6 Ways to Reduce Overhead and Gain a Competitive Advantage

By Nick Huber, Co-Founder of Storage Squad

Last week, we looked at the 6 top reasons why you should drop what you’re doing and start a service-based business. Once you have a concept and you’ve tested your market, it’s time to set-up your operations and build your company. These 6 steps will help you reduce overhead and gain a competitive advantage.

• Ditch the office setting: You don’t need to share a cubical with your employees to oversee their every move, track their productivity, and make sure they are pulling their weight. Tools like Slack and Asana are just the tip of the iceberg. They can use their smartphone to clock hours and you can track their location each minute they are on the clock. You can record and listen to their customer calls for quality control. You can hold T&T meetings (today and tomorrow) for 5-minutes at the end of each day where they share with you what they accomplished today and what they plan to accomplish tomorrow. Rent a we-work desk for employees who want to live in other cities but want more accountability.
• Don’t make your hourly employees a jack of all trades: Don’t overburden your hourly employees. If you train them to take on too many tasks, they will not be able to do everything extremely well and the customer experience will suffer. Keep it simple. Constantly ask the question: “how can I shift this task away from my hourly employee on site and have one employee handle all of it for the entire company?”
• Be a gorilla marketing machine and target your online ads: Let your competitors waste their precious marketing budgets on radio and newspaper ads. Spend yours on highly targeted online ads and put some miles on your shoes by passing out flyers under windshield wipers at the next college football game. Get a Google Place set up and find ways to encourage your early customers to leave honest reviews. Offer referral discounts and compensate customers for bringing you more customers. Manage and develop your own social media presence.
• Cash payments are a thing of the past: I could write an entire article on why you shouldn’t accept cash payments in the service industry. If cash isn’t an option, then you don’t have to trust anyone but yourself with the money. No theft. No trips to the bank. You can have customers remit payment on their own time instead of having your employees spend time writing invoices and counting change. We founded our company in 2011 and have never accepted a cash payment. We haven’t had a single complaint yet…
• Outsource your overhead: You don’t need an accountant, bookkeeper or web developer on your full-time payroll. It’s cheap and easy to outsource this to other companies that specialize in these areas. You and your employees should focus on your business and your customers. Stay organized but leave the administrative work to the people who focus only on that.
• Paperless operations: Paper is a waste of time. Fill out PDFs using Panda Docs or a similar service. Keep detailed records and collaborate using Google documents and cloud storage tools. When my co-founder and I started our company in 2011 while in college, we made a deal with my mother in my home town that we would pay her Internet bill each month if she scanned up all of our mail and organized it in our corporate Google Drive and email it to us. We bought her a scanner and now each time an important piece of mail comes from the IRS or one of our vendors, it shows up in our email inbox and is organized on my Google Drive where it is searchable instantly. I have since moved 4 times and I’m glad I didn’t make my college dorm room my address for important mail.

If you start implementing these 6 tips, you’ll soon gain a competitive advantage while reducing your overhead as you move your startup forward.