When you start your own business it may be that you don’t have a lot of money to do so, which means you need to be creative with the money you do have. This might mean that you need to look at things for uses other then what they had originally been intended.
For example, when the author was setting up her own craft business, she couldn’t afford fancy shop fittings, so instead, she looked at Ikea furniture that would work instead, giving her the look she wanted at a fraction of the price and if something happened to the business then it was something that she could easily either use at home or sell online to recoup some of her money.
But this doesn’t only apply to furniture, creative thinking can be used on many aspects of your business, for example, look for specialist machinary that could be used for multiple purposes – ie something like an envelope stuffing machine, which can obviously be used to stuff envelopes, but if you choose your packaging with care, dependant on your product, it may be possible for you to use the same machinary to package your product.
This means that you have had one outlay, but two procedures, which can make a lot of difference to a small business just starting up and leave you with more money to do the things you can’t think creatively about, like insurance and staff training.
Recycling shopping bags is another example of some creative thinking, instead of going and buying new carrier bags, simply reuse the bags you get when you go shopping, the customer doesn’t mind and some actually like the fact that they are helping the environment by recycling, and it reduces your overheads consiberably.
Throw rugs aren’t just a great way of adding character and colour to your office or shop, they are also a great way to hide ugly or damaged carpets.
The ways to save money in your fledgling business are pretty much endless when you are willing to think “outside the box” and aren’t difficult to do, you don’t have to keep it up when you are a big business, unless you want to, and the benefits can be great.