"They said, 'OK, Doug, we'll settle on cutting the budget by 20%, but we expect you to still deliver the same amount of value,'" Menefee said.

To meet that goal, Menefee first evaluated all of Schumacher's ongoing projects. Smaller ones, especially those with an immediate ROI, were bumped ahead, while large projects were scaled back or delayed. For instance, Menefee is continuing to put off upgrading Schumacher's financials software.

Projects requiring a lot of expensive consulting and integration work are being especially targeted.

"We are absolutely cutting strings with consultants," he said. "Rather than sending them 100% of the work, we are sending them 50 to 75 percent and taking more ownership inside."

Having bought servers this year, Menefee plans to put off buying any data center hardware next year apart from replacing some "end of life" Cisco Systems Inc. networking gear. To increase efficiency on the 140 servers Schumacher runs, Menefee expects to use more virtualization next year.