The business
L.M. Liveries LLP operates across seven sites. Each one is metered separately, which is where the difficulty starts.
The problem
Seven meters means seven supplies, and each supply comes with its own contract, its own price and its own end date. Nothing lines up.
That turns a single annual task into seven of them. Every renewal has to be found before it lapses, every price has to be negotiated, and every contract length has to be decided on its own. It is a lot to hold in your head, and it is a lot of work for a business whose actual job is something else entirely.
Doing it site by site also costs money in a way that is easy to miss. Seven separate negotiations at seven separate moments means seven separate chances of signing at the wrong point in the market, and no ability to go to a supplier with the whole portfolio and ask for a better number.
The solution
The partner network took on the pricing and the negotiating, including renegotiating contracts that were already in place, at a point when the market was hard to read.
The structural fix was bringing all seven meters onto one central end date. From that point on, the whole portfolio comes up for renewal together. It can be negotiated as a group rather than site by site, and there is one date to keep track of instead of seven.
Timing did the rest. The contracts were agreed well ahead of the market turning, which left the business paying around 40% below the market rates that followed.
Two other things came out of it that had nothing to do with the rate. A new connection was arranged for the property, which included getting a new swimming pool connected. And a review of past billing turned up VAT that had been overcharged, so the business received a revised statement.
"I have always found that queries are promptly responded to and managed by them. I used this time to focus on my own work."— L.M. Liveries LLP
Why this matters if your renewal dates never line up
If you run more than one site, the maths is usually the same as it was for L.M. Liveries. Every extra supply adds another contract, another price and another date, and none of them arrive together. Getting them onto one date, and getting somebody else to handle it, usually pays for itself many times over, because:
- Suppliers price a portfolio differently from a single site, but only if you can put the whole portfolio in front of them at once
- Every date you have to remember is a date you can miss, and a missed renewal rolls onto out of contract rates that cost far more than the negotiation would have
- The rate is not the only thing on the bill. Standing charges, VAT and historic billing errors all sit there too, and nobody finds them unless somebody looks
If you operate multiple sites in any of our four target industries, whether that is restaurants, care homes, hotels or bakeries, a Switchgrid audit will tell you within 48 hours how your supplies compare, when each one renews, and what bringing them together would look like.