The New York Times Sunday Business Section runs a regular column called "Job Market," full of advice for wage slaves, and today's installment was about watching how you spend your money. The examples given are all about the things people spend on when they're at the office — lunch, lattes, and such. But the basic message was that it's a good idea to pay attention to the little seemingly inconsequential things you're spending your money on, and if you can't just eliminate them to look for alternative ways to get the same result (or something similar) for less money.
This is good advice in your personal life, for entrepreneurs as much as for employees, but it also pays to consider whether there are also costs you have in your business that on a daily or weekly basis don’t seem like much but that over a year add up to enough money that you could have done something better with it.
I just had a chance to see this principle in action in a fairly big way. On Friday I was talking to some executives of a rather large and successful company. And they were talking about cutting back on the bottled water the company keeps available for employees and switching back to water coolers (with filtered water, of course). Turns out those handy individual bottles of spring water cost a lot more than they’d realized. And something they decided rather quickly they didn’t really need, after all.
So at a time when it’s important to marshal your cash, it’s a great idea to look more closely at the details of how and where you spend your money every month, to find the inevitable expenses for things that don’t create value and that, however insignificant they seem individually, add up to real money that can be spent in ways more likely to keep your company on the road to realizing its potential.