As a small business owner, you will have personally hired every single member of your team for their skillset, dedication to the business, and rapport with other members of staff, so when the potential need for redundancies occurs, you need to find ways of saving your staff members while still keeping your business afloat.
Why is it essential to eliminate redundancies?
- You need all the staff you have hired to make sure that your business is being run effectively and losing a member of the team will be incredibly detrimental to this
- In a small business, not many skills will overlap, so losing one person could mean that you are actually cutting a whole department away
- You work as a team to make the business work, and you want to keep your staff employed so that they are able to take care of their families and live their lives
With all this in mind, this article is going to give you some ideas that will help you to keep redundancies off the table and your staff still employed.
Minimize your spending
One of the most simple and straightforward ways to avoid redundancies is to minimize the business spending,but the difficulty here is knowing where you can make these savings.
- Effective Software Asset Management
Like any modern business, you will rely on technology to help your business to run and to be successful, so looking into Software Asset Movement (SAM) through Bytes.co.uk is a great way to begin making positive changes. SAM is the practice of optimizing and managing the purchase, maintenance, and utilization of the software your company uses which will help to cut down costs while still allowing you to get the most out of the software you use on a day-to-day basis.
- Get creative with marketing
Finding out how to cut down on marketing costs is another excellent idea as marketing is where a considerable amount of money goes when a small business is looking to get its name out there.
These changes can include using free platforms, recycling marketing material instead of investing in a new campaign, and taking on the marketing responsibilities yourself, rather than outsourcing them.
Finding investors
Alongside cutting down your business expenditure, you should also look into how to get more money into your business to help support staff and avoid redundancy.
By learning how to find investors, you can begin to get additional money together to inject some life into your business and help to keep all of your heads above water.
You need to start this process by writing up a watertight business plan for investors to look over, while also taking this material to a bank to see if a short-term loan would be possible to keep things going.
Finding investors to show this to might be the hardest part, but there are lots of places you can find great potential partners, such as:
- Business school alumni
- Networking events (that are free to attend)
- Angel Investor Networks
- Crowd Funding
Redundancy should be an absolute last resort and, with these tips, your business will never have to resort to it.