The very first person we have in our Stellar Partners series is Matt Denburg from Schooley Mitchell.
This podcasts discusses in detail what Schooley Mitchell does to help reduce your company’s cost in three specific areas. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below to learn more.
Click the link to learn more about him and what his company specializes:
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Read the podcast transcript below:
Welcome to today’s session of URDesigns. What we’re gonna be doing today is having additional conversation with MATT DENBURG. My name is Eric Dobbins. I am the CEO of URDesigns and we basically build mobile applications, custom applications, pre-built and just about everything under the sun. So if you need to connect to your field service people to your business systems, we can help you out with that. But the reason I have you on today is to talk with Matt. Now Matt I’m gonna let you introduce yourself and then we’re gonna talk about a couple of things and see where we go from there.
Great! Thank for having me, Eric. So good morning, everyone. My name is Matt Denburg and I’m a Cost Reduction Consultant with a company called Schooley Mitchell. And Schooley Mitchell is an independent cost reduction consulting firm. And by independent, I mean we’re not affiliated with any providers of the services we’re gonna be talking about today. In a given business, there’s cost areas – in (a) business operations – and there’s three of those that we specialize in. They are: Telecommunications, which is your voice, data, and mobile communications; your Credit Card Processing Costs, and your Small Parcel Shipping Costs. Basically we’re like auditors. We don’t sell these services. We do an analysis of the company’s cost in these areas and provide a professional report, laying out what we see opportunities to reduce those costs. We technically don’t change the clients’ vendors. We merely reduce the cost they’re paying to those vendors by an average of about 30%.
So basically, you can still do this even if you’ve just signed a contract with Verizon, or Sprint, or somebody like that with the cell services. Cause all those have you know, these huge cancellations fees. I mean, if you decide to go from Verizon to T Mobile, you know they talk about yes they’ll give you x number of dollars to buy you out but are you getting into a good service when you do that or you know, is that enough to cover what (it) needs to be covered. So you’re saying that for the most part, you (don’t) can do this even if they’re already with a vendor and not have to make them change. Is that right?
That’s correct, Eric. Let’s start with Telecommunications. If the client is under a contract with their vendors… since we’re not changing vendors typically we’re often able to make adjustments within the client’s contract that are able to reduce costs. On the cellular side, mobile devices, since we’re not changing carriers, we have unlimited flexibility to recommend plan changes to the client to generate those savings within the contracts. When we get to Merchant Processing and Shipping, in those areas the vendors have contracts that are very easy to get out of without paying termination fees.
Oh, okay. So the big ones are with the… were with the telecommunications. Now let’s say for instance somebody just got into a telecommunications contract with a vendor. Do you feel most of the time – no, this might be a loaded question – do you feel most of these vendors are actually looking out for the best interest of the company when they sign them up? Or are they just trying to get them on a plan that helps them you know, that gives them the services that they think that they need at that time?
Eric I think you probably know the answer to that question but let me elaborate on it a little. The telecom carrier salesperson that sells the services is getting a commission that’s a percentage of the amount clients spend each month. So it’s not really in their best interest to show the clients how to lower their cost. And in fact, think about it. When was the last time when one of your current telecom vendors called you to say, “Hey, let me help you out try to lower this bill.”? They really save that effort to try to win new clients.
Exactly. And if they do call you is because your contract is expired and they want to get you in a new one. So I understand exactly how that works and yes, that was one of those things. Coz’ as I remember with the company I was with we basically went in thinking, “Okay, we have to take the worst user which is the highest number for sales person.” And for all of our sales people, we have to expect that they’re all gonna do exactly the same amount of phone call, exactly the same amount of data, and all of this stuff that was going on in there. So we’re basically buying these extremely high plans. And then we went in and looked at our technicians and said, “Okay, well we aren’t using as much data right now but when we implement this stuff, we’re gonna be adding some complexity to it and some more stuff to it.” So we had to buffer it and make sure we had enough. Plus because of our accounting department, they wanted us to keep everybody all in -you know, all the sales people in one place. All of the technicians in another place. All of the support people, and office people, and all these other things all split up into different areas. So what happened is every time we were going through and looking at this stuff, the bill just kept going up and up and up.
