Business energy is one cost a bar cannot switch off, and one where the price often hides a broker’s commission. Mallo.uk founders Matt Chaplin and Lloyd Russell explain broker bloat, transparent pricing and buying energy in four minutes.
For readers who haven’t come across Mallo.uk yet, can you introduce the business and what you set out to do?
Mallo.uk came from years of working in the business energy industry and seeing how unnecessarily complicated buying energy had become for small businesses.
For too long, the market has been dominated by sales calls, brokers, hidden mark-ups and jargon. We just kept asking ourselves: why does it need to be like this?
So we built Mallo.uk to give control back to the business owner. You upload a recent energy bill, we do the hard work in the background, and you can see prices from participating suppliers and complete the whole process online. No sales calls, no pressure, no chasing.
Our aim is simple: make business energy as straightforward and transparent as it should have been all along.
Business energy has traditionally been dominated by brokers, sales calls and lead-generation comparison sites. What makes Mallo.uk different?
The biggest difference is transparency.
Traditional brokers are often paid by adding commission into the price of every unit of energy a business uses. The customer may never really know how much they are paying the broker, because it is wrapped into their energy rate.
We wanted to turn that model on its head.
Mallo.uk gives businesses access to participating suppliers’ base prices, and we simply charge a transparent fixed fee of £1 per meter, per day. Whether you are a small independent bar or a much larger venue, we are not earning more because you use more energy.
Mallo.uk is not a lead-generation site either, where you enter your details and wait for the phone to start ringing. The journey is online and self-service, from uploading your bill through to choosing a deal and completing the contract.
We call that hidden commission broker bloat. Mallo.uk was designed to strip it away.
Why specialise in energy rather than comparing every business cost, and why does getting it right matter so much for bars?
Energy is a significant overhead for many hospitality businesses and, unlike some costs, you cannot simply stop using it.
A bar needs refrigeration running constantly, along with lighting, heating or cooling, glasswashers, ice machines and kitchen equipment. The meter keeps turning whether it is a busy Friday night or a quiet Tuesday afternoon.
Margins in hospitality are already under huge pressure, so paying more than you need to for energy is money that could be going back into the business.
Energy is complicated enough as it is. We did not want Mallo.uk to be a website that compares everything from broadband to card machines. We know business energy, so that is what we have built the platform around.
Talk us through how it works in practice. A bar owner arrives with their latest energy bill: what happens next?
That is probably the part of Mallo.uk we are most proud of, because we have deliberately made it incredibly simple.
Take a photo of your latest business energy bill or upload the PDF. Mallo.uk reads the information, identifies the supply details and does the work that would traditionally involve forms, emails or phone calls.
You can then see available prices from our participating suppliers, compare your options and, if you want to go ahead, complete the contract digitally.
The whole quote-to-contract journey can take around four minutes.
For a bar owner who has already got enough to deal with, that is the point. Business energy should not take up an afternoon.
Commissions and mark-ups are often buried in the price. How does Mallo.uk approach pricing, and what should bar owners be looking out for?
I would always say do not just look at the headline unit rate. Understand what you are actually paying and, importantly, whether someone has added a commission to it.
Traditional broker commission can be added as a pence-per-kWh uplift. That means the more energy your business consumes, the more commission you could be paying.
Mallo.uk does not work like that. We provide access to participating suppliers’ base prices, and our fee is fixed and transparent at £1 per meter, per day.
Small businesses deserve to know what they are paying for their energy and what they are paying for the service helping them buy it. It should not be hidden in the small print.
What savings have businesses seen so far, and what is next for the platform?
We have already seen some really encouraging examples of businesses finding substantial savings, but I am always careful not to promise that everyone will save a particular amount. Every business, contract and energy market situation is different.
For us, Mallo.uk is about more than putting a big savings number on an advert. It is about giving small businesses a fairer and more transparent way to buy something they all need.
Our ambition is big. We want to win around 1% of the UK SME energy market within three years. Small businesses have been underserved in energy for far too long, and we want Mallo.uk to help change that.
