During good economic times when business owners can afford to keep a few “perks” in the operating budget, it isn’t unusual to see a lot of time and money spent on meetings, training, employee benefits, and marketing. But when business is slow and things have to be trimmed back or eliminated, it is usually these same items that disappear from the operating budget. Many of these things are eliminated because they are non-billable and cannot be charged off to any job. This is not always true, but for the most part, something like attending an educational seminar cannot be directly billed to a customer.
In a recent online survey at LinkedIn.com, the question of budget-cutting drew responses from 163 people. They were asked, “You are setting next year’s budget for your business and have to make some expenditure cuts: What do you trim first?”