Running a business is not as easy as most people think it is from one perspective, from another, it is not as hard as others may think it is. The main thing is that you have to have a knack for it, or at least have some knowledge on the ‘tricks of the trade’.

The most obvious thing is that to set a business is easy; it is operating the business on a day to day basis that kills you and eventually the business itself if it is not handled properly. Among the main reasons behind the failure of most businesses is due to their inability to sustain the business long enough to pick up, and this usually happens when the business owner runs out of funds before the business has had a chance to flourish.

The lesson here is that, you have to be able to maintain the business long enough to allow the opportunities to be realised and thus having enough capital and funds is one thing and if you spend too much and unnecessarily, it would only push your break-even point further and further away. The idea here is among the oldest tricks of the business world, minimise cost, maximise profit.

However, this is easier said than done, a savvy business person would know exactly receipt paper rollswhere to cut corners, create ancillary revenues, manage an optimal level of inventory, and eliminate redundancies and excessive turnarounds. All these elements only lead to one negative element which is the depletion of invaluable funds.

Below is an example of optimising your POS (Point of Sale)

If you are presently using a dot matrix printer for example for your POS, the cost of the ribbon cartridges and the double ply bond point of sale receipt paper rolls could be quite substantial over the course of a single financial year.

In order to optimise your POS and reduce cost, you could opt for thermal printers that use thermal paper rolls which cost much less and the consumption of energy is also much lower. By doing this you might save about 200 dollars in total over the course of a financial year and this is just for your POS system.

Imagine if you took on other initiatives such as turning on only half of your air-conditioning units in the mornings when its cooler and turn on the rest in the afternoon and shut them all down one hour before your operations shut down.

You would probably save about 500 dollars a year there and if you are thinking of hiring a new employee and pay him or her a full salary, ask yourself if it would be more practical to promote internally and raise an existing employees salary by 10 or 20 % which would be much lesser than paying minimum wage to another brand new employee.

These are just simple tricks that you could pursue in order to enhance you competitive position among competitors who are probably already there!