The Boss of You

The business pages are full of articles about the impact of rising fuel costs on business, and to be honest as a small service based business it’s easy to write these things off as inconsequential to your bottom line. In our company we all take transit to work, we don’t ship physical products anywhere, so is it really a big deal?

While it almost certainly isn’t a big deal, a lot of small businesses do make the mistake of not properly accounting for their costs of doing business when setting pricing for their goods and services. Keeping track of costs (particularly rising costs) is key to making sure you get paid what you are worth. This example of rising fuel costs can serve as a good example for what I mean. It’s really easy to look at the stories in the paper about the impact of increased freight costs on a big business where a 2% increase may translate into headline worthy thousands of dollars in increased costs over a year and dismiss those kinds of numbers as irrelevant to your smaller size of business, but are they? If your courier fees went up this year by say $200 due to an increase in fuel surcharges and yet you still brought in the same amount of money as last year, then you just lowered your income by $200 — even though you did the amount of work. Lame no? $200 is afterall a really nice dinner out/spa day/splurge on Etsy and you just missed out due to no change in your worth ethic or productivity at all. Very lame.

Now, I’m not advocating for instant panic - not by any means. Instead, I’m just reminding you that the savvy small business gal needs to not get so busy that she forgets to take some time to check in on where her operating expenses are at, and make sure that by not keeping an eye on those expenses she isn’t cheating herself out of a pay cheque or two.