Dan Schneider found a business hiding in the bills

An invoice is a remarkably successful piece of persuasion. It arrives looking official, asks for money, and often gets it. Dan Schneider made a career out of interrupting that agreeable little arrangement. The founder of SIB looked at the ordinary bills of running a business and saw questions waiting for someone with the time, information and incentive to ask them.

The incentive was part of the attraction. SIB earned a share of the savings it found, after those savings materialized. A company could hear the pitch without first writing a consulting check. Schneider was proposing a relationship in which the consultant’s reward depended on something rather more tangible than a handsome presentation.

His career has some pleasing complications. The founder who helped scrutinize expenses also offered a $50,000 loyalty bonus. His Charleston office had a chef. An employee’s significant mistake could occasion ice cream for the office. There was arithmetic behind the enterprise, certainly, but nobody had insisted that arithmetic must be joyless.

Twelve shops before the consulting firm

Schneider came to consulting through selling. At 18 he founded Main Street Cellular, a mobile phone business that expanded to a dozen retail locations around Philadelphia. Before the recurring invoices came the customers, the inventory and the daily obligation to make a shop earn its keep.

He later built Main Street Assets, an international wholesale operation handling excess mobile phone inventory. It was a useful vantage point on value: something one market had finished with could still find a buyer elsewhere. Retail and wholesale gave him different views of the same commercial machinery, from the individual transaction to the movement of stock across borders.

His early ambitions had been less corporate. He left school at 16, made balloon animals at T.G.I. Friday’s and once planned to open a restaurant by 21. There is a certain continuity between entertaining a table and pitching a business customer. Both require an audience willing to give you a little attention before it gives you anything else.

After the phone businesses, he took two years away from work to travel and kiteboard. Charleston appealed partly because of the kiteboarding and partly because he had childhood friends there. Eventually, recreation ceased to be a sufficient occupation. He rented an office and began going in.

“I wanted to think and solve problems.”

Dan Schneider, on returning to work

November 2008, and a reason to read the bill

SIB began in November 2008, during the Great Recession. Schneider’s new business had an appropriately practical subject: the money organizations spent keeping themselves running. Telecom, utilities and waste removal offered little glamour, but each category generated bills, contracts and opportunities for closer examination.

The company’s own history records $2 million in revenue in 2010 and $6 million in 2011. Those are dated milestones, rather than a claim about its size today. They show the early pace of a business built around a proposition that could be explained without much ceremony: let us inspect what you pay, and compensate us from the savings.

Recurring expenses are especially good at becoming familiar. A charge appears in roughly the same place often enough that its presence begins to feel like a justification. The work SIB offered required examining the arrangement beneath the amount: the service, the rate, the terms and the alternatives.

Schneider’s 2015 writing about contracted expenses supplies the everyday detail. Businesses could pay for unused phone lines, overlapping voicemail services, unnecessary waste pickups or maintenance agreements whose modest monthly price concealed a substantial commitment across locations and years. The individual line item could look small enough to escape a meeting. Its annual total might deserve a chair at the table.

He also emphasized the value of knowing what comparable businesses paid. A price printed on a bill tells you what the vendor is charging you. Learning whether it is reasonable takes another set of information. That difference gave specialist review a job to do.

The expensive business of saying goodbye

Schneider applied similar attention to a cost inside his own company: losing people after paying to train them. By 2011, SIB’s answer was attracting coverage. Full-time employees who stayed five years were eligible for a $50,000 bonus.

It was an unusually legible promise. Five years. Fifty thousand dollars. Employees did not need to decipher a complicated scheme to understand what staying might mean. For a young company, it also put an obligation into the future, when the people earning the reward would have accumulated years of experience.

The logic began with training costs and the expense of repeatedly replacing people. That does not make every large retention payment a good decision. It does explain why this particular cost-reduction founder could regard a large future check as a sensible expense. The relevant comparison was the cost of keeping someone against the cost of losing what they knew.

The promise eventually acquired a recipient’s name. In a company announcement Schneider shared on LinkedIn, SIB congratulated Dan Kaufman on earning his five-year payment. The post provides a useful concrete ending to the story of an incentive first discussed while the company was still too young for anyone to qualify.

A benefit sounds different when somebody has actually received it. In this case, the headline number survived the passage from recruitment talking point to an announcement celebrating a colleague.

A kitchen, a dog park, and the price of a lesson

The office had its own argument about spending. SIB moved into a renovated Charleston building in 2013. A tour the following year described a former car dealership garage equipped with a commercial kitchen, a dog park and an electric vehicle charging station.

Schneider hired chef Jordan Marhoefer to prepare lunch and snacks for staff. Picnic tables were shared with neighboring Edmund’s Oast. For a business concerned with overhead, these were rather conspicuous choices. They suggest that scrutinizing an expense could end with approving it.

His approach to mistakes was equally memorable. In a reported example involving a failure to back up work, the employee responsible had to buy ice cream for everyone. The point was to make the error public enough to be remembered while giving the occasion a form other than a reprimand.

There is no need to turn dessert into a complete theory of management. The appeal of the anecdote is its specificity. Everybody knew why the ice cream had arrived. An otherwise forgettable instruction about backing up work had acquired a taste, an audience and a bill.

Good judgment can wear an apron

Schneider’s interest in people extended to where companies looked for them. In a 2018 essay, he made the case for hiring former hospitality workers. His list of useful abilities included solving problems, handling expectations, dealing with different personalities, improvising and showing humility.

He illustrated improvisation with a restaurant visit in Boston. The coffee machine was broken; the waiter eventually brought coffee from Starbucks across the street. A small service problem had received a practical answer. Schneider treated that kind of judgment as relevant to business roles far beyond restaurants.

The argument carries some personal history. His own early work had happened among restaurant customers. He knew that experience could contain more than the job title advertised. A dining room gives a young worker repeated encounters with urgency, disappointment, competing requests and the need to remain useful through all of them.

His business writing also returned to process. The archive includes essays about learning from failure, vendor billing errors and a two-part account of a business review inspired by Top Gun. The film reference supplies the entertainment; the subject underneath is the less cinematic matter of examining how work gets done.

A different seat at the table

On May 26, 2020, O2 Investment Partners publicly announced its acquisition of SIB. Kevin Flounders became CEO. Schneider, now the former CEO, remained a board member and equity investor at the transaction. Twelve years after founding the business, his relationship to it had changed.

The announcement supplied a measure of the operation he had helped build: SIB had reviewed $3 billion in spending across 50,000 locations nationwide. That figure describes reviewed expenditure. It gives the scale of the material the company had examined, rather than the savings it had produced.

Through Logic & Reason, his advisory firm, Schneider describes a move toward longer-term strategic work. Its stated interests include improving systems, finding revenue opportunities, reconsidering pricing, examining marketing returns and working on mergers and acquisitions. Its boundaries are unusually explicit too: daily operational management, human resources and passive board seats fall outside its offering.

That combination leaves a recognizable job for him. Look closely at the business. Ask why an arrangement exists. Work on a change that can justify itself. The objects have varied, from phones and inventory to invoices and company processes. The useful question remains remarkably portable: why are we doing it this way?

For a founder who has made money by looking again, it is an appropriate occupation. Even the most official-looking bill can survive a second reading. It should simply expect a few questions.