The very first person we have in our Stellar Partners series is Matt Denburg from Schooley Mitchell.

 This podcasts discusses in detail how Schooley Mitchell gets paid and how the company works after an evaluation in your cost areas.

 

Click the link to learn more about him and what Schooley Mitchell does:

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Read the podcast transcript below:


Alright. Welcome again to URDesigns’ Podcast and Video Series. Just wanted to welcome everybody. I am Eric Dobbins. I am the President and CEO of URDesigns. We provide Mobile Applications for companies. We basically connect your field people to your business systems and that’s pretty much what we do. We have can packages, custom – depends on what it is that you’re looking for, what you need. We’re here to help you out. And what we’re doing today is we’re talking with a business partner of ours named Matt Denburg from Schooley Mitchell. And these guys do some really cool stuff so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna turn it over to Matt and let him introduce himself and tell you guys what he does.

 

Alright. Thanks, Eric and hello, everyone. So my name is Matt and I work for a company called Schooley Mitchell. And Schooley Mitchell is a business intelligent firm that specializes in business operational cost reduction. And there’s three specific areas that our company has expertise in. The first is Telecom and that would involve a company’s phone lines, their data connections, and their wireless devices. The second area is Electronic Payment Processing; so for businesses that accept credit and debit cards. And then finally the third area is Small Parcel Shipping. So this is what involves businesses that are shipping packaged goods that are under a hundred pounds typically and using vendors like FedEx, UPS, and DHL. So that’s what we do. We are independent of the providers of these services – we’re like auditors. We come in to the client’s business and we do an analysis of those cost areas and provide a report that shows the client where we see opportunities to reduce cost in those services. Since we’re not selling these services, what our goal is to optimize the client’s cost with their current vendors. So we’re not changing the providers; we’re just reducing the amount that the client pays those providers each month.

 

Okay. Well one of the questions that I’m getting here and there is basically it’s… everything is sounding really good but their big question is: How does Schooley Mitchell get paid? How do you guys work out the piece where you guys are getting your slice out of it?

 

Good question, Eric. So the analysis we do is actually a contingency cost reduction analysis. And what I mean by that is Schooley Mitchell performs the analysis at no cost and no obligation to the customer. In order to do the analysis, we obtain billing information and permission to talk to the client’s vendors. And when we come back to present our recommendations for cost reduction to the client, the client gets the final go/no-go decision in all those recommendations. There’s no obligation for them to accept any. Typically, we find real meaningful and pack-full savings so the client most of the time accepts all of our recommendations. And the way we get paid for the recommendation the client accepts – we implement those and our fee is a 50% share of the client’s real life savings and that fee is actually paid in arrears. So in a given month we would be invoicing the client for half the savings that they’ll realize in the prior month. So the client never has to come out of the pocket in order to pay our fees.

In the event that we don’t find savings – that happens maybe 10% of the time – in that case we don’t charge any fee. The client just gets a professional confirmation that everything they have is optimized and they’re in good shape.

 

Oh, okay. Now I think you had it to me at one time that after a client gets his – let’s say for instance,the client reduces to that point where there’s not much savings left there, they can still retain you guys to do some of the services that you do. Is that correct?

 

That’s correct, Eric. You know after a certain point we can’t reduce the cost any further. They’re optimized. But a client’s … support and the impact that we make on their business so it’s not uncommon for us to be retained on a monthly basis going forward just to manage and maintain what we’ve done.

 

Wow, that’s really nice because of what it does is that is, as I’ve mentioned in the prior one, the reason I asked this is after you know you’re reducing so you start way up here, you’re reducing to here then you’re reducing; later on you’re reevaluating again and reducing a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Then when you get down to the point where there’s not much left it’s real hard you know… It will be real hard for any company to continue to provide services without actually asking for something. But the services that they provide are so… unique that it just seems like it’s very needed in a lot of cases. Now, not saying that no one, other people can’t do it but they have some tricks and some things that they do to keep those things down.

