 On Tuesday, June 6th, the Southeast Kentucky Chamber of Commerce held a membership meeting with special guest Lee Balaclaw. Balaclaw is a cost reduction expert visiting the Pikeville area to assess local businesses and help them understand better ways to manage their finances. Mountaintop News spoke with Balaclaw for more details. Today's topic was about cost reduction and how businesses can benefit from reducing their costs in multiple different services, including telecom, waste, merchant services, small parcel shipping, and a bunch of other categories. Local businesses need to know that they have a consultant who will be self-funded based on a share of savings and we don't charge a commission and we guard our clients' interests vigorously with vendors so that we make sure that they are getting the best deal and that they have the best services for the price. Cancer, it's a very scary word, but an outstanding treatment facility was here at home. I was led to the Lawson Cancer Center. As a nurse practitioner at the Lawson Cancer Center, we are champions for our patients. I am so happy for Robert. The treatment worked. Businesses in Pikeville are growing every day and more pop up every year. Balaclaw is positive that by working together, growth for local businesses will no longer be an issue. I didn't think that being in eastern Kentucky was going to be a competitive advantage, but every different town has a different set of vendors and so we had to learn a lot of different vendors very, very quickly, which has been a tremendous advantage to us. We've now worked with more than 90 telecom companies and we've done work on clients in 19 different states. We are available to clients in the area. Our cost for an analysis is free. We're happy to help out local businesses. They should reach out to us because we can absolutely help them. In 10 years in this franchise system, we've only found two clients that actually didn't had all of their costs completely optimized. Reporting from Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Collum.