Most of your expenses fall into one of three areas; supplies, fuel and labor.
Labor is the only near constant you have. You either work for yourself or you have a crew that work X number of hours a week for a certain amount. The next expense is fuel and we all know that is rising out of this world making everything else go up. So that leaves your supplies as the best place to be able to cut costs. So how can your chemical supplier help besides lowering their prices? We can make suggestions.
First, as we spoke of earlier at the start of these posts: Buy as much product as you can at the best freight rate you can get. Paying $50 for a single pail of 5 gallons of product and spending $50 to get it there costs you $20 a gallon. But if you bought 4 pails ($200) for the same $50 in shipping, your cost per gallon drops to $12.50.
If you had bought all four of those pails separately even over just a few months time and freight rates had stayed the same, you would have spent $400 on the same amount of product you could have spent just $275 on, for a savings of $125. We here at Soap Warehouse are always ready to calculate rates for you with different carriers or amount of product that can be shipped. We are happy to help you get the best $ per gallon rate you can get.
To help you with this we have posted in our archives the weight chart for our products on our website that you can go to at any time; Product Weight Chart. Of course freight prices will always be changing but you will be able to see what pails and drums vs. kits weigh.
Let us know what your suggestions are as to how to save on product costs.