The cost of production, overhead, and maintenance are the most important items on which you must pay attention to reduce your costs and increase your profits.

Every good entrepreneur should know that reducing and optimizing costs is a strategic issue. In developing this work, it is necessary to focus on essential items, over which you have control, and that reduce them do not affect the business.

A company should not expect a crisis to start a program to achieve maximum efficiency in spending. The control of expenses should be a permanent task on the part of the manager and the comptroller of your company.

We can not say that there is a method applicable to any company when it comes to looking for cost reduction management, but it is possible to give you a series of tips to get you started on this important task. Here they go:

1. Trend Analysis

Check all types of expenses, compared with previous months or periods, and pay attention to those who experience significant variations, both in increase and decrease.

2. Justification

Do the zero-based budget exercise with expenses and ask each area and department to "justify" each expenditure to be made and to explain or detail the costs already incurred. Ask these three questions: Is this expense necessary? Can it be reduced? Is it possible to postpone it?

3. Budget

It is important to establish the budget of expenses and monitor it month by month, evaluating its deviations. The fact of having a budget does not force to spend, if you can avoid or postpone the expenses, you have to motivate to do it.

4. Follow-up

To control expenses, it is important that you follow up. This consists of monitoring the critical items on a weekly or monthly basis, analyzing the deviations and taking the similar measures.

5. Raise awareness

Reducing or cutting costs is difficult, so it is necessary to increase awareness among management and other staff that it is a need to do so.

6. Do not be afraid

You must lose the fear of cutting expenses, they are hard measures. But remember that if you face a crisis, you must execute them before the consequences are irrecoverable.

7. Reward

Take care to motivate employees to present savings and expense reduction initiatives, so that those who contribute ideas that lead to reduced costs are awarded.