3 Easy Ways to Grow Your Business and Control Costs

I recently met a CFO who made an interest in remark. He said I am either acting as a speed bump or I'm the person running out of money. Right? So that's the CFO dilemma is how do you manage cash without slowing down growth? If you are CFO of a growing company, that is a very common challenge to bring all the stakeholders together and making sure you're making the best use of money that's available to you if you're in this situation. This video is for you. I'm going to share three simple strategies that you can implement today to control costs without slowing down business growth. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Procuredesk where we help growing companies with spend control. So let's jump right in. Number one is set up guardrails, not gates. So what do I mean by that? Many companies when they start with their spend control process, the first thing they do is set up an approval process. But do you really need approvals for everything? Because every approval slows down things. Even if you are approving something within like an hour or two hour, that is great. But if it takes more time than that, then slows down the momentum. Your teams need software, people need project management software or you need supplies, whatever the case might be, right? So the way to kind of look at this is rather than having approval controls for everything, let's set up automated approvals below a certain threshold. So define upfront, you know, who are your preferred vendors, what are you allowed to purchase? So making sure your stakeholders are educated about what is, you know, the right purchasing process and what they're allowed by. And then set up approvals in a way that below a certain threshold things get automatically approved. So they're still following the process, you're giving them the guardrails, but you're not slowing down the approval process. Right? So that's number one. Number two is getting visibility without micromanagement. Now I get it. You know, finance teams need visibility in terms of what is going on with the spending, right? And month end reports are too late. If you have a spreadsheet for every purchase, that's hard to maintain because you can't scale it. So what is the solution to that? Solution is having a system where you have visibility into your spending at any given time. So you can go in and look at how are we trending as per our forecast or as per our plan. And are there any spikes that I need to jump in and figure out why we are having spikes in the spend and if that is not happening, let it continue. Right? So having a process so that you have real time spend visibility kind of prevents that micromanagement by default and give people more freedom to do what they need to do to run the business. Number three is budget ownership. Now if you look at your department stakeholders, right, our budget owners, they want more autonomy, understood. And you want more accountability. So how do you solve for both? An easy way to solve for that is give them the budget visibility so that they know exactly how much in their budget and then have a system that is checking against the budget in real time so they know exactly how much money they have left so that they can make better decision. So it's simple way to give them autonomy to spend under their budget and you're driving accountability because they are spending against the budget. Right. So those are three simple strategies. So now one more thing I want to talk about here is which many people you know get it wrong is it's not about cost control, it is making better purchasing decisions automated. So how do you make sure that people are buying from the right vendors? Spending is pre negotiated, they know what is allowed, what is not allowed. If you deal with these three things, controls become automated, right? And at that time people are doing the right things because you have enabled employees by giving them better tools, better processes and so on. Right? So just to recap, if you are facing with the dilemma of the speed bump versus running out of cash, here are the three things you can implement today. Set up guardrails, not gates. Focus on visibility, not micromanagement and give them budget ownership so that you can drive accountability. If you like this video and found this helpful, go ahead and hit the subscribe button so you get notified when we release videos like this. And thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.