Hello again everyone and I hope you all had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Four-day weeks are always a challenge as we normally end up doing 5 day’s worth of work in the shorter time period, but it keeps us out of mischief if nothing else.

Carrying on from last week’s setting the scene blog, this week’s focus is on how we got to the present day. Having established that we had an innovative product in which the market was interested and could genuinely disrupt the status quo, we went about engaging with potential clients to discuss it in more detail. Our initial target audience was the small to medium sized suppliers who had a finite resource in order to chase debt. The ability of Utility Collections to become an extension of these suppliers’ collections teams added instant value and we quickly won all the collections business for three suppliers. In order to ensure we could maintain the high levels of service we went to the market and began to recruit a highly skilled team of people. This team not only had the skills and experience needed to support our clients but believed in the value of #debtdonedifferently.

We went from collecting a couple of thousand pounds to breaking records on a weekly basis, collecting £20k+ and resolving 75%+ of the accounts we were given.

So far, so good I hear you saying. For those of you involved in our industry, the second half of 2021 can only be described as catastrophic (there is another way to describe it, but I’m not allowed to swear on LinkedIn) 😊. Nearly 30 suppliers went to the wall, many through no fault of their own and unfortunately hundreds of exceptional people lost their livelihoods, many of whom were lost to the industry forever. Of the suppliers who went out of business, most were the very suppliers who were our target market, including three of the four new clients we had taken on and for whom we were doing work. The challenge we had to face was not only did we lose the current and future revenue, but we lost money owed to us once the administrators were called in. Through the strong relationships and the robust way we set up our commercial agreements, we were able to weather the storm but not without a few sleepless nights and some difficult decisions being taken. One thing we are proud of is we managed to make it through without having to make any of our wonderful team redundant and it also pleasing to see all the team stick with us when it would have been easy for them to look at alternatives.

Focusing on our sole supplier and working every hour available to engage with new customers, Christmas and New Year 2021 into 2022 was the most difficult time I’ve experienced in business in over 25 years. We stuck to plans and then January 2022 saw our hard work start to pay off. Interestingly, the circumstances which created the challenges became the driving force behind the opportunities created, predominantly through the SoLR process. Suppliers needed a different kind of support with their debt and Utility Collections was ideally placed to provide that and through our philosophy of customer engagement, we were able to gain several new clients and the business grew exponentially through the first half of 2022. We trebled the size of our team and our turnover reached just short of £1m by the end of our financial year (August).

Again, so far, so good I hear you saying. Well, we all know what happened next but next week I’ll tell you how it affected us, and the landscape changed once again.

By Kevin Harris, CCO.