How Entrepreneurs Can Get More Bang For Their Buck While Spending

Those who know me well know I am obsessed with travel, and with traveling on the best deal possible. At one of my first jobs, back in 2001, I managed the travel department for Crescent Heights, a large national condo developer, reports Forbes.

I was originally brought on to sell surplus items on Ebay—things left behind by the previous owners of an office building that Crescent Heights had purchased. Going about my business one day, selling everything from computers to servers to art, I heard a co-worker talking about an upcoming trip from our office in Los Angeles to a corporate retreat in Miami, a trip that the company’s outside travel agency had just booked. The cost of the ticket, in coach: $1800. I couldn’t believe my ears. I quickly jumped online and found multiple flight options for much more reasonable prices. I emailed the CEO to tell him that if I took over travel I would save his company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The CEO bit, and I spent the next two years as the go-to guy for travel. If any one of the hundreds of employees needed to fly or stay at a hotel, they went through me. I used my travel booking skills to save the company money, day after day.

Any good entrepreneur knows that one of the most important trait they need is frugality. Being cheap isn’t a quality you may want in a friend or spouse, but it’s crucial for a small business owner. My parents didn’t instill a frugal attitude in me, but for some reason, when it comes to travel, I turn into Mr. Scrooge. I take such pride in my mastery of travel sites like Priceline and in my tricks for traveling cheap that I literally get a high from landing a good—or better yet, free—travel deal. And one of the best ways to land good travel deals is credit card points.

Your mother always told you nothing is free in life, but your mother was wrong: points are free. Points, or credit card rewards, have been around for a long time. Before sites like The Points Guy or Dan’s Deals were popular, I was obsessed with maximizing points for free travel. As entrepreneurs, we don’t get many perks with the stressful job of building a business, but if we purchase correctly, we can build up a lot of points. You can use points to keep your company’s travel budget low, and you can use points when you need a get-away but you don’t have a vacation budget. As someone who has maximized the use of points for both business and pleasure travel, here are my tips for those new to the points game.

Make Sure Everything Goes On A Credit Card.

In my opinion, American Express is the business credit card to sign up for if you want to subsidize company travel with points. The AMEX Gold and Platinum cards have some great bonus offers, and their rewards can be transferred to many different airlines, hotels and rental car companies. Once you’ve signed up for your new card and received your bonus points, you need to start spending. I suggest using your new credit card for all business purchases. Most vendors say they don’t accept credit cards, but there are ways to convince them to make an exception. Back in 2012 I decided I was tired of not earning points with our largest vendor, Sysco. Despite spending millions of dollars a month, my company wasn’t earning rewards points because Sysco didn’t accept credit cards. Deciding this was no longer acceptable, I told Sysco we wouldn’t pay the next invoice unless they accepted our credit card. They made a “one-time” exception, and thankfully that “one-time” exception lasted over a year.

Make Sure You Aren’t Paying A Fee To Use Your Credit Card

Despite success stories like the one above, some other of my experiences were not as positive. After convincing another vendor to accept credit card payments, I noticed that their product prices had increased. Some quick investigation revealed that the vendor had raised our prices in response to our switch to credit card payment. When you do switch to credit cards, make it clear to the vendor that you expect your pricing to stay the same—they need to take the hit from the credit card fees, not you. Of course if you can’t convince them to do this you’ll have to decide if higher pricing is worth the points; usually it is not.

Make Sure You Are Enrolled In Your Rewards Program

I recently took back the day-to-day operations at Fresh Diet. When I came back to the office as CEO for the first time in almost three years, I wanted to see how many points were in our account. What I found was devastating. Although the company had spent over one million dollars on our American Express card over the last year alone, we had no points. No one at the company was thinking about points so they didn’t enroll in the points program when they signed up for the card. For a $90 annual fee, we would have earned over one million points that could have saved the company over $25,000 in travel expenses, or more.

Unfortunately, now I can only dream of how I would have used those million plus points. But if you’re reading this now, perhaps I just made sure that you won’t miss out on accumulating points while building your dream.