As we move into the final months of 2024, many business owners are starting to work on next year’s budget. While you’ve likely got a good handle on income and expenses, there are some recruitment firm budget busters you’ll either want to avoid or plan to accommodate.
- Office space—By now, many small recruitment firms have shifted to smaller office space by utilizing both hybrid and remote options. If not, make sure you’re not overpaying for commercial space.
- Subscriptions—It’s soooo easy to sign up for “free” trials of this-or-that shiny new tool … and then forget to cancel before you start getting billed. Or finding out that you’re paying for a subscription that you don’t use. Keep track of these recruitment firm budget busters—they add up to real money over time and it’s easy to forget how many you have.
- Advertising—Are you still sinking money into traditional print or Yellow Pages-style advertising? Are you seeing a return on that investment? Dig into this. You may find it’s smarter and more effective to spend resources on building your digital presence. You may also find you can spend less on digital marketing where you can more easily target and segment and sometimes at much lower costs.
- Accounting and bookkeeping—If you’re doing your own bookkeeping and accounting, you may be saving money in the short-term only to spend it in the long-term. This is an area where it’s probably smarter to hire the pros, especially if you don’t have much of a background. You could be making costly errors without realizing it.
- Insurance—This is a cost that keeps rising, so you’ll want to make sure you are shopping regularly *and also* not cutting corners, especially when it comes to business interruption. If your staff work from home with company-owned equipment, make sure you know what is covered through your business policy vs. an employee’s homeowner’s or renter’s policy. Don’t forget to ask about cybersecurity protection as well, especially if you have ecommerce or are providing contractor/temp payroll, etc.
- Renewals—This includes things like annual software renewals, but also things like your domain name, security certificates, trademarks, and business licenses. Individually, these aren’t likely to be budget busters, but if you forget to renew them and your website goes offline, you might find out in a hurry how expensive that can be to fix. These can be easy to miss because each renewal is likely good for multiple years, so if you’re using last year’s budget as a template for this year, you might not remember.
Here are a few bonus ideas that don’t fall into the bucket of recruitment firm budget busters, but you’d be wise to earmark some funds:
- Legal and/or Collections—In a perfect world, you’d never need either of these, but here we are. Better to budget a small amount than to blow up your forecast due to unforeseen problems.
- Professional Development / Bonuses / Team Building—Your business is only as good as your team, so make sure you are budgeting appropriately for things beyond salary.
- Your Salary & Vacations—If you’re a solopreneur, it might not occur to you that your own salary and vacation time should be in your budget. Including your salary is a good way to assign a value to the hard work you do. Budgeting for vacation will both remind you to take off and make it easier to do so guilt-free.