Sometimes you actually save money by spending a little extra money on certain things.

For example, when it comes to travel, there are a lot of factors involved like airplanes, hotels, and rental cars.

Saving money on one of these expenses might mean that the other items are more expensive.

In today’s story, one boss finds this out the hard way.

Let’s read all the details.

Limo Service Does Make Me More Productive and Saves Money

Several years ago in the late 90s/early 2000s, my dad travelled a lot for work, definitely “road warrior” status.

Depending on the month he could spend 15-20+ days a month on the road.

Usually closer to 10-12 days a month, but the busier months happened regularly enough that he knew the pilots and flight attendants on his Mon/Tues flights out and Thurs/Fri flights home.

Even though he traveled a lot, he made his family the priority.

But he’s a family man.

He’ll sacrifice getting up early, traveling long days, doing whatever to get home every weekend, go to my football games, holidays, anything you tell him you need him for, he’s there.

His boss understood and accepted his expenses as the cost of keeping a skilled employee productive and happy.

He tried to save both time and money, but time was the priority.

My dad was never irresponsible with his expenses, but he’s not going to inconvenience himself or us to save the company a buck.

And if he can save time, he’ll spend a few bucks to do so.

This meant that he often took very early flights Monday morning to leave and very late flights Thursdays to get home, go to the office late and wrap up paperwork.

The new boss thought this dad was spending too much money.

He checked around, and the best option was to have a private car service pick him up and take him to the airport and vice versa.

Sometimes it was a town car, sometimes a limo.

New boss comes in, sees my dad is expensing a private car service and tells him he’s being wasteful and irresponsible with company money and if he does it again, he won’t approve it and dad will have to pay out of pocket.

Ok.

The morning didn’t go well.

Dad always prescheduled his car service.

Tried to preschedule a cab, they wouldn’t do it in advance.

He gets up at his normal time for his normal flight and calls a cab.

Cabbie is late getting there and dad misses his flight, changes flights at the airport but it’s more expensive.

This is getting expensive.

Dad stops booking the earliest flight out since he now doesn’t trust the cab to show up on time, but he’s not going to spend LESS time at home to save them money, so that means he has less time on ground with clients.

He has to take more trips to complete all his visits/work.

More flights, more hotels, more per diem, less work.

The car service wasn’t actually a frivolous expense.

See, we lived over an hour away. And he was going early in the morning, before traffic started up.

Now he’s going as traffic is starting up, means it takes longer.

Also, with the car service he was just paying a flat fee and gratuity was included automatically.

The cabs are not a flat fee, and they’re actually more expensive due to the distance and time. And there’s no gratuity included.

Dad understood the importance of a good tip.

Dad had a pretty cushy gig at this point, but he was what you’d consider blue collar most of his life and he’s not about to stiff a cabbie just trying to feed his kids, so of course he tips them.

Since the tip is separate, it gets itemized on the expense report.

Boss has to audit each itemization on the reports.

The expenses don’t stop there.

He also stopped taking late flights on Thursday and working half a day on Friday in the office.

Instead, he stays an extra night in a hotel, takes a more expensive midday flight home Friday, and his paperwork waits until after the weekend.

Dad submits his expense report for that first month and new boss blows a gasket.

The boss had a question.

Why did your travel expenses double when you spent less time on the road?!

Dad explains that since he can’t reliably get a cab that early in the morning, he booked a mid morning flight instead of a red eye.

Ok. Boss tells him that he was warned already about excessive transportation cost to the airport.

Dad points out the receipts are all from a cab company just like boss man directed.

The boss had another question.

Boss asks why there’s so many itemizations, this is going to take more work.

Dad points out they’re gratuity for the cabbies.

After a couple of hours picking apart his expense report, boss gives up and tells dad to just go back to how he was doing it before, it was cheaper, more client visits were getting done, and post trip reports were in before the weekends.

At least the boss understood that this travel situation wasn’t working.

I’m actually surprised he caught on so quickly.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person loved this story.

This person shares a similar story.

Here’s the perspective of another “road warrior.”

Sometimes you have to do the math.

Not every boss learns this quickly.

A boss that actually learned his lesson – wow!

That’s a pretty rare thing on Reddit.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.