How to Monetize Your Business
Unless your business is registered as a non-profit, it’s concerned with revenue, and the means by which it can earn that revenue. Sometimes, by virtue of our operations or where we’re situated in the market, it may be we can benefit from a range of exceptional and worthwhile additional means of bringing in revenue, and of using our staff for worthwhile measures they may be all-too-happy to consider.
Learning how to monetize your business in ways you might not expect can help tide you over the difficulties of running a firm in 2020-2021 and beyond, or it can help you make good on the unrealized potential that may have been with you all along.
Of course, making good on this involves ensuring you know just what your extra room for added capacity is, or where and when the value may be slipping through your fingers.
In this respect, we can more readily ensure that we’re allowing nothing to be forgotten and that as a result, we don’t have to resort too readily to cuts or other debilitating yet recuperative measures.
Let’s see what this means in the long run:
Monetizing Your Business In Ways You Might Not Expect
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Selling Inventory
Selling inventory is an important consideration to keep in mind. It could always help you in ways that you might not have expected on the surface. For instance, GF Commodities are a great service through which professional chefs or commercial enterprises can sell used cooking oil and yellow grease leftover from their production cycles.
This can work in tandem with your wish to economize and to make the most of every opportunity afforded to you. Commercial kitchens and the chefs that run them will do their best to ensure leftovers aren’t wasted, or that deals get the customers in on slow days, so why not ensure every element of your working process is managed in kind?
This approach can help us more readily understand what our inventory denotes and how it thrives going forward. This can be tremendously important to understand, and little efforts like these may add up to what helps push your business through hard times.
Consulting, Talks & Integrations
Your business isn’t solely a provider of goods or services, but it’s also a retainer of the assets used to help make that a possibility. Namely, your staff, and your shared skillsets are valuable too, and not necessarily only for the pursuit of your business.
It may be, for instance, that you allow your staff to consult as part of your business, or help them attend talks at local trade shows, or try to enhance your influence with academic programs going forward.
Monetizing your business in this light can help you more readily understand exactly what services you could offer outside of your standard operation.
Perhaps, for instance, your ability to take on students as part of a working placement can not only help you pick from a prize pool of candidates going forward, but they could help fortify your team without you having to pay too much for the overall insight. It’s a win/win, especially with what the placement attendee may get out of it.
As you can see, employers can utilize all forms of strategies to contribute while also bettering their own standing, be that through reputation or through more readily being part of the wider integration of careers and skillsets.
Training Opportunities & Bidding on Contracts
Much like speaking at keynotes or offering consulting services, you may find that training opportunities can help you deliver your expertise in a manner that structures the pursuit of another operation’s aim.
For instance, the public and private sectors often find themselves merging in a wide array of ways. We cannot list every industry this may be applicable for, so let’s use two high-profile and recognizable considerations to manage, and you can dilute that more readily for your own humble enterprise.
For instance, consider how SpaceX and NASA are not competing, but rather inform one another for the shared goal of a successful space race to Mars and beyond. They integrate their processes while still retaining their intellectual property in some respects.
In the same token, Amazon provides Azure services and production capacities for many elements of the government, particularly in defence contracting.
Could your industry, and your positioning within it, also herald an opportunity for training or for bidding on contracts?
What kind of collaborative process can you ensure, even if this means using tenders to get ahead and build a reputation with a certain provider?
This may not apply perfectly to your firm, but it’s certainly worth considering from now into the long run.
Subscriptions & Accounts
Of course, sometimes monetizing your business means finding new ways to deliver, improve upon, and charge for an enhanced user experience. That said, it’s not always easy to figure out what this means and how it applies to your business. Let’s use another case study.
Monzo, a challenger bank in the United Kingdom with no branches but an industry-leading mobile app, has found itself in trouble. Each year they report heavy losses and seem to be operating on a long-term plan.
Recently, in order to enhance their ability to generate revenue even from their free customers, they introduced Monzo Plus and Premium, two dedicated and additional subscription plans offering a range of features for £5 and £15 a month respectively.
In this light, customers were able to create virtual cards, access their monthly credit report, and access new, experimental features for the app, just to name a few things.
Could your business also offer subscription opportunities that help your customers or clients interact with your firm in a more convenient way, even if that just means paying the cost of free deliveries ahead of time?
This kind of effort can helpfully curate not only your ability to generate revenue but to gauge interest and how many loyal or engaged customers you have on hand – and what features they desire from you, too.
With this advice, we hope you can monetize your business in ways that you may not have thus far considered or expected.