It’s easy to focus on revenue-building strategies, but many business owners forget that some of the expenses they are incurring could easily be holding them back from making additionalrevenue.

This is because these — things that, if improved, would be driving more revenue to your company.

Here are five expenses to kill before they kill your business revenue:

1. Marketing: While marketing is intended to boost revenue, some of the costs associated with traditional marketing tactics can actually be chipping away at the revenue opportunities. If you have your marketing department only focused on things like press releases, print and television coverage, you are losing revenue because these approaches lack the proper targeting and are not reaching your audience. Instead, you could reduce your spending on traditional marketing and put more of an effort into online, social, search, and mobile marketing. Since the majority of these new marketing approaches can be automated, including posts on your social networking profiles, blog, and website, you also save time while more effectively reaching your intended audience. In return, you are likely to get more traffic and leads that are converted into revenue.
2. HR: People have been proven to be one of your company’s most valuable assets and one of the main reasons your revenues grow. However, the last thing you want to do is spend hours on HR paperwork, including paperwork to meet certain compliance demands and onboarding tasks to get new hires up to speed. The faster you can get new employees working, the more quickly you can starting adding revenue, so it pays to invest in some cloud-based platforms, digital signature capability, and online collaboration tools that provide a way to manage your “human capital” in an efficient manner while integrating numerous areas of your business like payroll, CRM, sales and more, providing you with more ways to gauge employee performance related to revenue targets. This frees up your time and theirs to focus on the more important tasks at hand.
3. Accounting: Managing the financial aspects of your business, particularly if you are still keeping paper records, can take away from revenue-building activities. Manual accounting processes take so much time and are repetitive in nature, meaning an even higher cost due to the amount of labor required. Instead, it is more cost-effective to automate accounting with a wide range of software solutions, including cloud-based platforms that allow you to update financial records from anywhere. The software performs the majority of work while you are only required to enter minimal information and click a few menu options. In return, you will get all types of reports and financial statements in minutes that would have taken you hours if you were still performing them manually.

    
   

 


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4. Invoicing:Like accounting, invoicing has typically been a purely paper process, again using up valuable time that could be spent generating revenue. Instead, you are trying to remember how much to bill, printing out invoices and sealing them in envelopes, and then taking them to be mailed. Using online invoicing tools that provide templates and a database for fast, professional invoice generation can save you a significant amount of expense and free up time to make more money. The invoicing solutions also automate many aspects of the process, including calculations, payment reminders and receipts, and recurring invoices. These online invoicing tools also include estimate and quote tools, which help speed your response to new projects and clients, creating more opportunities for revenue.
5. Payment processing:The type of payment methods and processing you do could also be costing you revenue because you are losing out on customers that would come to you if you accepted credit and debit card acceptance, digital wallets, ACH/e-checks and/or cryptocurrency. Instead, potential customers are going to your competition because they are set-up to accept these payment methods. While you may think credit card processing is too expensive for a small business, there are numerous payment processing companies that cater directly to smaller companies and even those in high risk businesses. The amount of processing fees and costs associated with expanding your payment methods is significantly lower than the revenue you are losing by not changing your payment acceptance strategy.

The common thread among these lethal expenses is that they take your resources and focus away from those activities that create revenue.

Instead of opting to pursue non-revenue activities, you can choose technology that helps you streamline processes, automate tasks, and combine efforts, giving you the ability to take on more opportunities to earn revenue.

About the Author:

John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, online marketing guru and startup enthusiast. He is founder of the online invoicing company Due. John is best known as an entrepreneur and connector. He was recently named #2 on Top 50 Online Influencers in the World by Entrepreneur Magazine and a Blogging Expert by Time. He currently advises several companies in the San Francisco Bay area.
 

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