When devising a business development strategy, one of the most valuable things you can do as a business owner is make your employees feel like they have a stake in the company. Creating a sense of ownership among employees helps ensure an organization runs more efficiently and less expensively, which drives results. Pamela Bilbrey and Brian Jones, coauthors of Ordinary Greatness: It’s Where You Least Expect It … Everywhere, explain how to go about it.

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• Ask staff for their opinions. As your business grows and evolves, it needs change. Rules and regulations that were once vital may now be antiquated and even counterproductive, costing you time and money. Ask your employees the one thing they would get rid of, whether it’s a policy, paperwork, your regular morning meeting, or whatever. Because they’re in the trenches every day, they’ll have a good idea of what’s not working. Hearing them out may save you time and money in the long run.

• Reconsider whose money you’re spending. Or rather, have your employees reconsider whose money they’re spending. Ask anybody whose money they prefer to spend and the answer is sure to be the same: someone else’s. That can be a scary thought for a business owner. While an extra $50 a month spent on paper products may not seem like much to an employee, to the business owner, it looks like an extra $600 per year that could be drawing interest in the bank.

  We’re all much more conservative when spending our own money, and helping your employees look at the company’s money as their own could save you big bucks in the long run. If they were paying for coffee cups in the break room, would they be more likely to reuse their cups for refills? Ask staff to be on the lookout for coupons that could help the company cut costs. By giving the people in your organization a sense of ownership over the way the money is spent, you’ll open yourself up to finding new ways to cut costs as part of your business development process.

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