5 ways to save money in a small business

I’m a marketer. I’ve worked in marketing for my entire career. I’ve managed multi million dollar ad budgets, but I am not an accountant. You know how in a small business you have to be the IT team, photographer, HR exec, marketer and finance director? (We’re all pretty awesome aren’t we!!) Well I see a lot of room for improvement over here on the finance side. I could get better at this. A lot more savvy.

And so I’m committed to improving the finance side of things in my Limited business by the end of the year. After all, this is the base for every decision to be made.

I’ve started with an audit of where my hard earning nuggets go and those £8 and £10 monthly payments are getting it.

Read on for money savers you may also be able to make in your business.

5 Ways to save money

1.Canva Pro. I use it daily to design posts, banners and sometimes video.  Very likely I spend more hours a month looking at Canva than I do watching TV. Having the pro version £10.99pm is a non negotiable in my business. It saves me time, and it is probably the one app that I can not operate without. You probably use it too. I’ve been paying monthly…for err how many years. I have just hit the annual payment button and saved myself £31.89 per year. If I did this for everything I had a subscription for, it would be a significant.

2. Subscriptions. Running a business and marketing it online creates a lot of these small monthly subscriptions. And there always feels like someone convincing you to buy another. Now I run things pretty lean with the amount of apps, programs I use, but there’s still a few including Calendly for power hour / one to one consulting bookings, Vimeo for hosting zoom recordings, workshop replays, client recordings and other videos, Lightroom for photo editing – I use it daily, dropbox for image sharing with clients and storage, and Inshot but that’s just one small annual payment. All of these have a 20% saving for annual payments. It makes sense to go annual for everything we know we will continue to use. Particularly the time saving apps. I will switch to annual but spread them through the year so October isn’t a hugely costly month each year.  Also I do not pay for scheduling tools such as Planoly. I schedule anything I need to via Meta Business Suite – it works just fine. I would quite like to add the Freedom productivity app to my phone – to stop me opening apps when I’m in focused deep work sessions. We’ll see.

3. Memberships can be significant costs to our businesses, although also a supportive community and source of knowledge and potentially leads. Again, I keep memberships pretty lean. Do you? I have one that I am part of. The Inner Hub run by The Two Lauras. It’s a membership for those working in social media and means that if I don’t know the answer to something a client asks, I have about 500 other experts to call upon all with different areas of specialism. I was a founding member and I’m staying put.  I’ve also just joined Helen Perry’s podcast patreon memberships because I love her podcasts and Helen is always hugely helpful to me. It’s just £4.80 per month and it’s already lovely.

4. Websites. Do you really know what you are paying for in terms of your website? What is wrapped up in hosting fees and services agreements?  It’s easy to bury your head in the sand where things are complicated. Where there’s parts of running a business that you don’t understand. Websites are like a big black hole for that. I delved deeper. Firstly I was running 2 websites, Sarah Richards Social and Rich Marketing. I literally never update the Rich Marketing site and my husband who I share Rich Marketing with, now works full time for a big business. He is not needing to pitch his consulting services. And so the Rich Marketing website is being retired. Paul @griffandco have you done it yet? This saves hosting costs and brain power. I also found wrapped up in what I thought was our email hosting, I was actually paying £11.96 monthly for a WIX website I haven’t used for years. Now cancelled and saved.

5. Let’s talk energy costs. At the time of writing (Oct 2022) I’m not sure any of us know the actual impact of the rising energy costs for this Winter. But the media has definitely put the frighteners out there. We’re with Octopus. They have been amazing and our energy bills haven’t risen greatly. They might change their minds soon when the cost of charging my electric car gets on their radar.  We also got a smart metre this year and oh my gosh, to see the money that we spend on energy is so revealing. And if you don’t know already, I’m a bit of an eco warrior. So if I can save on using energy I will be. So my plan this Winter to save energy and the cost of energy is to go and work in my hubby’s office down in the village. It might last one day before his many zoom calls drive me up the wall, but I might as well go and use his energy and not heat the entire house. And I also intend to go and help my local coffee shops pay their heating bills. Coffee, people and time to work sounds good to me. Don’t worry coworking girls, I’ll still be firing up the heating at home for our days together.

6. Bank. My hubby just reminded me. I’ve just saved myself another £100 a year moving my business bank account to a fee free account. I’ve been wanting to move to Starling for at least a year. They are a more sustainable bank. They state “We are committed to the pursuit of ecological sustainability and to combating climate change”. Paperless and bank cards made from recycled plastic. I’m hooked and when I reached out to my Instagram community a little while ago for advice on which sustainable bank they recommended, Starling won hands down.  So slowly I will transition the account over (got to update all the ins and out) and save myself at least £100 a month. Hooray!

That’s it from me. If you are still here, then thank you for reading. I hope I managed to help you save a few pounds in your business. I say save the unnecessaries, so that we can blast forward and continue to grow and invest in our businesses. If you have thoughts to add, read something I could be doing differently or have some suggestions of your own, please add them to the comments below.

One more thing that could save you time and energy in your business, download my Autumn Winter content planner and get your content planned in an hour.