Business Idea Center:
Expense Reduction Consultant

Business Overview

Calling all business managers, controllers and operations managers. You can profit from your business and budget management skills and experiences by starting your own expense reduction consulting service. Expense reduction consultants provide clients with services such as controlling long-term product and service costs and developing expense reduction strategies to suit individual client needs. The objective of the expense reduction consultant is to uncover costs associated with doing business that can be reduced or eliminated while still maintaining the efficiency of the business in terms of operations, customer service and profitability. Potential clients will largely be small- to midsize businesses, but you can also target your marketing efforts toward professionals, nonprofit associations and privately-run institutions. Additionally, many of these consulting services will specialize in a particular type of business or industry such as fixed location retailing or manufacturing. Get started by developing an expense reduction manual. The manual should be representative of the type of business of industry you'll target and include an index of categories you'll analyze, such as business location, employees and communications. The purpose of the manual is to act as a road map to guide you through each client’s business. You can then tailor the manual to a specific client’s business and enter subcategories for each business component that you analyze. Expense reduction consultants present each client with an extensive written report at the end of their investigation. This report typically outlines the consultant's suggestions in terms of reducing costs, including relevant supporting data and statistics. Fees for the service vary. Some consultants prefer to charge an hourly rate, while other prefer to charge a percentage based on the amount of money they can save a client. The percentage can range from 10 to 50 percent of the first year’s saving. Marketing the service can be as easy as joining business associations to network with small business owners.