Utility Warehouse is a FTSE250 company with an every expanding head office in West London. They provide Utilities to home and business owners all across the UK. In England, Wales & Scotland, this is gas, electric, telephone, broadband and mobile phone. They also offer a pre-pay Mastercard which offers substantial cashback incentives at several high street shops including Sainsburys, Boots, Halford
s, Homebase, B&Q, Topshop, Evans Bikes and many others. Utility Warehouse promote their services through a network of self-motivated entrepreneurs known as ‘distributors’. This is best likened to a franchise; For a one-off investment of £100 almost anyone can set themselves up as a Utility Warehouse distributor. For this £100 you receive a welcome pack that contains all of the training and marketing materials that you need to get started. Online training gets you up and running in less than half a day and subsequent classroom training builds on this to sharpen people skills and deal with common questions that potential customers tend to have. With Utility Warehouse, you are your own boss. Your income is directly related to your effort. Such a direct relationship is rarely seen in today’s workplace. This self-reliance interestingly has resulted in a large number of distributors signing up, going through the training system and then failing to succeed as distributors. And more importantly, what can I do to ensure that I am part of the successful few? The answer is so subtly simple most people miss it: Keep going. I still remember my first customer, my hand was shaking as I handed over the form to be signed (we don’t use forms any more, it’s all online these days). Two weeks earlier, I remember being on the phone to my mentor at the time moaning that I had asked everyone and everyone had said ‘no’. That happens a lot in the early days – lack of experience tends to generate a low sign up rate. As you become more experienced, the confidence shines through and the proportion of customers signing up to The Utility Warehouse increases. Since I signed up in 2009 a number of improvements have been made to the process of getting started as a Utility Warehouse distributor. These days you are assigned a mentor in the early days. They are financially incentivised to assist you on your early appointments to ensure that you get your first 3 customers signed up with assistance from an experienced distributor. The mentor system is optional and it does significantly help many distributors in their early days. The beauty of Utility Warehouse is that once you have signed up a customer, you get paid on that client for life. Every month when they pay their bills, you are paid the following month a percentage of that bill. This works out to typically be £5 per customer per month for a 4-5 service customer. This is an entirely ethical business model, as a distributor you are incentivised to take care of your customers and make sure that they are happy. When they pay their bills, you get paid. The truth of it is that almost all of the assistance customers need is in their fist 3 months as Utility Warehouse customers. All of these enquiries can be dealt with by head office although some distributors do choose to got the extra mile and give their customers a more personal service. Got any questions? Want to apply to join my team? Drop me a message below, I read them all.
