ason Raddenbach woke up one fine morning to the growl of a chainsaw. But Raddenbach wasn’t on the set of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” He was sitting in his South Beloit, IL, office. The saw belonged to his company’s new owner, who was slashing through Raddenbach‘s exhibit budget with reckless abandon.

After only eight months on the job as trade show coordinator for Warner Electric LLC, a manufacturer of clutches, brakes, and other power-transmission-related equipment, Raddenbach’s company was taken over by Altra Industrial Motion Inc. of Quincy, MA. Think a takeover like this could never happen to you? Think again. According to Thomson Financial, a division of Thomson Corp. in Stamford, CT, there were 9,244 such U.S. mergers and acquisitions in the United States in 2005 alone, and they’ve been spreading like colds at a daycare center, increasing by an average of 13 percent a year since 2002.

For Raddenbach, the real Chainsaw Massacre began after the takeover. Management not only chopped Raddenbach’s budget, but also increased his show schedule. “I was asked to cut back before I even understood how it all worked,” he says. “It’s like telling a rookie small-aircraft pilot flying a 747 jumbo jet, ‘Hey, you've had one hour of experience flying this big fella. Now go into a nosedive and then pull flat at 1,000 feet. But don’t crash.’”

Raddenbach’s 2004 budget of $250,000 for 16 shows — an average of $15,625 per show — was carved to less than $200,000 for 2005. Exhibiting at the same number of shows would have been hard enough with that Slimfast figure. Then his bosses piled on four additional shows they wanted him to attend that year, for a total of 20. Raddenbach’s 2005 per-show budget was now an anorexic $10,000, a nearly 36-percent plunge from 2004.

In 2006, the other shoe dropped, and it was the size of Old Mother Hubbard’s. Management whacked the 2005 budget by another 50 percent. Thankfully, they also directed Raddenbach to eliminate nine under-performing shows. Even so, his per-show budget now averaged $9,090, a 9-percent drop from his already meager 2005 allotment. “There was fat to cut,” Raddenbach says, “but I absolutely doubted my ability to make the cuts necessary.”

Luckily, Raddenbach can pinch pennies until they are fused together. This is a guy who has never owned a car less than seven years old, and who sticks with basic-cable service at $10.15 a month.

Raddenbach didn’t need rocket science to scale back his budget. Six simple cost-saving measures such as opening exhibit-related costs to competition, negotiating meal and hotel discounts, and purchasing expensive equipment that paid for itself over the long haul, helped him turn small snips into big-time budget cuts. “The small things add up fast,” he says, “if you look for enough of them.”

Here, the self-proclaimed “budget geek” tells how he survived a 60-percent budget slash over two years and turned his program into a lean, mean exhibiting machine. e

When one business buys another, the budgets aren’t the only things that get turned inside out. So does the branding for the newly acquired companies, which may have to assimilate the new parent company’s logos, icons, colors, and more into their marketing mix. For a trade show manager, that can mean the logistical migraine of designing, printing, and changing the exhibit’s graphics — and generating an enormous production bill in the process.

Raddenbach’s case was no different. The new parent company, Altra, wanted its logos integrated into Warner’s booth signage. Most exhibit managers would groan and accept that they’d have to shell out for all new exhibit graphics.

But rather than dwell on the seemingly inevitable, Raddenbach took a big step back. Instead of focusing on just the graphics, he opted for a large-scale kind of solution that would make graphics changes easier on his corporate wallet and reduce his overall spending on the exhibit. Instead of a large custom exhibit like the one he’d used in 2004, Raddenbach turned to a group of pop-up structures his company already owned that could easily be updated and wouldn’t have to be covered with expensive graphics.

First, he took his old booth’s graphic panels and stuck them on the pop-ups by attaching the panels’ hook-and-loop-fasteners to the pop-ups’ magnetic carpet panels. Then he produced inexpensive vinyl overlays of the Altra logos, and stuck them on the pop-up panels. He and his advertising director artfully merged the old with the new, and no one was the wiser. “Actually, it looked pretty good,” Raddenbach says, “and now graphics changes hardly cost us anything.”

