Your biggest business energy drain

Many owners of small businesses try to reduce their bills by encouraging their staff to adopt energy-saving habits. You've probably heard most of these tricks already: not to boil more water than you need to, not to leave lights on in empty rooms, etc. However, this really is an uphill struggle, because it's not that easy to get adults to change their life-long wasteful habits. Is there a simple way to drastically reduce various business energy bills without having to babysit your staff? Yes, there is.

I have a rather outside the box question for you: as a small business owner, do you really need an office in the first place? You might think that you must have an office in order to have a business, but it's not true. What you must do to stay in market is run your business efficiently and dumping your office might be one of the best decisions you can make.

Just think about how much money you would save if you'd let your employees work from home instead of working from an office. There's much more to that than merely cutting various business energy bills. You wouldn't have to pay any rent. You wouldn't have to pay any water, electricity or gas bills. You wouldn't have to hire cleaners, electricians, plumbers and other people involved in an office maintenance process. You wouldn't have to keep replacing equipment. All these expenses that add up to an enormous financial drain would be gone in a moment.

Furthermore, the decision to dump your office isn't only good money-wise, it's also good productivity-wise. Studies have shown that most employees work are much more productive when they work from home. Why? It's because when they have to sit in an office from 9 to 5, they know that it doesn't matter how much work they'll get done, they'll still have to stay there until working hours are finished. On the other hand, working from home is a completely different story, because employees know that once they'll finish the job for the day, they'll be able to do whatever they want. The incentives are much better, right? It's hardly surprising that businesses that allow their employees to work from home are often the most productive ones.

At first, getting rid of your office might sound like a crazy idea, but is it? We live in an information age where it's easy to exchange data via and hold meetings via internet. You don't really need a physical space to store your documents either: there are companies that will be happy to store them for you and they cost less than renting an office. Sure, going from an office-based business to a business where everyone works from home is a big transition, but it's worth it in the long run. Why would you want to pay a lot of money to have a place where people don't really want to be? You can be wiser than that: run an office-less business. It's so much more than merely reducing your business energy bills.