An Edinburgh headquartered client with a turnover of £1.2 billion with 29 premises throughout the UK who are a subsidiary of a larger parent company which floated. Their incumbent broker (when I was asked to speak to the Company in February 2019) was one of the largest brokers in the UK – and that was part of the problem. Our immediate advantages which were able to offer were:
• We had several meetings with their Board. The incumbent broker (based in England) had NEVER visited the client in the 3 years in which they had advised them.
• They had received a 30+ page summary and update every month which they admitted they had never read or understood.
• We did not have the incumbent brokers overheads: e.g. 400 staff salaries (most financially incentivised to “land” clients), premises costs for staff to operate from, computers, office furniture, staff expenses, money spent on buying data/leads for sales and expenditure on advertising. This makes us far more competitive.
It was therefore no surprise on being asked to quote alongside the incumbent broker that the price which Focus Business Consultancy offered – and the contract we subsequently secured was £144,900 cheaper than the quote offered by the larger, incumbent broker over the same period. Additionally, the client was grateful for the advices and insight which we offered – for instance, they were previously unaware that approximately 60% of their energy bill was made up of government-lead tariffs and pass-through charges and that only circa 40% was their actual energy usage. They were unaware that they were paying for these various charges on a “pass-through” basis and had no idea when and by how much they would increase over time. We were able to clarify this for them.