Charleston Ep. 7 - Kevin Flounders - SIB Fixed Cost Reduction

With 25 years in the telecom industry, Kevin Flounders recently assumed the role of CEO at SIB Fixed Cost Reduction in March of this year. SIB Fixed Cost Reduction specializes in reducing monthly expenses for companies. They take a months' worth of your companies' invoices and analyze them to check for billing errors and ensure contract compliance. Then they connect with your vendors to negotiate savings. If SIB doesn't find you savings, they don't get paid. SIB has worked with Fortune 500 companies, restaurant groups, hotel groups, regional banks, senior living groups, health systems, grocery stores, retail chains and everything in between.

Our phone conversation was great! He was lively and sounded genuinely excited to be a guest on the Shrimp Tank. He told me a couple of interesting stories about himself. In his 20's he invested $8,000 into the stock market of his own money. It was all he had. It ran up to $2.2 million but Kevin was speculative of its expansion. He ended up losing all of it. He said that if he hadn't lost all of it and instead cashed out the $2.2 million, he probably wouldn't be here today, or if he was here, he wouldn't like the person he had become. Kevin says that was a huge turning and learning point in his life. We spoke about risk and his perspective on the risks he took at a young age but when the money got seriously big, he became wary and ended up losing it all. Kevin said it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Another personal story he told was again in his earlier years but revolved around employees. His first employee he ever hired told him within the first few hours of employment that he had a better way of doing things. Kevin silently rolled his eyes and said to himself to wait it out and see how badly this new employees' process turns out. Well it did turn out, and 20 years later they are still using that process in his business and that employee is now in the top tier of management at SIB Kevin's take away from this was that you are not always the smartest guy in the room.