Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

I’m on a business trip this week with my cheap ass co-founder Fowler and it reminded me of a topic that used to come up all the time when I travelled a lot for sales. The basic idea is contained in the ancient proverb (or whatever it is) in the title above, but more specifically: when travelling for business, always factor in your time as money spent for the company.

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As tempting as it is to point out examples from this specific trip, I’ll go to a more glaring example from a sales trip I took with an old sales manager of mine in the ‘90s. Against my better judgment (I’ll talk about what a nightmare he was on sales calls some other time), I allowed him to tag along on a couple meetings in San Diego. Actually, I had one meeting scheduled, but he threw in a last minute “meet and greet” Barney (I love you, you love me) special with a VP at a company that was too small to buy our software to “cost justify” the trip. The whole way down on the plane he was jawing at me about how he was the P&L manager for the west coast, I had to tighten my belt for travel expenses, blah, blah, blah. I was busy doing my presentation for the REAL MEETING and trying to figure out how logistically we were going to fit in his waste- of- time meeting and still get me back to airport in time to catch a plane to Arizona for my next meeting (which was way too important for Wink Martindale to attend).

Anyway, I suffer through the day with the Platitude King; trying to cover up his lack of knowledge about our product and marveling at his complete ignorance as to what is actually taking place both meetings. We are racing back to the airport to catch our flights and he says “hey wait- we need to fill up the gas so we don’t get charged.” We then spend the next 30 agonizing minutes driving around the residential neighborhoods that are mysteriously intermingled under the freeway down there looking for some gas station that “he knows is right around here.”  I end up missing my flight to Phoenix, having to re-schedule my dinner with the CIO of a large company (who I never end up meeting with), and we both make a late flight back to San Francisco.

While we are eating dinner that night at the airport, I explained to him some simple math. At the time my quota was $2 MM, or about $40,000 a week. Another quick calculation gets you to $1,000 per hour. (I don’t get paid $1K per hour, but I need to generate $1K per hour.) His number was $5MM, so his time is worth another $2500. The change fee and difference for my flight was $200. The dinner cost $100. So in order to attend his cost justification meeting (of course no revenue resulted) and avoid a gas charge of probably $5 (remember it was not today’s gas prices), we put the company out over $10 grand in lost time and expense. And that doesn’t even factor in that I never got the upsell to the AZ client.

I’m not saying you should go fight your boss or your accounting policy to stay at the Ritz and fly first class (unless they might actually agree to it). Just when you find yourself wasting hours of your time chasing penny savings on connecting flights, distant cheap hotels, no rental cars in favor of “public transportation” and the like- remember that your time is money, too. Big money.