[SprinklerGuy]

Thought it would be neat to compare cost cutting this season....

I am about to make two small changes that will add up to big money:

Nextel is out.......cricket is in. Cricket telecom has been in my market now for almost 18 months and those that have it swear by it.....

3 phones at 50 per month each which includes all local calls plus 500 min of long distance......$150 getting rid of my nextel phone because it doesn't work at the pond.... $0.00
These replace our nextel phones and my nextel phone saving about $400 per month....$4800 per year....WOW!

Going from paying weekly to paying every other week......saves $78.00 per month.....or $936 per year....

I just got a 5500 dollar a year raise!!!

Anybody else got any ideas?

I am looking into other options for Liability insurance and commercial auto insurance....that should save as well.

also, i switched long distance providers and got 5 cents per minute with no connection fee like MCI was charging, should save about 50 per month

[Stonehenge]

Are all of your tools always in your truck? By that I mean preloaded? Or do you have to load and unload tools depending on the project? I believe a nice-sized custom truck business was started just for that reason....

Fuel - do you have a commercial account that gives a % back? It isn't much, but I get $.03/gallon back on every purchase....

Are there supplies you always buy a lot of? If so, do you buy in bulk during the off-season? Nice discounts to be had there, too (5-10% or more sometimes)....

A big one for me is marketing - I don't know if this is a cost savings, but I always track my campaign results closely, and I junk anything that isn't working, no matter how many other landscape companies are doing it. Like the yellow pages online sister, smartpages.com. Sure, it's cheap, but over the course of one year, my site got 11 hits from being listed there, and I had one of the more deluxe listings. Of those 11, about 3 were from the yellow pages people, and about 6 were from me. So I got at best 2 hits over 12 months - resulted in 0 leads, 0 dollars...

Those are a few, anyway.