Trimming the telecom fat: telecom consultants can cut hidden costs in your bills.

• Author: Wilhite, Brent
• Position: Small Business Advisor

HOPING TO CUT SOME FAT from an already lean business? Telecommunication services are one of the most overlooked expenses for small business owners. A thorough assessment will likely reveal unused services, overlooked charges and buried billing errors, not to mention thousands of dollars in recoverable cash.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of companies are over-billed by telecom providers," says Diania Thrner, an independent telecommunications consultant. 'And 99.9 percent of the time, there is money out there that you can get back if you have someone who knows what they're doing."

Drawing upon outsiders' expertise can be valuable to small companies, particularly when a critical need can't be served well with in-house resources. Most small business owners lack the requisite skills to successfully navigate today's complex telecommunication industry Rather than blindly paying the monthly bills for your dial tone, long distance, cellular and Internet services, consider how the services of telecommunication consultants can shrink those bills for you.

As an independent telecom consultant, Turner spends her days deciphering telecom bills and wrangling with telecom vendors on behalf of Utah businesses. As head of Salt Lake-based Thmer Telecom, she has salvaged hundreds of thousands of dollars from telecom providers. "I recovered $140,000 for one of my clients. Yesterday, I was speaking with a consultant who found a billing issue with a vendor, and after researching the problem, recovered $250,000 for his client. Another associate of mine found $400,000 for his client," she adds. 'There's a ton of money out there, and you have a right to recover that money"

Take a close look at your most recent phone bill. Do you have any clue what all those acronyms, access codes and charges mean? What are they for? Are they correct? And most important--do you have to pay them?

Turner explains that few people comprehend what all of those individual charges are on a phone bill. "The information is just so hard to understand," she says. 'To most people, looking over their monthly telecom bill is like reading a foreign language." Rather than spending time and resources questioning the charges, people just pay the bill. "If you're not charged correctly companies can literally lose hundreds and thousands of dollars," she says.

One Salt Lake-based equipment company fell victim to a once-popular scam called "slamming." "Representatives from these fraudulent companies...