookkeepers at your disposal by contacting us at AdminAssist today.