What are five essential sources of revenue for SMEs?
Thursday 6th January 2022
It’s a universal and basic truth that all good businesses are built on a solid foundation of revenue streams. Businesses of all sizes cultivate a variety of revenue streams that feed into their own model, and the best companies never put all their eggs in one basket.
But when it comes to SMEs or small to medium enterprises, it can be hard to decide on which revenue streams to focus the majority of your attentions on. To help give you a head start on your business, we’ve come up with a list of revenue streams that we think you should be putting the attention of your SME into - and we’ll look into how developing these streams with solutions like invoice financing can inject growth and progress into your projects.
5 essential sources of revenue:
- Product Sales
- Services
- Licensing
- Expertise-sharing
- Advertising
1. Product Sales
Product sales should always be your first port of call when considering ways to bolster your revenue streams. Selling a product feeds directly into your revenue naturally, so it’s important to be constantly thinking about how to bolster product sales as a revenue stream. This can include any number of new measures including things like working on your conversion rates, investing in high-quality marketing and advertising, or even improving the range of products you sell. There’s a number of ways you can approach it, but always being on the lookout for ways to revamp your product sales is a sure-fire way to boost those revenue flows.
2. Services
Providing a service is another vital source of revenue for SMEs and in a crowded marketing, constantly developing your service offering gives an essential lifeline to small and medium businesses to come out on top over their competitors. This can mean improving the service or looking at how you work out the balancing of service and expenditure. One key way to do this is by boosting cashflow with an initiative like invoice financing, which sees you sell your service invoices to a invoice finance loan provider who pay you a percentage of the invoice as soon as the invoice is raised. It’s a neat solution to a problem that so many services have and just one of the ways you can change how your service works to come out on top.
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3. Licensing
One source of revenue that often doesn’t get a look in when it comes to considering what revenue streams you can look into is the concept of licensing. If, during the course of your research and work, you develop a piece of software that speeds up your processes, you can always consider licensing that software out to other businesses in your industry. This is a revenue solution that has grown exponentially since the dawn of the digital age, and one that will only continue to develop as more and more companies create cleverer ways to work.
4. Expertise-sharing
When you start your own businesses, you’re either an expert in your field or you’ll rapidly be on your way to becoming one through your everyday projects and ventures. One way of bolstering your revenue streams is by sharing your expertise with the world and monetising that sharing process. This can take any number of forms – monetising a blog with advertising is an excellent way to start, and if you’re a keen public speaker, many companies and institutions are always in the market for speakers at events, workshops and symposiums. Sharing your knowledge also has the added benefit of improving your reputation as a market expert and can lead to new opportunities through networking channels.
5. Advertising
Since the first advert was put to paper, businesses across the world and throughout history have been using it as a revenue streams that has provided substantial financial rewards. In the digital era, we are more used to seeing adverts than ever before, and as long as your company isn’t too intrusive about it, you to can utilise adverts to your advantage. This obviously only applies to certain industries and fields, but hosting adverts for other businesses on your websites, apps, printed materials and event spaces can bring in that extra money in a way which requires less effort than other revenue streams. Keep an eye on the adverts though, to ensure they don’t affect the customer experience too much or they don’t result in a conflict of interest.
Those are just some of the ways you can bolster your arsenal of revenue streams within your small or medium sized business.
As ever, the potential of streams will grow as your business does, so always be ready to invest in new opportunities as they come to maximise your financial gains. In order to profit from those opportunities, you’ll need a solid cashflow to be sure you have funds free to pursue those new open doors.
