Member Info for peakyblinders

All 3 employees are ex-Utilitywise. Oh the irony!

Regent Gas also own over 5% of the share capital of INSE, one of UTW’s main competitors.

Have to agree re the IoT stuff. Just look at the T-Mac adjustments in their accounts. 99.9% of SMEs have no interest in monitoring. They just want the cheapest deal on their gas and power.

What a load of tosh! How on earth can he hit that target when they currently have 40k customers? The only way would be to buy a competitor but they don’t have that sort of cash and their shares are less than half the float price (ie no value to anyone with half a brain)!

Ridiculous levels including legal fees (unsuccessfully) fighting competitors and having to pay compensation to Clients plus huge impairment re T-Mac

I believe they’re having to audit the past 5 or 6 years’ sales (ie contracts). They claim to have around 40,000 active customers but the contracts they’re having to audit will relate to ex-customers as well as current ones.

Yes, but Inspired’s market cap is 4 times that of UTW.

Or they don’t want to pull the plug and have to take a big loss? To be fair, the business is still sound and it does make a profit. It’s just the revenue recognition coupled with the cash flow which has caused issues / concerns.

Paper profits but not supported by cash

Other than targeting businesses the 2 businesses have nothing in common. Sage has 35 years’ experience helping businesses manage their day-to-day operations efficiently and effectively. Businesses rely on Sage to help them manage their finances, pay their staff and get paid by their Clients. UTW is simply an intermediary. They have no product. They provide a “service” with dubious levels of quality and in a very crowded market. They have no USP. They’ve got to where they are purely by scaling more quickly than their rivals, but with rapid growth comes loss of quality / controls. Hence they have allowed their sales staff to nominate ludicrous consumption levels and now they’re paying the price. Trying to unpick their numbers must be a nightmare for the auditors (but will generate some tasty fees for BDO - maybe that’s where we should be investing our money!!).

Not sure that’s entirely fair. He’s walked into a shambles and probably had no idea what he was taking on.

The clawback is clearly because they allowed their staff to ignore the AQs and nominate their own (inflated) figures in orders to generate more commissions for UTW and therefore themselves. The TPI teams within the Suppliers have their own internal targets so the chances are they weren’t pushing for concrete evidence of actual usage for these Clients. They were probably more concerned with hitting their short term targets and then worrying about the reconciled (ie true) figures at a later date.

Icon and T-Mac were purely indulgences of the then CEO. Neither have been or will ve profitable. Prior to T-Mac he squandered a fortune on their own product (EDDIE). SMEs have little if any interest in energy saving technologies. If you spend £10,000 pa on energy are you really interested in spending a couple of £,000 on technology? Probably not. You just want a cheaper deal next time your contract is up for renewal.

Can’t disagree with any of your points. There must be over 2,000 people in the North East alone employed as Energy “Consultants” and their behaviours are all broadly the same, from what I have seen. There’s a real opportunity for someone to come along and set themselves apart simply by being open, transparent and putting the Client first. Easier said than done, of course, when people look at companies like UTW and how much their people can earn. Not sustainable, in my opinion, but it needs regulation in order to fix it. In the meantime, the Brokers AND Suppliers will continue to carry on behaving badly (don’t forget the Suppliers are just as guilty - they allow the massive uplifts and even use them as an opportunity to layer extra margin for themselves).

Speak to any current or past employee on all of those points.

All of this information is in the public domain.

I have to say, the longer it takes to announce their results the more concerning it appears. Surely the fact that BDO asked them to seek another party’s advice on the numbers tells you everything you need to know? The Thompson family are out of the business. Geoff Thompson has probably written-off the value of his 8+m shares but he’s still sitting pretty (the Rolls Royce, 2x Bentleys and vintage Aston Martin parked outside his £3.5m house are testament to that!). Jeremy Midfleton has taken a bath on his 3.5m shares too. He can’t be too happy. Ex CFO Andrew Richardson has setup a competitor business (whose markering blurb includes ****ging off tradiional brokers like UTW - the company that made him a millionaire - you can almost smell the irony!). I thought The Wolf of Wall Street was an entertaining piece of work.,,,,,,,Brendan Flattery has no chance of fixing this ‘business’. However, they do have data on 40,000 businesses and that will hold some value for someone but probably only at a knock-down price (and without taking-on the huge overheads).

I don't suppose the Thompsons are too bothered. They're all but out of the business now (and Geoff Thompson's son-in-law has just left Utilitywise to start his own energy brokerage - tells you all you need to know about their loyalty to the firm)!

It’s all about hitting that day’s sales target and dealing with the fall-out later. The business is run by the sales teams. The fact that the non-Execs haven’t been able to work this out is worrying (especially the likes of Jeremy Middleton - he’s about £7million down so far. Bet he wishes he’d asked the tough questions at the Board meetings....).

Their sales people are allowed to “nominate” the consumption and they (UTW and therefore the sales people) would get paid commission based on that figure. When the Suppliers then reconcile actual usage versus the nominated figure that’s where the variance comes in.