When you are running a business, keeping costs down is a major priority. Every business owner wants to trim expenses and make the kind of smart decisions that will help save money any way possible. However, you may not have given much thought to how your decisions about your lift equipment impact your business’s bottom line. Believe it or not, investing in lift equipment can make a major contribution to helping you become a more efficient and cost-conscious business.
The global lifting equipment market is an $85 billion industry, and it didn’t get that way by chance. Lifting equipment powers businesses the world over behind the scenes and contributes to a company’s efficiency in ways you may not have considered.
In this post, we’ll take a look at why investing in quality lift equipment matters, not just for moving stock and supplies but for keeping your costs down.
Long-Term Savings from Ownership
One way you will save money by investing in your own lift equipment is through the cost-savings that accrue with ownership. Many business owners have a short-term view of lift equipment and reason that renting it when they need it can prevent them from having to shell out a large amount of money all at once up front. But that kind of short-term thinking creates a problem because the costs of renting add up over time without accruing equity. When you rent, you are subject to the pricing whims of the equipment owners, and there is no guarantee that those prices will stay the same from one rental period to the next. Beyond that, over the long term, you will likely find that the rental fees for lift equipment will exceed the overall cost of the equipment, meaning that you might end up paying out more than the equipment is worth just to avoid buying it.
Ownership Builds Equity
Another way ownership benefits the cost-conscious business owner is through the equity that ownership accrues. When you own your own equipment, you have a physical asset that you are able to sell in the future, helping to return at least some of that investment to you. When you rent, you don’t have ownership and can’t sell the asset for cash later on. Similarly, when you own the equipment, you can claim depreciation on your taxes, allowing you to save money by writing off part of the cost.
Lower Labor Costs
Some of the value of lift equipment goes beyond the actual equipment and the work it does. When you have lift equipment that you own, you can save on labor costs, which can be an important benefit for the cost-conscious business owner. Consider this: Lift equipment can allow a single employee to do the lifting work that would require several employees to perform manually. This is already a huge savings. But when you own your own equipment, there is an additional savings.
Rentals will often leave you with different makes and models of equipment with each rental period, and that can create a learning curve as employees get up to speech. That learning curve creates a small, but potentially important, drag on your business, bleeding you of speed and efficiency. When you own your own equipment, you only need to train employees once, and their skill and proficiency with using the equipment will only grow over time, leading to increased speed and efficiency over time.
Fewer Workplace Injury Costs
Investing in lift equipment has some direct benefits for your workers that also happen to be important benefits for you as the business owner. When employees attempt to lift stock or supplies manually, they risk injury, and lifting heavy items is a leading cause of workplace injury. By investing in lifting equipment form a reputable source like Zume Sales, you reduce the risk of workplace injury and thus reduce workman’s compensation claims and lower your insurance costs. A safer workplace saves money for everyone, and it also saves on labor when you don’t need to pay others to cover the work of employees who are out injured.
Conclusion
If you’re still not convinced that spending the money on lift equipment is the right choice for you, consider this:
Most reputable lift equipment manufacturers offer financing options to help you spread the costs out over months or years. When you make use of financing, you can take the money that you might have spent on renting equipment and use it to build equity without spending it all at once.
