Ask a service station operator their fuel margin and they’ll answer to the decimal point. Ask when they last market-tested their electricity contract and the room goes quiet. Costs don’t announce that they’ve changed. The bill arrives, it gets paid, and the years pass. The fix isn’t willpower, it’s a calendar: a standing date for each major cost, checked on schedule the same way you’d service a car.
Recent examples from inside our membership show what the drift costs. One long-standing member asked us to look at his electricity and the last market test turned out to be six years ago. Another sent through a bill showing peak rates around 70 cents a kilowatt hour, roughly double a competitive business rate; the review took days and found about $3,200 a year. A third had a merchant fee review done a couple of years back that found a clear saving, then got busy, never signed the paperwork, and has paid the old rate on every statement since. A review that stops at a quote is just a more precise way of knowing what you’re wasting.
The calendar
Put each of these in your actual calendar, recurring, with the document you’ll need noted alongside.
Electricity: depends on your meter type. If you’re a larger C&I (commercial and industrial) customer on a contract, review six months before the contract ends; that’s when the market can genuinely be tested and a new deal locked in without pressure. Find your contract end date today and count back six months. If you’re an SME customer, review every three months, because these rates move constantly and last quarter’s good deal can quietly stop being one. Either way, the review needs nothing more than one recent bill. If you can’t find a contract end date at all, you’re probably on default rates, the most expensive place to be.
Insurance: six to eight weeks before renewal. Not at renewal, before it. A renewal notice with two weeks to run leaves no time to test the market, which is exactly why renewals are priced the way they are. The review needs your current policy schedule.
Merchant fees: every 12 months. Card costs creep because card share of sales keeps rising while your rate stays wherever it was set on the day the terminal went in. The review needs your last two or three statements; the number to know is your effective rate, total fees divided by total card sales.
Subscriptions and services: once a year, at tax time. Print twelve months of direct debits and justify each line in one sentence. Anything without a sentence gets cancelled.
Spread them through the year rather than saving them for a mythical quiet week. One cost line per month is an hour’s work each, and the whole cost base gets tested annually without any single heroic effort.
Whose job is it?
Costs don’t drift because operators are careless. They drift because reviewing them is tedious, technical and not assigned to anyone. So assign it. For ServoPro members, the three biggest reviews, electricity, insurance and merchant fees, are ours to do: send through a bill, a policy schedule or a merchant statement and we’ll test the market through the group arrangements, then bring you back a number to say yes or no to. The calendar is yours to keep. The looking is what we’re for.
Start with whichever review is most overdue. In our experience, that’s usually the one you can’t remember doing.