Summer Knowles: Hi. I am Summer Knowles with SBTV.com. According to an inside research businesses will spend roughly a $133 billion on communication services and 40% of that budget will go straight to paying off cellular phone bills so how can business owners reduce some of those wireless cost?
Well, we’ve got Dave Takushi right here with Wireless Toyz to answer that question for us, hi Dave.
Dave Takushi: Hi Summer. Well, one of the first things that small businesses can do is to look at the plan that they have right now and what they spend in on monthly basis. Are they, do they have multiple carriers? So are they using two different carriers for the cellular phones? Do they have individual plans or maybe are they cooling their minutes a lot of times by cooling minutes, sharing minutes across the different phones that are on account. One person uses a lot of minutes in one month, another person doesn’t use very many minutes. You can then save some money that way. That way you’re not paying for extra minutes because that’s where it gets really expensive.
So you really want to analyze and look at how many plans do you have, what are the plans that you have, how many minutes are you using. We’ve, by looking at customers plans. We have saved people unaware from a few $100.00 a year up to maybe $8,000.00 a year.
Summer Knowles: Wow.
Dave Takushi: Just by rearranging things and maybe changing carriers, maybe just looking at different plan. An easy way to do that too, if you don’t have a time because small business owners are very busy is to have a wireless expert help you out with it. They can look at a plan that you have, help compare across all the different carriers because there are a lot of options that are out there.
Summer Knowles: So Dave, all the business owners are debating whether or not to re-inverse their employees for phone bills or just supply them with their own phones, what do you think.
Dave Takushi: Well we see a lot of small business owners do both different, both options that are out there. Recent surveys that we’ve seen by In-Stat actually says that if you provide the phone, it actually saves you money by paying for the phone for them rather than having them spend the time throwing out their reimbursement expenses. Use, sending out the checks to reimburse some and then to actually simpler and easier, you can actually a little bit of money. And that a lot with the plans, they have free nights and weekends, which is most of the time when employees use the company phones for their own personal calls. So a lot of times, it really doesn’t cost the business anything and they use them on the nights and weekends so it’s looking these days that a lot of times it might actually be cheaper for companies to just provide the phone form in a lot simpler.
Summer Knowles: How much on average do you think a business owner could expect to save just by coming into an export and taking a look at their expenses and how much they are going to spend?
Dave Takushi: It’s going to depend on probably how many lines they have. I have some customers where they have five lines and where at to save them, you know, $50.00 a month. We have more lines as definitely where you can save more money.
It’s not a guarantee that we’re going to save everybody money but there are a lot of times, if you haven’t looked at it closely, if you haven’t compared the options that are out there or if it’s just been a while since you’ve changed your plans there. It’s a good reason in order to look at it because there is a potential savings of anywhere from $20 a month up to you know, $500 to a $1000 a month, depending on whether you have five phones or sixty phones but even if you only have one or two phones, still makes sense because every dollar counts, you know, as a small business owner, I know myself, try to save every dollar that you can.
Summer Knowles: But ultimately the first step is going to be assessment.
Dave Takushi: Exactly. Yap, take a look at what you’re spending right now. Look at how many minutes you have right now and try to go from there.
Summer Knowles: Okay, thank you very much Dave and for additional tips Dave, just keep it locked on our website, SBTV.com where small business is our only business.
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