Is Shiny Object Syndrome costing your small business hundreds each month?
As a modern business owner, you see on average 10,000 ads PER DAY!**
Don’t believe me? Ads are everywhere. Social media, websites, emails, catalogues in the mail, clothing, TV, radio, the back of receipts, roadside bins, benches and billboards, vehicles, thank you cards inside products, books, the back of products (buy the full range!), tourist centres… nevermind shopping centres and local markets!
That’s an insane number of times to say NO every day. All it takes is for you to be having a rough day and you’ll be typing in your card details to get the latest money/time saving hack available. But have you ever really asked yourself… does it REALLY help, or is it just another thing ?
**as estimated by digital marketers at Forbes September 2022
How we saved ~$263 PER MONTH in running costs with a 20 minute audit...
With the cost of everything skyrocketing in 2022, money saving hacks for house and home are a super hot topic right now.
We are feeling the pinch, just like everyone. But rather than jacking up our prices to cover these costs, we’ve shaved what we can out of our ongoing expenses – and have saved ourselves $244 PER MONTH in just a few online business tools and subscriptions. A couple of small tweaks to how we were running things, but nothing that has taken a huge amount of time or reduced the quality of work we produce!
This table doesn’t include all our paid online tools. We probably have more than most simply due to the nature of our work, but I do make a point of ‘spring cleaning’ our subscriptions regularly to ensure we’re not paying for anything we no longer use, or multiple tools that have features that overlap!
How much can you save each month with a little creativity and flexibility?
Here’s a list of the most common underutilised tools that could be draining your business cashflow each month that might not be worth it… Consider cancelling them outright, merging similar tools or changing to a more cost effective solution…
- Slack: First on our list, Slack is a tool that sounds great in theory, but unless you and your team are down with the lingo, the learning curve outweighs its 'time saving' benefits for most small businesses.
- Office 365/Google Workspace Everyone needs a word processor, and MS Word is the best... or is it? If you're running apple computers, we recommend switching to the free native apps Pages and Numbers. Or if you're on windows, consider OpenOffice or LibreOffice. These free alternatives can open and save as the 'normal' document formats for Office 365 and won't cost you a dime. If you're subscribed to either of these for emails - see if you can host your emails with your website and use a free email client like Apple Mail, Eddison Mail, Spark or Mozilla Thunderbird!
- iCloud/Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Cloud Cloud storage is one subscription we do recommend keeping, especially if you have a paperless office like ours and store archives digitally. For most of them, the lower tiers have more than enough space for everything you need. If you're already subscribed to either Google Workspace or Office365 - use the space included in that subscription rather than paying for a dedicated cloud storage service! For us, we use Dropbox and love it, but we don't subscribe to either Office365 or Google.
- Asana/Trello Project management apps like this can also come with a steep learning curve similar to Slack. Before you get sucked into a free trial, look at the features list and pricing and weigh up if the app includes everything that you need or if you will need to subscribe to multple services to cover all bases.
- Photoshop/Canva/image manipulation Each have their pros/cons. Canva is super easy to use, but also has some licensing issues that you need to be careful with, especially regarding logo design. Photoshop is a pain to install, a pain to uninstall and a subscription that is not worth it (IMO as a designer). If you're just resizing some images, fixing up some colours and cropping - GIMP is a free alternative that has all bases covered. Or, the more robust app Affinity Photo that we use is amazing and is a one-time purchase.
- Stock image websites Again, unless you're in the creative space and making digital assets all the time, stock image site subscriptions are generally unnecessary. iStockPhoto, Pexels, Pixabay... these are all well-stocked free stock image sites that have decent photos and will not cost you a thing. Better yet - take photos yourself. Original photos are ALWAYS preferable to stock images!
- WordPress Plugins Its no secret, we love WordPress. The library of available plugins to extend the core WordPress into your dream website is enormous! Understandably, some of these plugins come at a cost - and just because you pay for it, doesn't mean it does the job better than a free alternative. Your website will run into less issues, and perform better with fewer plugins. So really analyse if you need another plugin, or if it can be done with what you already have installed before installing anything new. Oh and don't forget to take a backup in case it breaks!
Online subscription audit in 10 minutes:
- In your accounting database, look at your subscriptions/software categories over the last 12 months (all that are active).
- Review the features list for each app/tool and see if any features overlap with another service you are paying for. Eg, if you have Office365 and also pay for Dropbox…
- Anything you have not used in 3+ months – cancel immediately. You can always re-subscribe if you need it again later.
- Only pay for a year license if you know you are really going to use
this for the whole year. The discount you get for paying for a year is
worthless if you only actually use the service for 2 months. - For apps that require your team to upskill – factor in the training time
to the overall benefit. Especially if you have a high staff turnover,
the cost of training may outweigh any other time savings.
