Businesses everywhere are focusing on a simple 3-letter abbreviation: ROI, or return on investment. This is essentially calculated with the money you’ve invested into a business and the amount of return you got. For example, if you bought 50 shares in a company at $10 a share, that’s an investment of $500. Let’s say you make back $550, that’s roughly a 10% return on your investment.

To give you a harder example, thinking about spending $50,000 on an employee for a year. Now you have to calculate how much money that employee has made you. If that employee sells products and works independently then you could potentially have an easy calculation on your hands, but unfortunately, an employee usually doesn’t work on their own and is part of a team, contributing ideas, manpower and other things to help your business succeed. In a situation like this, it’s not easy to calculate how much return you get on your investment.

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The Secret to Increasing Your ROI

Repurposing is perhaps the best way to improve your ROI. Essentially, it means to continue using your investment past whatever projections you have. For instance, if you invested money into a marketing campaign that cost $10,000 but you have some leftover assets that could be used, such as sample products that weren’t used, logo and website design features that can still be used, then you can continue to utilise those extras and repurpose them.

For instance, your $10,000 could’ve been projected to give you a 50% ROI, meaning you made $15,000 back due to extra sales. However, you still haven’t used up all the sample products you have, meaning you can repurpose them in unique ways. For example, you could offer an affiliate marketing opportunity with bloggers. You send them left over samples, give them a link for their readers to buy from you and further increase your ROI. The blogger gets money, you get to reuse samples and continue making money from your investment, and everyone is happy.

Repurposing Software and Technology

Another great way of increasing your ROI is to repurpose technology and software. For instance, if you have an alert notification software setup for your business and employees, you can convert it to a global messaging service to keep your employees in check and give them notifications about various jobs or tasks that need to be done.

Another method of repurposing software is to just continue using an older version despite there being a newer edition. For example, you could buy an older version of Microsoft Office instead of subscribing to Office 365. You’ll save money in the long run, it probably has all the features you need, and you don’t need to spend extra money on features you won’t use. For hardware, you could probably continue using old computers as word processing machines or handling spreadsheets. You don’t need a powerful computer to run simple office tasks, so why upgrade and waste money? That $500 computer you bought for your office could probably last you an entire decade and still be powerful enough to repurpose as an office computer should you upgrade in the future.

Repurposing Employees

Hiring an employee is expensive. You have to consider the costs of interviewing the employee, equipping them with a new computer and other tools, and also consider benefits they receive. It’s not cheap hiring an employee, but you can get more value out of your staff if you know how to. You might be thinking about forcing them to do overtime or making them do multiple tasks that they weren’t initially hired for, but that would be a brutish way to go about maximising the efficiency of your staff.

A long-term solution for improving the investment you made in your employees is to give them a career and not just a job. If you want the most out of each member of staff, then it would be wise to give them a clear path to progress further in your business. Perhaps they can start as interns and slowly work their way up to become more important members of staff. Eventually they could become more specialised team members, or perhaps they take on a general role and help with other departments whenever the time is right. Having employees that grow and fill a variety of different roles is critical when you are growing your business, and it’s one of the best ways to improve your ROI on each individual employee you hire.