A lot of us took the time we spent in quarantine to polish our green thumb. While for some of us, this meant a houseplant or two, for others, it meant an indoor jungle. In honor of our collective hobby, let’s think of your budget like a watering can.
If you’ve got a lot of assets, you’ve only got so much room in the budget to cover all of them. Much like watering the plants, you’re going to prioritize certain assets, typically the ones that require the most care and investment at minimum, leaving other areas a little bit too dry. And, as many of us learned, when we underinvest in certain areas, or in certain plants, they wither quite quickly.
Now, typically you can always make a second run to the sink, but what you can’t do is make a second run to the board room and appeal the results of your budget meeting. The solution is, of course, savings– cutting certain areas that demand undue resources,searching thoroughly for solutions and hidden resources, and being sure that what you do spend your money on goes above and beyond to provide value.
Launch an Audit
The first step can often be an audit, a deep dive into your finances to gain a thorough and complete understanding of your spend. By auditing your systems, you learn what areas are vacuuming up the most money for the least value in return. You can evaluate circuit utilization reports and other logs and data sets from the services and products you pay for to figure out what’s working for you and what’s working against you (or, maybe, what’s not working at all).
By reviewing contracts, equipment, lines, services, and costs, solutions providers like NetStar can offer you an expert assessment of your financial situation based on a full-scale audit. NetStar presents a full savings proposal to our clients, and we aid in the acquisition and implementation of the solutions that will free up your dollars.
Optimize Spend
You can invest the same $50 on one pair of wool socks or fifteen pairs of cotton socks, but only one will keep you warm this winter. This analogy certainly applies to your technology.
Savings are not always reliant on cutting certain areas of cost or reducing spend. The money that you save directly correlates to the time you spend on maintenancing, repairing, or waiting in delay as a result of inefficient technology. Sometimes, more isn’t better. Consider areas where the technology that you employ creates redundancy, where it is shortsighted, and where it is underutilized.
Take communications services for example. As we talked about in a recent post [link to resolutions article], companies in need of communications software often license outside applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams at the cost of not only the license, but inefficiency. By integrating UCaaS technology into their technology ecosystem, the same or similar budget can be spent on communications tech that is far more efficient. The value, in this scenario, comes not from dollar savings, but through increasing human capital and productivity that leads to value.
To optimize your spend, you may need to switch providers, change technology, or upgrade your existing systems. That’s where this final tip becomes crucial.
Hire A Trusted Advisor
Leveraging a trusted advisor is a powerful way to navigate vendor and provider relationships, maintain your technology ecosystem, and optimize your spend.
Choosing the right technology is difficult enough, but then comes the following step, which can be even harder— choosing the right provider. A trusted advisor maintains consistent relationships with top-of-the-line vendors and providers, as well as a sharp working knowledge of current and emerging technology. At Netstar, once we present the results of your technology audit and suggest solutions, we walk you through the best options for implementation and work in your best interest through the contract and installation process. We leverage our provider relationships to secure the best possible terms and contracts for your company.
We’ll help you manage your technology migrations and integrations, whether you’re moving to the cloud or looking to invest in managed services. NetStar offers technology expense management, so not only will we help you to procure and implement the solutions you need with the greatest cost savings possible, we’ll hold these solutions accountable and keep a close eye on your budget.
If you’re looking to stretch your spend as far as it can go this fiscal year, NetStar is here to help. We’ll help you reach your desired outcomes while sticking to your financial objectives, and you won’t have to sacrifice the quality and efficiency of your technology to do so. Contact us to learn more about what we do and how we can do it for you.
