His line? Usually it's forgotten

Kris Richards prospects for gold in

telephone bills. He seldom finds a big

vein, but the little nuggets he digs up are

more than chump change.

Consider:

Not long ago, Richards

and his Reno-based firm,

Insight Technology

Solutions, were hired to

sort through a thick stack

of phone bills from a trash

hauler in Texas who was

searching for potential savings.

Right off, Richards noticed that the

54-employee office had 50 phone lines.

Most companies, he's found during his

two decades in the phone business, average

about one line for every two employees.

Tracking down the lines one by one,

his company found 17 extras most of

them lines once used for modems that

long since had disappeared from the

office.

At more than $20 per line, that wasn't

bad.

And while Insight Technology

Solutions employees were at it, they

found another $100 a month from the

accumulation of modest billing errors.

The upshot? Savings of about $500 a

month for the trash hauler savings

that will continue even after Richards'

share is paid.

Line-by-line scrutiny of telephone use

and page-by-page scrutiny of telephone

bills isn't the most popular job at most

companies. And Richards notes the job

often gets overlooked because many

companies assign management of the

telephone system to one department

information technology, for instance

while giving responsibility for the bills to

another.

"It's something that people have taken

for granted forever," Richards said a few

days ago.

And because many businesses don't

pay attention, Information Technology

Solutions has a market niche.

The company targets mid-sized companies

those that spend $5,000 to

$10,000 a month on phone service, often

from multiple locations. Smaller companies,

Richards says, typically can keep a

tight handle on phone costs because they

have relatively few lines to track. Bigger

companies are the turf of consultants far

larger than Richards' two-person operation.

Those customers agree to pay the

company a piece of the savings something

on the order of 50 percent of the

savings for 24 months or 35 percent for

six months.

Then Richards gets to work. The fattest

target, he finds, is the number of

telephone lines that are installed, used for

a while and then forgotten.

"We find things all the time that people

are paying for but forgotten," he said.

Sometimes the detective work is simple:

Richards pulls the plug on a mysterious

phone line and waits a few days to

see if anyone in the company complains.

Usually, they don't.

In some instances, Richards recommends

new telephone equipment. The

Reno office of a construction company,

for instance, followed the company's

advice to install $13,000 in equipment to

realize a $20,000 annual savings.

And in some instances, Information

Technology Solutions even wades into

the deepest thicket of telephone billing

long-distance bills with their confusing

jumble of rates and additional

charges.

Richards launched the company about

a year ago after working for several suppliers

of business telephone systems in

northern Nevada.

"I've always been an entrepreneur. I

kept seeing this opportunity," he said.

So far, the opportunity has panned out.

With about a dozen clients, Insight

Technology Solutions has been profitable

from day one.