Small Business

4 Ways to Cope With Rising Gas Prices

By Mark Henricks

Updated on: May 4, 2011 / 8:19 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Whenever the pump shows a dollar sign followed by a number starting with "7" after I've gassed up the Camry, I know I have entered the la-la land of outlandish fuel prices. But even with $4-a-gallon gas fueling $60-plus fillups, there are ways to minimize the effect of rising fuel prices on your business's operations, employees, and customers. Here are some good ones:

Check sites like GasBuddy.com to find the cheapest gas prices for employees to fill up company vehicles. You can search by state, city or ZIP code to find the lowest and highest prices for regular, mid-grade and premium gas as well as diesel fuel over the last 24 hours. We're not talking about pinching pennies here. I found a station not too far from me that was more than 25 cents a gallon lower than the higher-priced stations in town. Assuming a 16-gallon fill-up, I'd save $4. That's pinching dollars, which is completely different.

Use sites like Drivepricing.com to figure out what a given trip will cost you. Then ask: Is it worth it? I was able to instantly find out that driving up to the big-box electronics retailer on the other end of town would cost me $3.83 in fuel, meaning it probably was worth it to comparison-shop the video camera I was looking at. You can do the same with customer visits, deliveries, and the like.

Strive to combine trips to pick up supplies from vendors or deliver products to customers. It's not worth trying to make this a science, given that the Traveling Salesman Problem, which seeks to derive the shortest distance that will allow you to visit several different cities, is one of the gnarliest problems in computational mathematics. Just look at a map and if you have two or more stops in the same part of town, consider making one trip instead of more.

Consider adding a fuel surcharge for deliveries. Customers almost certainly won't like it, but you aren't the only one doing it. Businesses from pizza restaurants to airlines are tacking on extra fees to pay for fuel. Some of them are making money off of it.

It is probably not wise to take a bath on trading in your V8-powered gas-hog vans for a fleet of battery-operated Nissan Leafs, or even some hybrid Toyota Priuses. Gasoline prices fluctuate. They could be much lower in a year or even less. Beginning to transition to higher-MPG vehicles may well be a strategy worth looking at long term. But for now, the difference between $50 fill-ups and $70 fill-ups is better dealt with by less drastic means.

Mark Henricks is an Austin, Texas, freelance journalist whose articles on business, technology and other topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and many other leading publications. Learn more about him at The Article Authority. Follow him on Twitter @bizmyths.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Steve Ganz, CC2.0