Once your business hits off and you start making a profit, you’ll find yourself in a dilemma what to do with all this money. Sure, spending something on yourself is a must, otherwise, you risk getting demotivated. Your next stop should be finding the right way to improve your business, however, this is not as simple as it may sound at first. Overinvesting may cause a significant cash flow shortage, which is why you need to be 100 percent sure that every single dollar you’re investing goes to the right place. With that in mind, here are the top six ways to invest your company’s first profits.
1. Investing in your team
The first thing you need to do is invest in your team. No matter how big of an impact you had on the overall success of the early stage of your business, you did not do it on your own. Therefore, don’t forget about bonuses, public recognition, congratulatory dinners and, in some scenarios, even awards. While this may seem wasteful to some, it’s important that you understand that morale is a quantifiable advantage. After all, happy employees work 12 percent better than their lass content peers. What better way is there to show this than to recognize their effort so far.
2. Hiring help
The next thing you need to think about is hiring some more help. We’re not just talking about hiring a few more employees but about actually looking for someone to help you out with administrative tasks. Hiring an assistant would be the best choice, while hiring a virtual assistant may sometimes be equally great alternative. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that you’re averting any of your responsibilities. In fact, this helps you pass on some of the boring tasks to someone else so that you can focus on more important responsibilities.
3. Outsourcing your least favorite tasks
One of the best ways to boost your company’s profit and save yourself from a lot of stress is to outsource your least favorite tasks. First of all, this way you’ll delegate this task to professionals instead of having to assign your inexperienced and underequipped team to handle it. Think about it, even if you were able to equip and train your team, they would still lack the experience, which means that this method is both more efficient and more cost-efficient. At the very end, this helps your team focus on your company’s core tasks.
4. Digital marketing
Perhaps the most important investment that you have to make is in your digital marketing. Not only is this field most likely underrepresented in your current business model but you might not have explored all the different options that you have there. You see, there are so many different types of digital marketing and, regardless of your industry, your business could benefit from all of them. Social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing and online advertising are just some forms that are worth exploring.
5. Training
The efficiency of your team can grow only so much with sheer experience. Once they encounter a competency roadblock (which happens even to the most talented of employees), you’ll have to hire a professional to help them overcome them. Helping your employees improve their skills through professional training, courses and tutoring will help grow your productivity, in the long run. Still, you need to be smart about the way in which you invest, seeing as how investing in employees who will soon abandon you or get poached by your competitors can turn out to be useless. Loyalty needs to be as big of a factor as competence in order for this investment to be considered smart.
6. Creating a cash buffer
This last part is aimed at preventing the problem with cash flow (which is something we’ve discussed in the introduction). Why not set some money aside in order to be able to instantly avert any cash-shortage-related crisis? This will help you avoid methods like selling invoices, applying for another loan, selling assets or enforcing extreme austerity in the office. Regardless of what way you look at things, it’s a vast improvement.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are so many areas worth investing in and, most likely, your initial profit won’t be high enough to cover all of them. Therefore, you need to prioritize to the best of your abilities. Nonetheless, there’s such a thing as a size-appropriate-investment, meaning that it’s usually a bad idea to have your spending match that of a much bigger company. This is why it is so important to be realistic and unbiased in an assessment of your own business.