My only hope at keeping up with all the bills and paying off the big loan I had to take out last summer was to cut some of our staff and look into other ways to save money. I announced the layoff of some of our staff members, after letting them know first and also asked for help from everyone else who wanted to save their jobs to come up with some money saving ideas.

Of course we got the usually turn off the lights and turn down the heating and cooling but the one that my secretary came up with was really good. She told me that we needed to change the company that we got our office supplies from and I asked her why that would help unless there were others out there that were much cheaper. If that were the case and I could have been saving money all along on things like discount office furniture and other things, I was going to be very upset.

My secretary informed me that I told her to use the local office supplies store when she first started working for me three years ago and she just followed orders. I guess that everyone else knew that there were other providers of discount office furniture and office supplies out there that could have been saving us hundreds if not thousands of dollars all this time.