Save yourself some grief and get pro cost reduction services
Do-it-yourselfers get all the headaches and still miss out on savings
It’s a question all of us grapple with, both at home and on the job: Should I bring in a pro to do the work, or should I try to do it myself?
If you have a burned-out light bulb, you can replace it yourself. If you have a bad light switch, you might know enough about electricity to fix it – or you might not. If you have an old fuse box that you want to replace with a modern breaker panel, you probably need a pro.
Easy? Not always
What gets people in trouble is the job that looks like it should be easy, but really isn’t. They dive in without thinking through the details. They hit some glitches they didn’t expect. They have to dig up some “how-to” tips, and maybe buy a tool they didn’t realize they needed. Suddenly they are running out of time.
Forced to move on, they either shove the half-finished job into a corner and forget about it, or they panic like Homer Simpson trying to build a backyard barbecue pit.
What it takes
Cost-reduction analysis is a job that seems like it should be easy. How hard can it be to look over some invoices and make a few phone calls?
In reality, there’s more to it than that. It’s about knowing ahead of time how to analyze a company’s needs, where to find alternatives and how to negotiate with vendors. (Here’s a hint: If your first step is to write an RFP or get quotes from several vendors, you already have passed up a lot of your potential savings.)
If you had a lot of extra employees (which you don’t), and they had a lot of extra time during the day (which they don’t), and you could afford to wait while they learned how to conduct a cost-reduction analysis (which you can’t), then your company probably could do the job itself.
Or you could hire a pro, get faster overhead cost cuts, and save more money. It wouldn’t cost you anything, because we earn our money by keeping a percentage of what we’ve saved you.
Somebody probably has watched you do your job and thought it looked easy. But you know better. It looks easy because you have the training, the experience and the tools to work efficiently and produce consistently good results.
So do we, when it comes to cost-reduction.
Has someone ever called you in to salvage a do-it-yourself job that stalled or ran off the rails? I’d be interested in hearing about it.
