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DQ News: Small Business on a Small Budget: 3 Simple Ways to Save on Costs

Every budding entrepreneur and small business owner wishes that they could launch their business with an unlimited amount of funds. But for many, unless they find a shiny gold genie lamp that wish isn’t coming true. If you are trying to start a small business with an even smaller budget there are still simple things you can do to come up with some capital and save costs on other areas so that your business can flourish. To learn the top 3 ways, continue reading below.

1) Use your Customers to Find Capital

It’s well known that it takes vast amounts of money to launch a small business. And if you are selling products rather than services, it can take even more capital—after all, you need to have funds to develop, test and manufacture the product(s).

But if you’re gaining no luck with investors and don’t want to turn to loan officers for the money (or maybe you don’t qualify for a big loan), another option you have is to depend on your customers. You can easily sell annual subscription memberships to big shot executives who can afford to pay fees up front and in full for example.

You can in–turn use that money to hurriedly jump-start your business—just make sure that your customers receive what is promised to them or you will be responsible for paying all that money back. While this option may not be possible for every business model, it certainly can help out a few small business owners.

2) Hire Unpaid Interns

One of the easiest ways to cut back on costs and still get the extra help you need is to hire unpaid interns. There are tons of eager college students who are dying to get their hands dirty in order to learn the tricks-of-the trade, earn college credit, and boost their resumes. Some will even work for the experience alone without earning college credit.

That said, interns can be most helpful. It’s up to your own discretion to decide where you feel an intern would be most useful however—maybe in the marketing or accounting “department.” But at the very least you can most definitely find a college student to be your social media intern. The duties of a social media intern typically include monitoring and updating all of your businesses’ social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) and passing out fliers/business cards.

Your social media intern maybe even be able to do some small secretarial work such as answering phones and sending e-mails while in the office. To make sure that you get some qualified applicants, contact the nearest college(s). They may be able to get your business on a official school list serve so that internship-seeking students can easily find you.

3) Take care of Financials on your Own

As soon as your business starts to really pick up then by all means hire all the professionals you need to take care of all of the financial projections, cash flows, budgets and book keeping. But if your business hasn’t really expanded yet and you’re really strapped for cash, you can hold out for a while and save a hundreds of dollars by taking care of these matters yourself.

Granted, you want to make sure that you are properly educated in this field so that you don’t make a major mistake that can severely jeopardize your business. While returning to school is a plausible option to expand your skills in this area, you just don’t have the funds to go back to college. Instead, you can brush up on your skills (or learn then entirely from scratch) by taking some free online classes like the ones listed below:

• Introduction to Financial and Managerial Accounting
• Fundamentals of Personal Financial Planning [UC Irvine]
• Business Skills for Success [Kutztown University of Pennsylvania]
• Introduction to Economics [Utah State]  

About the Author: This is a guest post from Carol Wilson who writes for business insurance guide. She contributes articles about a variety of marketing, business, stock market, small business topics. She can be contacted at: wilson.carol24 (at)  gmail.com.

Photo Credit: peasap

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