Ways To Boost Your Business' Bottom Line

Know your numbers

Do you know how much does it cost you to acquire a customer? How about your break even point? Or average lifetime customer value?

Knowing your KPIs in the middle of the night facilitates good decision making. If you measure everything you can easily cut what's not helping your bottom line.  Maybe you have a large advertising expense that simply doesn't work. Maybe your delivery costs for a specific product make selling it unprofitable. Knowing every important metric and being able to segment data will give you immense power. Use that power to improve your bottom line.

Know The Right Numbers

Now that you are able to measure everything you should define which metrics are important for your business. What's important for your business depends on your objectives and goals. If you are in a service business you will want to know how much your leads cost, for example. Business that sell merchandise on the Internet should what is their average order value. You get where this is going. 

Don't Waste Money

This one is simple and amazing at the same time. It's simple because every business can stop wasting money. It's amazing because you will most likely not stop wasting money when you read this article. We are all like that. We shouldn't be..

Here are some steps you can take to stop wasting money:

Tie Costs To Revenue
Whenever possible try to pay per performance.  Exploring pay per performance advertising is a good first choice. Paying your sales force commission.

Offer Performance Based Incentives 
These should be tied to profit. This will make your employees more productive but also more cost aware. No business has ever managed to stop wasting money without getting their employees to believe that they should do everything they can to cut costs will go a long way.

Always Try To Get The Best Deal.
This one sounds very simple. Try to get the best deal on everything from printer ink to fuel. Join forces with other business to get bulk purchasing power.

Look For Easy Distribution Wins

Can you sell your products online? Steiner Tractor Parts Inc. of Lennon, Michigan was a catalog business. Now they have one of the most successful tractor parts websites on the web. It's a significant part of their business.  Tate's Bake Shop from Southampton NY was a very successful bakery. The web has brought them a very important revenue stream.

These are just examples of the power of web as a distribution channel. We are sure you can come up with a few easy ways to improve your distribution.

Spend Time Thinking How To Increase Profits  

Sounds like a no-brainer. Spend time looking at your expenses. Be disciplined about that.  It will do wonders for your bottom line - longer term.