With summer around the corner, you might be shaping your body for the beach: chiseling out a couple more abs, putting some deltoids on your deltoids. But what about trimming the fat on your business? Why not give your business a hot summer bod so it can do more for you in the new year. More cash, more freedom, more success.

Here are 5 key areas businesses collect fat deposits and where you should look to start your trimming.

1. Outsourcing too much. Look closely at what your staff handle and what contractors look after. While it’s true that you want to focus on your core activities, often that can be an excuse to outsource too many activities that you could efficiently handle yourself. All at too high a cost. Look closely at what you’re spending internally and externally in every department of your business and see if there are areas where you could reduce cost by taking the task back in house.
2. Technology mismatch. Many businesses overspend on technology. Make sure you’re paying for the software you really need and not a whole lot of extra ‘market leading’ features that sit idle within your business. Do a systematic review of your currently technology to see where you are overspending and where you need to invest.
3. Expense tracking. Just as in our personal lives, it can be very easy to spend your business’ income and wonder about where the money went. Make sure you carefully track your expenses using Xero or other software so you can clearly identify opportunities to cut waste.
4. Bad staffing. Although this can be hard, you need to ensure you find the right staff for the roles you need performing and get rid of or re-train those who don’t fit. There are various wonderful psychological and behavioural HR tools to help you choose the right staff and manage them in a way that helps them thrive at work.
5. Poor decision making. This one could sound a little fluffy, but when you think about it, your success or failure as a business is largely the result of all the decisions you’ve made about it till now. So how good were those decisions? There are a range of resources you can use to improve your decision making ability and it’s worthwhile skilling up. In short, make sure you know how to generate good options, conduct a cost-benefit analysis, get the right data, be objective and be decisive so you can fail fast, learn and improve.

So there’s a 5 step plan to trim the fat and get that hot summer business bod. Look closely at your outsourcing, technology, tracking, staffing and decision making and make some changes for the better. If you need help in any of these areas or would like to learn about how else you can cut waste, give Andrew from Laing Accounting and Business Solutions a call on (07) 3448 0372.