Everyone assumes it’s cold-calling the school mum WhatsApp group.
It isn’t. But it isn’t magic either.
Somewhere between those two things is the actual answer, and when I was looking into it myself, I couldn’t find anyone willing to just say it plainly. Every page I landed on was either a glossy recruitment pitch or a forum thread written by someone who’d never done it. Nobody was telling me what the job was. What you’d actually be doing on a wet Tuesday in February.
So here’s my attempt at that.
First, the declaration
I’m a Utility Warehouse Partner. I’ve been one since last year, and I’m not neutral about it.
I found the opportunity advertised on my own job board, the one I run at Investing in Women, which is either very fitting or slightly ridiculous, depending on how you look at it. We’d been UW customers for three years before that. So I came at it as someone who already knew the service worked, at a point where our recruitment business was having its toughest stretch yet, and I needed something else alongside it.
You should factor all of that in when you read this. But I’d rather tell you upfront than let you work it out three paragraphs from the end.
The job, in one sentence
You show people what they’d pay if their household bills, energy, broadband, mobile, and insurance were all with one provider, and if it’s better for them, you sign them up. Head office handles the switch from there.
That’s it. That’s the business.
Everything else is a detail about how you go about it. But if you’ve been reading around this and still can’t quite pin down what the actual work is, that sentence is what it comes down to. You’re the conversation and the comparison. You’re not the one contacting their old supplier or moving anything across – that’s all done centrally, and you’re not the one they ring if something goes wrong with it.
And if it isn’t better for them, you tell them that. Which happens, and is fine, and is quite a lot of the reason I can do this without cringing at myself.
What a week actually looks like
Here’s the honest breakdown.
Conversations. Most of it is this. Someone mentions their bills have gone up. Someone posts in a local group about their broadband being rubbish. Someone I know is moving house. You have a conversation, and if it’s relevant, you offer to run the numbers.
You’re not pitching. You’re mostly just being the person who knows about this, in the way that everyone has one friend who knows about cars.
Running quotes. Someone sends you a photo of their bill or tells you what they’re paying. You put it through the system and see what it comes out at. Ten minutes, usually less. Some of these turn into a switch. A lot don’t, and that’s normal.
The actual sign-up. If someone wants to go ahead, you sign them up. The tech does the heavy lifting — it’s genuinely one of the better bits — and once it’s done, head office takes it from there. They handle the switch, the old suppliers, the dates, all of it. Your job is to have the conversation and make sure the person understands what they’ve signed up to.
Follow-ups. Checking in on people who said, “not right now, ask me in March.” Making sure someone who switched last month is happy. This is unglamorous, and it’s what separates most people who build something from those who don’t.
Training. There’s a lot available, and it’s included. Calls, sessions, a mentor. I lean on mine heavily — I’ve joked more than once that she’s saved me a fortune on a business coach.
Admin. Barely any. Which I’ll come back to, because if you’ve ever run your own business, you’ll understand why that matters more than it sounds.
As for hours, I fit it in during school hours and on the odd evening and weekend. It’s designed to work in the gaps, and that’s where I live. But I want to be careful here, because “flexible” and “easy” are not the same word, and plenty of people use them as if they are. It’s flexible. You still have to do it.
What you don’t do
This is the part that surprised me most, coming from running a recruitment business.
You don’t do the switch. Once someone’s signed up, it’s out of your hands – head office does the actual moving. You’re not managing anyone’s transfer, negotiating with their old supplier, or fielding a phone call about a meter reading at half past eight on a Sunday.
You don’t buy stock. There’s nothing in your garage.
You don’t invoice anyone. You don’t spend the last week of every month chasing someone in accounts payable who’s stopped answering your emails. If you’ve never run a business, you won’t know what a relief that sentence is. If you have, you probably just exhaled.
You don’t need premises, equipment, or a website.
You don’t have set hours or a manager checking that you’re online.
And you’re not selling anything anyone doesn’t already buy. Every household in the country already pays for energy and broadband. You’re not persuading someone that they need a thing. You’re asking whether they’d like to pay less for the thing they’re already paying for.
That distinction is the whole reason I was willing to do this publicly.
Right — the recruitment bit
Let’s not pretend this isn’t sitting there.
Yes, you can build a team. If someone you’ve spoken to decides they want to do this too, you can bring them in, and there’s an element of your income linked to that.
No, you don’t have to. There are Partners who only ever look after customers and never introduce anyone to the business side. That’s a legitimate way to do it.
What I’d say honestly is this: the team side is where the longer-term build sits, and if you’re allergic to the idea entirely, you should know that going in. It’s not a hidden requirement, but it’s not a footnote either.
What I won’t do is pretend I’ve never mentioned it to anyone or that the two sides are unrelated. They’re related. You can decide how you feel about that, but you should base it on the actual information, which is why I’m putting it here in the middle rather than burying it.
Who this suits — and who it really doesn’t
The people I’ve seen do well with it tend to be people who already talk to a lot of other people. Not salespeople. Just sociable, well-connected, at the school gates, in the running club or in the village Facebook group. If your natural instinct is to help someone sort a problem out, that instinct is the job.
It also suits people who need to build around something else. A job. A business. Small children. A job search. Retirement. It genuinely does fit in the nooks and crannies, which is how UW describes it, and it’s one of the few bits of company language I’ve kept because it’s accurate.
It does not suit you if:
- You hate starting conversations. There’s no version of this where someone else does that part for you.
- You need a predictable amount of money arriving next month. This builds over time, and it doesn’t build evenly. If your situation is urgent, be very clear-eyed about that before you start.
- You want something you can switch off entirely. Customers have questions. It’s not much, but it isn’t nothing.
- You’re not willing to learn a fair bit at the start. There’s a lot to get your head around in the first few weeks.
None of that is a warning. It’s just the shape of the thing, and I’d rather you knew the shape.
So
That’s the job. Conversations, quotes, follow-ups, training, and a surprising absence of invoice-chasing.
And here’s where I’d push back on my own framing, because I’ve spent this whole post describing something that fits into the gaps, which risks making it sound smaller than it is.
It isn’t only a side thing. It scales in two directions.
If you want to build a team, you can — and that’s where the business grows beyond the hours you personally put in, which is the thing almost no flexible role offers. Or if the team side isn’t for you, you can build a customer base instead. Those customers stay. You’re not starting from zero every month the way you are in most self-employed work, and over time, that base becomes something with real value attached to it.
Both routes take time and consistent work, and neither comes with any guarantees. But the ceiling on this is a good deal higher than “a bit extra alongside the day job,” and there are Utility Warehouse Partners who’ve built it into their main thing. It depends entirely on how much you want to put in and what you want out of it.
I started it because we needed the income. I’ve carried on partly because I can see what it could become.
I’ll write separately about what you can actually earn, because that deserves proper context rather than a paragraph, and because the honest answer has more nuance in it than most people give it.
In the meantime — if you’ve read this far, you’re probably weighing it up.
The role is listed on our job board, same as it was when I found it. You can read the details and apply there.
And if you’d rather ask a few questions first, that’s fine too. Message me, and I’ll tell you what I’d have wanted to know.
I’m a Utility Warehouse Partner and the founder of Investing in Women. This post reflects my own experience.