Everyone is trying to cutback and save money these days. So I thought I would share some money saving tips. Please feel free to add any that you have found helpful.
Business Meals & Entertaining - You don't want to take your clients to McDonalds or bust out a coupon when the bill comes. Those are definitely not ways to win business. One way to get discounts on business meals without your clients knowing about it is to register your credit card at www.rewardsnetwork.com and you'll receive discounts up to 15% at about 10,000 bars, restaurants, clubs, etc. nationally. The discount is applied automatically and shows up as a deduction from the total cost of the bill on your statement. It's free to sign-up and they allow you to sign up to five cards.
Office Equipment - There are numerous sales events going on these days at local retailers. However, if you want to save even more money on some big ticket items, such as printers, desks, monitors, etc., go to www.craigslist.com and check out the "free" section or freecycle listings. Now if you are not a fan of going to TJMax and searching through all the clothes for the deals, this might not be your cup of tea. You will have to search through figurines, shag rugs, and some horrible and dated gifts, but you will also be able to find some office furniture, printers, file cabinets, etc. that won't cost you a penny. Also if you need to get rid of something, you can post it there as well. Also keep your eye out for going out of business sales and auctions, while it is sad a business is ending, it could be a great opportunity to get a great deal. We picked up some amazing fire proof filing cabinets from a grocery chain going out of business for $20/each. It was a steal as far as we were concerned, and the company had to liquidate all of their belongings.
Labor - One of our most expensive and appreciated assets is labor - we need them in order to survive. Most companies have asked employees to take anywhere between a 10-20% reduction in salary, while others are maintaining salaries yet not giving out raises. First things first, before you think of hiring anyone make sure your bus is in order. Do you have the right people on the bus and in the right seat? If you don't know what I am talking about, check out the book (or my favorite the audio book) Good to Great. Once you have your bus in order and define where you are heading, you will be able to see what type (if any) of additional labor you need. First things first, think interns! With the job market slowing down, more and more student are looking for work. Start by visiting your local college's job placement office. See if they will post that you are looking for someone with these skills and for this many hours a week. Some of them will work for free to obtain the experience and get it on their resume. Another option is to post an ad online where you can hire contract workers for specific deliverables. You provide information on your deliverable/project and providers/seekers write back with proposals and pricing. A third option is hiring a virtual assistant. I hired my first virtual assistant this year, and it was liberating. She entered my listings into various websites such as costar.com, loopnet.com, etc. She created my property flyer templates - I had to fill in the specific marketing and property details, but she inserted pictures, formatted it with the property specific information from the MLS sheet, etc. She also took all the business cards that I had received from a recent conference and typed them into an excel spreadsheet which I imported into my contact management software - REA - and she then imported them into my eflyer provider - MailChimp. She created a newsletter template and new listing template for my eflyers. It was a great investment. Now, I will warn you it might take a little bit of time to figure out how you will work with a VA. So you want to be very clear in what you want and what you expect. For example, I sent her three examples of newsletter eflyers. I told her what I liked and did not like about each one of them. I had to do some minor tweaking to the finish template she did, but I would have done it no matter if someone in my office created the template (call it personal preference). My VA was able to get things done that I did not have to do personally. I was given some great advice early in my career - find out where the bottlenecks are and work them out. If you find out you are a bottleneck, remove yourself from the flow and monitor how things are done afterwards. Once I realized I was the bottleneck for getting flyers out for our properties and posting them online, I hired a VA and all of these items were done within a week. It was amazing how I was able to focus more on lead generating and selling when I wasn't having to create flyers, post info on props to other websites, create marketing materials, etc. It not only saved me money, but it provided me opportunities to get more done within the same time frame.
Please feel free to post your suggestions on how to save money.
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