How are small businesses working to offset the cost of living crisis?

"As a small manufacturing and ecommerce jewellery business, rising inflation and the cost of living crisis is of great concern. My business is very much in the luxury spend category. With rising energy, food and fuel prices, this has inevitably put a great deal of pressure on most people. Purse strings are tightened and understandably luxury spend is put on the back burner. Like so many other small businesses, we have had to make changes within our company to try and offset the negative economic inflation and cost of living crisis as much as possible. This has resulted in us being forced to put our prices up. Precious metals, like gold and silver, have yet again gone up and our silver chains that come from China have also increased in price dramatically. We have also seen a huge rise in our electricity bill to run the machines we use. This has forced us have to reconfigure our workshop so we can turn some off our less busy machines, lights and drills until they are absolutely needed. The knock-on effect goes even further as most our trade comes via our website. We have a large annual advertising budget that is used to get us customers via Google and social media adverts. If the customers can't afford to buy our jewellery, the return on our advertising spend becomes too high and we are then forced to pull back on ad spend. This in turn, if we are not careful, creates a deficit of customer visibility that then results in far fewer sales. I think that this year is going to be very difficult for all SMEs and hard decisions will inevitably have to be made by business owners across the country to protect themselves."

"Right now, small businesses are being squeezed more than a tangerine on a juicer. The result is a mixture of questions and scenarios. For example, do you put prices up, but what happens if your customers then go elsewhere? Also, what happens if they don't pay on time, or worse still, at all? Sometimes you wonder whether it's all worth it, but it is, of course. So off we all go, back on the merry go round again, where the Government expects us to pull a rabbit out of the hat and create economic wealth and jobs amid an unprecedented cost of living crisis. For my own bid-writing business, the use of zoom (and other similar tools) has been revolutionary for me as a home-based consultant. Time is my most precious commodity and the only place I can make savings that positively affect my business almost immediately is controlling it. Zoom and Teams help massively on that front. Not having to travel too much also helps with the cost of fuel going through the roof. Remote working helps to alleviate the financial burden of rising costs."