I check and recheck my maths all the time, because I can scarcely believe it myself. One charity I worked for was spending roughly £25 per sim per month for 250 staff for years and years. They had no massive need for unlimited plans or tonnes of features. After I’d tendered and rolled out a new sim provider, they were now spending £5.50 per sim per month.
How could they get to this point where they were way overspending on their telephony? It felt scandalous that some middleman O2 reseller had gotten away with rinsing a charity to this degree. In this article I’ll talk about what the setup was, what I did to change it, and the results. It’s one of the worst examples of waste I’ve encountered so far, and I do not doubt that there are thousands of businesses in the UK that are overspending on utilities, and receiving substandard service too. I’ll end with a small plug for my services.
This Local Charity had around 250 staff, and most if not all of them had work mobiles. This had been the case since the beginning of the covid lockdown. The provider was a telephony business that resold O2 network access among other things. When they’d originally signed the contract, part of the deal was a ‘hardware fund’ where the Local Charity could get some mobile phones as part of the deal. It was a clearly rushed and hastily put together deal, and I don’t believe the decisions that led up to that point were very smart.
The results of those decisions meant that the Local Charity were paying an extraordinary amount of money for sim cards, with some embarrassingly crap Android pieces of garbage thrown in. The salesman, also the owner of the telephony provider, had quite a reputation with the charity staff. Some of them joked that when he came to meet, he’d bring doughnuts, and that thus made these the most expensive doughnuts in the entire world. He was a talker, didn’t back down, and as I understood, was quite aggressive in his sales pitch. Not bad things, but certainly red flags, especially in the context of this enormously expensive sim cards. In the few times I’ve had conversations with him on the phone, he would quite regularly (often more than twice on the same call) repeat the same line about how he “helped us out over covid”. I don’t doubt that it was a help, but I do doubt that it was a good deal for the Local Charity.
To the uninitiated, the idea of using a reseller in the first place might seem a little counterintuitive, and they’re not way off the mark. Why not directly contract with O2, instead of paying for some resellers bills? Why wouldn’t cutting out the middleman make more immediate sense? In theory, a reseller like this can provide value. An example might be, say, they’re able to keep the customer appraised as to the use on their sim cards. If a sim card has zero use, or is being heavily overused for data, this would be worth flagging, to help prevent overspend. Or perhaps the middleman can structure an arrangement with O2 that means he can offer a cheaper rate, whilst still making enough to make the deal worth it for him.
Well, our Provider did none of that. Not only did we have dozens of zero use sim cards costing money, but there were also some staff going way above their data limits regularly, costing even more. So, add to this the sheer expense and the shit phones, and you’ve got a good idea as to why I found this arrangement to be scandalously wasteful. I knew we had to change provider, get a direct contract with a network, cancel everything we’ve got with the middleman, and hopefully we’ll never hear from him again.
I canvassed a few potential suppliers, and settled on a direct contract with EE. They would cost £5.50 each, provide reports, give better coverage, better customer service, and give us access to a much wider variety of features that we could use. The rollout wasn’t simple but I was able to plan it out well, communicate it properly, and ensure every individual was ticked off the list to receive their new sim cards. They kept their same old numbers, and wouldn’t notice a difference beyond it. More than a few of them were terrified of anything technology related, so required a little bit more management and hand-holding through the process. This is totally normal, and I have infinite patience for individuals like this. There were a few teething issues around voicemails for some of the phone line based staff, but nothing I wasn’t able to resolve relatively quickly. Upending an entire business process will do that – you’ll break a hundred things that need to be broken and replaced, but 1 of them will turn out to be actually useful, so you need to address it quickly. This is the nature of business change, and is a super useful way of finding out what is useful and getting rid of what isn’t.
By the end of the relatively quick and light switch, 250 staff had new sims, with the same numbers, and life carried on like nothing happened. There were, however, two people that very much felt and saw a difference: our accountant, and the middleman. I’d taken £70k a year out of his business, and I had absolutely no sympathy. I didn’t even give him a chance to rebid/reprice. The sooner the Local Charity saw the back of him, the better. This doesn’t mean all of his business is this bad, but the arrangement we had was scandalous and I found it offensive.
I shudder to think of all the other arrangements that businesses have that are as wasteful as this. This is what I’m good at, and it’s enormously satisfying and rewarding work. That Local Charity over the next 5-year business cycle is going to have over a quarter million pounds more to play with, simply because of this one change.
What waste can I uncover at your organisation? What savings can I realise? How much better could your services be? It all starts with a conversation with me. I’m very familiar with most of the providers of different services here and around Oxfordshire, so even just by name I’m going to know how good a deal you’re getting or not. I know the good ones, the bad ones, and yes, the ugly ones (like the Provider in my article here).
Email me at hello@blockbrown.co.uk and maybe there’s something I can do for you too.