Because one of the things you’ll notice is that once you stop doing it, everything starts to creep back up. Because we, you know, we as a IT people we spend a lot of time looking at it but we have to plan you know in most cases we’re planning for what could happen. Not necessarily what does happen and us checking you know the day before invoicing it’s really hard for us to do. Coz’ you never know; what happens if your ERP system is down and all of the IT people are working on it and we missed that window to make all those adjustments. So it’s really a good insurance policy to make sure that all that stuff stays the way it is. So… and that’s kind of what I’m looking at.

 

Yeah I’m glad you brought this up. When we ask our clients after an engagement you know, ”How did we do?”; you know, “Where did you really see value in our services?”. Of course they mention that they really enjoy and appreciate the cost savings but what we see time and time again is they appreciate the time savings just as much. The amount of staff resources that we’re able to free up for other initiatives.

 

Exactly. And as I said in one of our previous recordings, I probably saved about 20% of my time when I passed this off to someone else in my organization because I had more demands than even I had on myself. I basically probably saved this person 30% of their time just by doing this. And taking a person and adding 30% to their day or to their week, that’s huge. I mean when you’re talking about IT people you know, yes we all think they all sit in the backroom and just browse videos on YouTube and stuff but that’s not what we do. We actually, if you’re not asking us questions, we’re doing our job. If you’re not – if you don’t notice that we’re there, we’re doing our job. If something fails, that’s when we’re in trouble. So that’s when we also are needed the most. We’re doing things all the time and if we’re not – if we don’t have time to those maintenance pieces and we spend our time doing something else it could potentially impact the business in the future.

And that’s one the things that I always say; we, you know, as part of what we do with mobile, we look at how we save people’s time. And it’s not because we wanna reduce people, that we wanna save their time. (If) The way we look at it is if we’re gonna cut someone’s time, the piece that we wanna do with that time that we’ve cut out is give them the opportunity to do more for the company. Because if you can do more for the company, they might actually handle your customer better. Because they have more time to take care of that customer; they may make sure that something else is done better. So that is exactly why some of this time saving pieces – even though they may not be you know, super, super big savings – they’re soft savings that’s what we refer to but those soft savings can also account for a lot of business growth, a lot of other things that go along with it, which is really you know. The money is great but the time savings puts the emphasis on other things that needed to get done that possibly weren’t being done because they were busy doing that particular piece.

And I – we really focus on a lot of that with our mobile applications. That’s one of the reasons why I really tied this in with what Matt does because the time savings is huge. You know we talk about the money savings; money savings is great. I mean your accountants are gonna love that part. The time saving is what your managers are gonna love because your managers are gonna now be able to do things that they weren’t able to do before, which is great. And that I think is what (it) helps us in our industry with mobile applications and it helps with what you’re doing in the management side, which is really slick.

Okay. Sorry. Didn’t mean to take over. Matt, how are you doing?

 

No problem. You’re doing great.

 

Okay. Anything else you wanted to talk about on the way Schooley Mitchell gets paid? Is there anything else that you wanted to add before we jump off?

 

No. I think I covered it. (Okay, perfect.) Just the important thing to remember is the client doesn’t pay any fees unless we find savings that they like to implement. So it’s really a no risk service

 

And the other thing is that they’re getting a free evaluation to find out whether or not they’re doing the right thing or not. So even if you have the staff that’s supposed to be doing this, take the time to do it because what may happen is that you may find that you know, you can save something and then you know then there’s possibly this little pot of gold that’s sitting out there that you can use for something else. Which is exactly what you wanna do. Keep it away from the big carriers who don’t really… I don’t wanna stay they don’t care about you but they care about your money but they don’t necessarily care what you’re doing with it. So if you can get the cheapest services at the best price, it’s best to do that. And you know, (Absolutely.) do what you can.

Alright, Matt. I really enjoyed the conversation and we’ll do another again in the future, okay?

 

Alright. Thanks for having me today, Eric.

 

Now to get Matt’s information, jump on to our – there’ll be a link associated with this webinar or with this video or audio. Jump on our website: www.ur-designs.com and we’ll point you over to them and get you all the information that you need to be able to get yourself a nice pre-evaluation and see how things work. Alright? Thank you, guys and we’ll see you next time.

– End of Podcast – 

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