Origin
Schooley Mitchell has been offering professional consulting services to business clients for over two decades. Initially, we offered accounting, computer and management consulting, before transitioning to telecom consulting in the late 1990s. While we don’t consult to accounting or computers anymore, professional, business-to-business consulting is at the root of our model.
We introduced telecom consulting after realizing that our own phone bills were a series of indecipherable codes that constantly increased in overall cost. We knew our consulting clients experienced the same confusion — and we knew they, like us, were likely paying more than they should. So our programmers created software to interpret these bills – this software has evolved over the decades, allowing us to better analyze our clients’ telecom expenses and much, much more.
The Marketplace
We discovered very quickly that competition was very limited in the telecom consulting space due to the high levels of research required to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing world of technology. In the mid-2000s, a study placed the value of telecom consulting in North America at over $16 billion, with a 12 percent growth rate annually. Through our marketplace research, we also found an absence of telecom consultants working with small to mid-sized businesses. Therefore, we decided to take our concept nationally and then across North America.
With changing technology and a rise in vendor competition, the telecom world has continued to get more complex over the years. Businesses now spend over $1 trillion on telecom products and services in the U.S. and Canada — we’re here to help them spend that money wisely.
We then recognized similar confusion in the world of merchant services – where consumers use less cash and prefer to pay for goods and services with credit cards, debit cards, or other electronic means – and began reducing our clients’ expenses in this area as well.
After this, we expanded into small package shipping and courier services, an industry that consists of about 7,500 vendors with combined annual revenue of $90 billion. We began to reduce our clients’ expenses further in this category as more and more clients were covered by our services.
And in 2019 we introduced our new waste expense category amidst widespread market changes and policy shifts in the waste management industry. We now reduce our clients’ trash disposal expenses, as well as other disposal categories including recycling, scrap, shredding, medical waste, electronic waste, and more to ensure their materials are removed as cost-effectively and securely as possible.
We have since added many new cost categories, including E-signature and Electronic Logging Devices/Fleet Management, followed by Compressed Gases and Fuel in 2021.
In 2022, we began consulting for our clients in the areas of LTL (Less Than Truckload) Shipping, Facility Supplies, Uniforms & Linens, SaaS (Software as a Service) and UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service)
In 2023, we expanded our service offerings again to include Packaging & Shipping Supplies, Office Supplies, and Coffee & Water.
We are committed to expanding our portfolio of services to help our clients adapt to the shifts and changes in our world.
Franchising
We determined franchising was the right business strategy for Schooley Mitchell to penetrate, develop and dominate the marketplace.
We’ve always believed that professionals who wanted to run their own businesses and who shared our goals and beliefs would be more motivated to grow and prosper than individuals we hired as employees across the continent.
Franchising has allowed us to use the experience, skills, knowledge and financial resources not only of our Head Office, but of all the Franchisees in the system.
At this point, we have built Schooley Mitchell into the largest independent cost reduction consulting firm, with over 280 Franchisees in markets across the U.S. and Canada. With more cost categories in the pipeline and continued changes coming to the way our clients do business, we look forward to more growth and success in the years and decades to come.