And one of the things that Matt’s group helped us out with, is they basically went through – Schooley Mitchell helped us out with and Matt, was that we went through and looked at them, (and said you know) looked at this stuff and said, “Okay, we’re gonna take one sales person and put him in with nine technicians in a ten-person group plan and save money.” And that was one of those things that we never even thought that we can potentially do. Because we always thought you know you plan for the worst because the last thing you wanna do is get that overage cost at the end of the month. And one of the things that they like I was saying before, is they would actually go in and adjust the plan. Let’s say for instance, if it was looking like this group was gonna go over and they couldn’t move them somewhere else to make it more even and they would just raise the plan for that group for that month and we wouldn’t get the overage charge. We might get a little bump. I mean, we’re talking about 20-30 dollar bump over a 10,000 dollar contract, which was next to nothing. You didn’t even notice it. But it was just those type of things were just…those ways of doing that actually saved us money not only during the time of us reducing stuff but even afterwards we kept em’ around because it just made it easier for us to do those things and they were looking out for our best interests, which is something that is very hard to find.
Eric, you know, business managers are spread so thin these days you know they’re wearing more hats than ever. Who’s got the time not only to gain the expertise to manage the cellphone plan but to spend time on it anyway. And that’s where we really add value. You know when were at the helm, the client doesn’t really have to worry about it.
Exactly and that was (the) originally the cellphone piece was in my lap. So all cellphone transactions all went through my desk. And believe me, it took me probably… 20-30% of my time was spent doing nothing but cellphone stuff. Okay, as a director that’s not really a good percentage of your time being spend on something as… I know this may sound bad but as small as that. You’re looking for what helps make the company money and we end up focusing on something as small as one little piece of it that we want to keep the cost under control but we spend so much time on it coz’ we don’t understand it. We don’t know how to make it work right. It was just so easy you know I even… this job even passed off to someone else. And I would have to say it when I pass it off to someone else, it probably took about 30% of their time. Because they had to do more coz’ I was asking them to do more. So in all of this stuff that was going on, by the time it came… you know, by the time Matt’s group came around almost all of that was gone. We had requests that came in and said, “Hey, I need a new cellphone.”. We called Matt’s group and said, “Hey, we need a new cellphone.” Then showed up a couple days later. I mean, it was great. I loved it. You know instead of us going through and trying to figure out what a contract – what contract to put it on, how to add it, who to talk to to get it done we called Matt and said, “Hey, Matt. Get us a new cellphone. We need a new one for our sales group.” And they bought it, they put it in a plan, they put the piece in there, we ended up getting the bill for it but we knew; we were expecting those thing, which was great.
And then as an IT Department we were able to focus more on what IT needed and what the company needed as far as that goes. And we’re able to basically take this piece of it that actually consumed a lot of time and move it off to somewhere else. Now if you’re the size of the company that has someone who just does cellphone or just does our phone then that’s great. You might be able to figure this stuff out but man, I’m telling you. These guys can find some money in places you’d never thought you could. We went through the first two-year contract thinking that at the end of it that we couldn’t find any more. Well here’s the kicker: plans change every day or nearly every day. Every month they change. So they were able to actually go into the second year and even saved us money there, which was totally, totally cool. So you know, Matt like I said… I’m a fan. What can I say?
I appreciate it, Eric and we really enjoy you know not just saving our clients’ money but the work that we do really frees up time for them and allows them focus on what they do best. So thanks for covering that with me.
Okay. Alright. Well I think that’s gonna do it for today’s thing. As I said in the other one, if you wanna catch up with Matt and his group, we’re gonna basically put a link on our website: www.ur-designs.com and send you guys right over to them. Matt has a great group; Matt is a great guy to work with I honestly recommend his services. I mean, I really do. They’ve been great for us. So just wanted to say that and thank you, guys and we’ll see you on the next one. And thanks, Matt.
Thank you.
– End of Podcast –
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