Businesses that have survived the last two years now have to continue to manage costs particularly carefully, with operational costs (opex) being a key factor to their continued existence.
“Luckily,” says Euphoria Telecom CEO John Woollam, “modern technology has enabled businesses to use and pay for services on an on-demand basis. This gives businesses much greater flexibility on opex items such as rent, utilities, insurance.” Here, he suggests five ways in which SMEs can curb their costs.
- Reassess your employee expenses annually – Check your payroll for ghost employees, first, and then make sure that each employee’s benefits and tax deductions are loaded correctly, Specifically, double-check that you’re not overpaying on PAYE. Also relook company health plans, pensions, disability insurance, life insurance, and any other benefits your company offers to get the best bulk deals possible.
- Investigate porting your business phone number – Non-geographic number portability came into effect on 7 March, meaning if you have non-geographic numbers (like 0800; 0861 and 087 numbers, for example) you can port your business away from Telkom and take it to independent service providers. Call centre businesses, in particular, will now be able to choose providers that meet their needs exactly, and businesses will be able to switch providers without incurring massive costs.
- No more long-term contracts – from your office productivity suite to your telephony solution, getting tied into long-term contracts isn’t cost-effective, particularly because technology costs often decrease over time (like internet bandwidth). Find a provider that will allow you to sign up on a month-to-month contract basis and review that contract often to make sure your spend is still in line with your needs.
- Insist on usage-based billing – per user, per second, per MB, you should pay for what you use in the smallest viable increment. This means not signing up for 10 end user licenses when you really only need five, and not paying per minute for call costs. It may take a bit more time to work out what your exact need is, but it’ll pay off in the long term. Also, make sure your provider will allow you to scale up or down easily, adding user licenses, or storage to your cloud-based business infrastructure, immediately and cost-effectively.
- Use even more cloud-based solutions (and look at the free ones too) – Modern, affordable cloud technologies empower businesses to take control of costs without having to sign up for long-term, binding contracts. Businesses can also capitalise on the added benefit of a selection of fully scalable, optional features; including CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration, cost management systems and a completely mobile-enabled workforce.