How To Increase Your Business Profit in One Hour

What’s the purpose of your business?

Setting aside your mission and purpose, when you get right down to it, your business is an income stream. Your business exists to accelerate your journey to Financial Freedom while ensuring your baseline lifestyle needs are taken care of along the way.

In other words, the goal of your business is to turn a profit. And you can radically—and quickly—increase that profit by decreasing your business expenses.

But that’s easier said than done.

What trips up many of us is the Business Owners Trap. Often, I see owners focus exclusively on their top-line revenue. In an effort to maximize that revenue, they take every penny of profit and put it back into the business.

All of a sudden, the business stops being a tool to support their present needs while building a Freedom Generator. The result?

The typical business owner invests in the business to the point where he can’t invest in himself.

It’s one thing to spend a dollar that will allow you to make two, but the problem starts when you begin to accumulate unnecessary expenses. They begin to gunk up the plumbing of your business and gradually make your business sluggish and inefficient.

And most business owners don’t even see it happen.

So it’s critical that you consciously and regularly take the time to eliminate unnecessary expenses.

What qualifies as an unnecessary business expense?

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Most expenses start off as a good idea. Maybe it was the right time for that new marketing approach, that big hire or that service subscription. So you made the up-front investment or you set up a recurring payment.

And you forget about it. Or you simply assume it’s still an important part of your business infrastructure.

Cut to today. Your business has evolved. And some expenses just don’t make sense anymore.

Instead of contributing to the success of the business, the price tag now exceeds the benefit. Certainly, there’s a dollar value, but there’s also a time cost, a labor cost and a cost of focus.

Your goal is to focus on building your business, bringing in new clients and dazzling your existing clients. But you wind up losing valuable energy to your overly cluttered expense ledger.

So what’s the secret to streamlining your expenses?

Here’s my tip, and it’s one that I use in my own business:

Once every few months, start from zero.

Ideally, every quarter, sit down with a blank sheet of paper or a spreadsheet. Imagine you have no expenses at all in your business. Now, begin to add your expenses into a list based solely on whether each one adds value to your business today.

Every expense that wants to live in your ledger must justify its residence there.

Here are some questions to ask yourself as you go through this exercise:

• Does this expense help me manage the administrative tasks of my current business?
• Does it help me get the clients I want right now?
• Does it help me maintain my current roster of clients?
• Does the value I gain from this expense make it worth the cost of money and energy?

Go through each of your expenses until you have a list of only those that are essential to your business today.

Get rid of everything else.

Scheduling this financial check-up every few months, so you are routinely tuning in to your business and optimizing its structure. You cut unnecessary spending and maximize profits at your current revenue.

Best of all, you transform your business into what it was always intended to be—an incredible tool for moving you rapidly toward Financial Freedom!

When are you going to schedule your first “start from zero” review of your business expenses? Set a date, and then share with us in the comments below or in the Business Owner Only community.

image credit: Bigstock/Palto

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