CG Moneta Consulting

Cost saving solutions one valued client at a time

The origins of the modern English words ‘money’ and ‘mint’ come from the Latin word ‘money’, which means ‘to warn’. They were named after the goddess Juno Moneta who, in Roman mythology, was the wife of Jupiter, Queen of Gods and protector of the wealth of the state. During the siege of 390 BC, the sacred geese she kept in her sanctuary alerted the Romans of the invasion of the Gauls. In gratitude to Juno for saving the city, the General built her a temple on the hill, which later became the site of the first Roman mint. Those coins, stamped with Juno’s head on the face, were fittingly called ‘moneta’.

It’s the messaging subtly captured in the trademark name CG Moneta Consulting, a boutique B2B expense reduction firm working with organizations to cut costs and increase cash flow, thus ‘protecting’ their clients’ funds. Based out of Tuckerton, New Jersey, the company was launched in 2019 by managing partners with impressive backgrounds in banking and financial services. The firm curates its own unique cost reduction process, relying on three core pillars of service: Specialized Tax Incentives, Corporate Expense Reduction, and Telecommunications, Cloud & IT optimization.

Now with offices in Orlando, Florida, Effort, Pennsylvania and Houston, Texas.CG Moneta has quickly become one of the nation’s premier cost reduction firms through expert focus and beneficial savings, encapsulated in their mantra: cost reduction without compromise.

Daniel Covell, Managing Partner

“About six years ago, we started talking about different opportunities,” recalls Managing Partner, Daniel Covell. “At the time, I had a private wealth management firm. Vinnie had retired from the banking industry. And we were just throwing around some business ideas. A friend of mine—actually, it was the individual who initially hired me at Morgan Stanley—was doing some cost reduction services for another firm. That got me thinking: based on Vinnie’s experience, and on what we’d seen with different companies, there was a tremendous need with small businesses and mid-sized companies to procure some of the incentives and services traditionally reserved for larger companies.”

Covell spent the next 18 months building out his business model. By the end, he had a strategy that took advantage of background expertise, could profitably scale, and was intricately connected to the vendor network he’d developed up to that point.

“We were very fortunate in our industry background to have already established COIs—you know, great points of contact—from our previous careers,” adds Managing Partner Vincent Gargione. “That was a tremendous help in the beginning.”

Vincent Gargione, Managing Partner

Their current setup is twofold, with part-time and full-time regional consultants on staff in addition to strategic partnerships that allow expansion into new markets. “We’ve established a kind of referral-based relationship [with those partners] where we’re able to integrate our services into their key profession,” Covell explains. “That’s how we managed to scale so quickly.”

Today, CG Moneta Consulting has agreements with over 80 companies, each creating a significant amount of referral-based business for the firm. Through those connections, they’ve been able to generate a combined total of $1.2B in tax incentives and cost savings procured for those clients.

“Once we saw how well that process worked, we kind of focused our efforts on continuing to develop the COIs and strategic partnerships, and then slowly onboarding the regional consultants,” Covell continues. “We’re now largely a digital company—our regional consultants work virtually—although our design does include regional brick-and-mortar offices on the East Coast, the Northeast Coast, and Southeast Florida.”

From there, Covell says they’re looking to scale by making their way west.

“We plan on opening up probably two more offices over the next 12 to 18 months,” he reports. “We’ll also continue to hire regional consultants and establish more strategic partnerships to spur that growth.”

For all that growth strategy and intent, one of the biggest challenges they’re finding in the wake of the pandemic is in the execution of solutions for the companies committing to a hybrid virtual/in-person working environment. “With Covid-19, a lot of businesses went home-based,” Gargione offers. “There was no choice anymore—if they wanted to be productive and keep that revenue stream, they had to make the change. Now it’s more about supporting proper unified communications as a service. The software, the bandwidth, and the technology to do this on an ongoing basis.”

He points out that right across the board, the pandemic created lots of supply chain problems—some of which are nowhere close to being solved.

“That was huge,” Gargione says. “Inflation is now a major issue. We actually work with a lot of hospitality groups that have been impacted—who’ve had to consistently raise their menu prices as their operational costs have increased. We’ve been lucky to be able to establish relationships with partners that, in conjunction with what we offer, can help with supply chain and sourcing.”

The firm considers itself ‘vendor agnostic’, meaning they offer consultancy open to all viable solutions. “We’ve established relationships with some of the top specialized tax incentives for cost reduction, and one of the top telco firms in the nation,” highlights Covell. “It’s easy for us to make adjustments because that platform is already built, the relationships are already there. Things may change from state to state, like the property tax mitigation, but as long as we’re able to keep track of those changes, we’re able to update our internal continuing education portals and communicate with our strategic partners. It really hasn’t been difficult.”

With a portfolio of over 250 service providers,CG Moneta’s Telecom Division delivers bespoke cost-reduction initiatives that complement specific business situations. “We want it to be unique,” Gargione insists. “That’s one of the reasons we took as long as we did to do the background. You’ve got your Schooley Mitchells out there who provide similar services to a corporate cost reduction, but they aren’t doing these tax incentives and they don’t have the kind of leverage we have with the 250 service providers in our Telecom Portfolio. We utilize a buying consortium to reduce Telecom, Cloud & IT costs right off the bat—about 40%. So, we’re not going in with a spreadsheet, trying to reduce current services by five or 10%. We act as an aggregator, combining services from the providers that you want, and we’re also going to get you that price reduction immediately, Gargione elaborates.

“Looking at us versus the competition, I think we’ve taken the best parts of any competitor and combined them into what we believe is the ultimate firm that small- and mid-sized businesses can go to for significant near-term cash flow and savings benefits, all at once. That’s really what we set out to do, and we’ve been pretty successful in accomplishing it,” he adds.

Keeping in mind the competitive and changing landscape of corporate cost optimization, CG Moneta intends to remain at the forefront of the new technology and tax rate options they predict will be stand-out areas in their industry over the next few years. “The way the economy is, and the deficits this country is running, I think tax issues are going to be a big thing,” predicts Gargione. “We’re going to let business owners know that we’re here to help them through the process—that we’re here to let them capture whatever we can, savings-wise, so they can put that revenue back into their business.”

Because CG Moneta isn’t a one-and-done type of firm. The company’s work philosophy is all about relationships—letting clients know they’re there for the long term, to see them through current and future challenges as a team.

“Whether it’s telco needs, whether it’s tax incentives on a local, state, or federal level, whether it’s different hiring incentives, or whether it’s costing studies, our portfolio runs deep and it runs wide,” Gargione says.

“We also foresee having a presence in the contiguous United States within the next five years,” Covell adds. “It’s a lot easier to do once you’re virtual and you’re digital—we’ve got strategic partnerships spread right across the country. We just want to continue to deliver, engage, and develop those relationships that will carry forward through the years.”

AT A GLANCE

CG Moneta Consulting

What: a boutique B2B expense reduction firm working with organizations to cut costs and increase cash flow

Where: Headquarters in New York, NY

Website: https://www.cgmoneta.com/