Marc Freedman is the co-founder and managing partner at Evolved Profits LLC. He is a certified expense reduction consultant and currently serves as the company’s chief cost evaluator. Freedman has worked as a business consultant for more than 40 years, but for the last decade, his company has focused on expense education and recovery. The company recently added the cannabis industry to its roster of industries.
What does your company do?
We have a team of category experts that focuses on reducing expenses for clients. Instead of charging clients a flat fee, we only charge if we find savings. We’re paid on a success basis. We’ve found savings for 91 percent of the companies without them even changing existing vendors.
If you don’t charge a client unless you know you can save them money, does that mean that your company spends a lot of time going over their financial information?
Before we get too deep, we know about the opportunities for savings, or we get some data to help us determine that. We basically know how to ask the right questions. For instance, if I ask to see an agreement I’m looking at a cost-plus model. If I ask a potential client how are they calculating costs, they generally won’t know.
We know the questions to ask because we have a lot of pricing information from all across the country. We use that knowledge as a base to help customers.
What do you attribute to your success? It’s because of our people and our processes. Our team uncovers previously lost profits. We renegotiate business expenses using data from more than 25,000 contracts analyzed in the past. Clients don’t pay anything out of pocket, and five percent of our recovered savings goes to an impact project of their choice.
We also have a team of experts that all focus on specific niches, including the medical space. One of our team members is the former president of one of the largest multinational health care supply companies.
Another one of our team members spent over 35 years at one of the world’s largest logistics companies as a senior vice president. He designed the pricing matrix that they still use today. He has experience in knowing about market prices. A lot of vendors negotiate, but you don’t really know the costs.
What has your company done in the cannabis industry?
Because of the relationships that we have, we did an Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC) for a national cannabis trade association and we found them a very nice recovery of over $400,000. And we just did a recovery for a glassware and smoking accessories retailer in Colorado, which is getting back over $350,000. We’re working on two others right now. We don’t have results yet, but one will be about a million dollars in savings.
Do you see other opportunities to help businesses in the cannabis industry?
Here’s the interesting opportunity about the cannabis space. About a month ago we started offering a digital solution for cannabis businesses.
Right now, most business is done with cash. Customers go to an ATM machine and get cash out. What does the store do with the cash? You can’t put it in a regular bank. We can provide alternative payment solutions for merchants in the cannabis industry.
It is a bank-sponsored and regulatory-backed corporation that can process digital payments – online payments, ATMs, bank transfers, debit cards, credit cards, gift cards, and many more with innovative payment terminals.
You get the assurances of multiple bank sponsorships, and your cannabis business can accept payments from any card and bank. Other benefits include WiFi options for in-store purchases, online reporting, statement retrievals, wireless terminals for deliveries, and faster approval and setup when you apply for the terminals.
What it does for a retail business is that if a sale is $72, instead of a customer taking out $80, that money doesn’t have to sit in a drawer. And retailers get a merchant number.
Congress has already passed laws to use credit cards, but the Senate has not. When it does pass, people are going to be rushing to find solutions. Our customers will only have to flip a switch because everything will already be set up. They will already be pre-approved.
