The Greater Manchester Loan Fund (GMLF), managed by Maven, has made a successful exit from its investment in Love Energy Savings (LES). The investment in LES was one of the GMLF’s first transactions when it provided £750,000 of funding to the Bolton-based business in November 2013. Since then the business has grown its revenues by 135% and now serves 16,000 customers across the UK.
Established in 2008, LES provides brokerage services, acting as an intermediary between businesses and energy suppliers in order to deliver the best deal for its clients. The investment from the GMLF enabled LES to grow new routes to market, such as the innovative online energy price comparison engine for SMEs, which was unique to the B2B sector.
Although comparison sites are common in the retail market, they are rare in the business space. The platform, www.loveenergysavings.com, provides businesses the opportunity to compare and contrast energy providers, offering a full online accurate price comparison in a table format similar to that found in the domestic market. This innovative price comparison approach allowed Love Energy to generate its own leads, with higher conversion rates, rather than competing amongst a large number of brokers for the same business.
The flexibility of GMLF finance was the perfect fit for LES, providing it with the growth capital it needed to expand as well as providing a stepping stone for the business to attract a substantial equity investment once that growth had been achieved.
A major cornerstone of GMLF funding is also to create and safeguard jobs across Greater Manchester and during the life of the investment an additional 16 jobs were created across the business which now employs 53 people in total.
Andy Thomas, Investment Director at Maven, said: “Love Energy Savings.com has grown hugely since our initial investment in November 2013, which is testament to the hard work of the management and staff at the business. The company has a clear and well thought out growth plan based upon their value-for-money proposition for SMEs, and we wish them every success in continuing to expand their business.”
Phil Foster, Managing Director at LES, added: “The introduction of GMLF via Maven came at the perfect time for us and allowed the team to put their plans into action. Maven didn’t just provide us with working capital they became a really positive influence on our board helping us make sound decisions and were continually supportive of the direction the business was going."