Raddenbach realized his less-than-truckload shipping consumed a whopping 10 percent of his budget. While 10 percent is pretty much a standard portion to spend on shipping, to Raddenbach, the line item represented a huge opportunity for cost savings.

Warner put its manufacturing division’s shipping contracts up for bid in 2005. That year, Fed Ex Corp. snagged the contract. Raddenbach knew Yellow Transportation Inc. had bid for the contract and lost. Since he controlled the exhibiting department’s preferred shipper, he approached Overland, KS,-based Yellow with the kind of inducement that would make Pavlov’s dogs drool. He told the company he would use it for all of his trade show shipping if it gave him the same steep discount that FedEx offered the manufacturing division. “Yellow wanted to get in the door,” Raddenbach says, “and they thought this was their shot.” As a result, Yellow offered Warner significantly reduced rates to earn the contract.

Some of the biggest expenses at trade shows aren’t always on the trade show floor. Going to shows often means going out to eat at restaurants, where the bills can rack up as quickly as the national debt.

When Raddenbach, booth staffers, and salespeople dined out during a show, he noticed a curious culinary phenomenon: One person would order a high-priced meal, which initiated a chain reaction of others ordering their expense-accounted food in the same manner. It didn’t take long before the bill looked like Wolfgang Puck himself was catering an all-the-caviar-you-can-eat party for the Warner staff.

“It was the ‘carte-blanche effect,’” Raddenbach says, “where everyone feels free to order more on the expensive side because everyone else is doing it.” Raddenbach wanted to put some controls around his food-and-beverage costs at shows, without condemning his staff to convenience-store Cheez-Its and Cokes.

Prior to a show in Las Vegas in September 2005, Raddenbach approached Benihana’s, a restaurant located next to the Las Vegas convention center. He spoke with managers at the location and asked if they could arrange a pre-selected menu for his group. The restaurant agreed, and Raddenbach worked with them to create a menu for his team with shrimp, steak, and chicken options, along with a choice of the house red or white wine. When Warner staff and guests were seated for dinner at the restaurant, the wait staff simply asked which one of the three entrees and two wines each diner would prefer.

The result was so popular with Warner staff that Raddenbach now arranges similar packages in his other shows’ host cities. According to Raddenbach, the staff liked knowing what to expect when they went out to eat — and he liked knowing what to expect when it came time for the bill.

Before the budget crunch, Raddenbach used Gaylord crates to ship everything from equipment to product literature. Made of wood and cardboard, these bulk-cargo containers cost only $15 to $20 apiece, but were so flimsy Raddenbach had to junk them after only two uses.

In early 2005, he made a penny-foolish but pound-wise decision. He invested in six roto-molded reusable crates for $75 apiece. At that price, they cost several times more than the Gaylords up front. “But despite some dings after two years,” Raddenbach says, “I haven’t had to replace the new crates yet.”

When amortized over those two years of frequent use, Raddenbach’s larger up-front investment has today more than paid for itself in cost-of-ownership terms.

Warner’s trade show and sales staff preferred Hampton Inn hotels for their show and other business-travel accommodations. But for all of their repeat business — as many as 15 employees traveled to each of the 20 annual shows, in addition to other business trips by the sales department — they may as well have been tourists who walked in off the street and paid top dollar.

Raddenbach contacted the Hampton Inn’s corporate-rate program. “I asked them, if I was a loyal customer, what kind of a discount would I get?” A pretty big one, as it turns out. They referred him to Hampton Inn’s Web-based eAdvantage program, where businesses with 10 or more employees who travel to at least five different destinations can manage their own reservations at steep discounts.

In 2004, Raddenbach rented electronic lead-retrieval systems for each of the 16 shows he attended. Those rental charges, averaging about $350 to $400 per show, totaled approximately $6,400 in 2004. In addition to the cost, Raddenbach wasn’t happy with the quality of the rented retrieval systems, which didn’t integrate smoothly with the company’s other database software. So he purchased a PDA-style lead-retrieval system for about $1,600. It also came with a bonus. “It was much easier to upload the information to my company’s sales database,” Raddenbach says, a benefit that decreased his stress level almost as much as it decreased his expenses.

Once again, Raddenbach found that a more significant up-front investment can pay off handsomely — and in more ways than cash savings alone.