Here are a few relative painless ways to cut cost and make your business more robust.

Use Free Services

Why pay for something you don't have to? There are a lot of free stuffs on the internet. Web sites, e-mail addresses, fax numbers and conference call services are all among the options business owners can use for little or no charge at all.

Just enter "free phone service" or "free fax service" in Google, you will be amazed at what come up.

Do It Yourself

You need people to run a business unless you happen to be a one-man-industry. So, if you have employees, you have payments to make, taxes to deduct from the salaries and send the deducted money to the state exchequer. In case of larger establishments, these things are taken care of by the professionals, who are experts in the area, which takes the accounting load off the higher management.

But if you own a small business, you need to take care of the payroll all by yourself. Calculating the income tax and national insurance contributions in producing the weekly payroll can easily take an hour or more each week. A payroll software package to satisfy the payroll requirements can be just one part of making that small business more efficient.

How much you pay your accountant each month? $200? With less than $100 priced easy-to-use payroll software like ezPaycheck (from halfpricesoft.com), you can handle the payroll job easily yourself. Most payroll software can be downloaded from the website and try free for 30 days. Just pay the software after you feel comfortable.

And do you hire a professional to create to e-letters or flyers? With software like Microsoft Office Publisher, you can select from pre-built templates to quickly and easily create professional-looking e-letters or print the flyers advertising a sale in house with a color printer.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing does not always mean sending your business oversea. This is an idea to find talented people not limited in your local geography. From guru.com, elance.com or other websites, you can find web master, bookkeeper and other people that work for you on a subcontract basis.

Marketing Efficiently

If you mail a printed newsletter or coupon to customers, would it be more cost-effective to send out an e-mail? You can save not only printing and paper cost, but also postage.

Instead of buy advertisement from traditional news paper, you can also market online. If you have money, you can use pay-per-click program from Google, Yahoo or other companies. But do not forget there are still a lot of free and effective ways to marketing your company online, such as blog, bookmark, article-marketing, directory-marketing, press release, email-marketing and so on.

Cut Transportation Cost

The gas is over $4 per gallon now. Here are some questions to ask:

- Do all your sales or services calls need to be in person? Can you help your customers with internet-based technologies such as web conferencing and tools?

- Can your company allow full-time employee to telecommute? It will cut your rent expense, travel and fuel costs. And some studies have shown the employee work from home have increased output and enthusiasm.