Leading us astray?

Every removal firm in the country accepts the same thing as a cost of doing business. You buy leads.

No one wants to do it. In a utopia you would be flooded with inbound enquiries, supplemented by some central not-for-profit distributor sharing the work out fairly. In the real world, you pay a comparison site for enquiries, some of them turn into jobs, most of them don't, and that is simply how getting work happens now. Nobody questions it. It is the weather I described in The Margin Question - a force you brace for rather than argue with.

I stopped and questioned it. Once you actually look at how the machine works, it is hard to unsee.

Up to six quotes

Start with a number the lead companies publish themselves. One of the biggest states, in its own marketing, that a single request can generate up to six quotes.

Read that again slowly. Up to six quotes per person. Which means one enquiry can be sold to four, five, even six firms at once - if every one of them reaches a quote. That is not a critic's estimate or a disgruntled operator's guess. It is their own figure, in their own material.

Only one of you can ultimately perform the move. The others still paid.

Follow the money

Now follow it properly, because this is the part that should genuinely bother you.

The firms that pay for those enquiries and don't win the work don't get a refund. They have paid for enquiries that were never going to be theirs. That cost does not vanish. It has to be earned back somewhere, and there is only one place it can come from: the jobs they do win.

So the price of every lead you lose is folded into the price of every job you land. The customer who books you is paying, without ever knowing it, for the other enquiries you paid for and never moved.

How does that make sense? The model takes one house move, manufactures multiple wasted sales efforts and one inflated invoice, and everyone involved has agreed to call it normal.

Who wins every time?

And that is the question I can't get past. In that whole arrangement, who wins on every single enquiry?

Not the operator - several firms can pay for the opportunity while only one can perform the move. Not the customer - they pay more so that the losing operators can recoup their costs. The only party that wins every time, whether anyone moves house or not, whether you win the job or lose it, is the company selling the lead. It can be paid several times over for one customer, and it carries none of the risk of actually doing the move.

The entire professional removals industry has agreed to fund a middleman to auction its own customers back to it, potentially six at a time, at a price the customer ultimately covers. Written down plainly like that, it sounds absurd. But it is the model most of the trade runs on, and it has been running so long that questioning it feels almost offensive, and at the very least eccentric.

A million pounds, kept

Look at what that middleman actually keeps.

One of the larger platforms files accounts stating, in its own words, that its income is commission from removal companies. Not from consumers. From you. And in a single recent year it retained over a million pounds in profit - after all its costs, after paying its staff and its marketing and its overheads.

Over a million pounds, kept, from commission on moving enquiries. How many removal companies made that much profit last year? A handful? You are in the top few per cent of this industry simply to turn over a million, let alone keep it.

That is money that left our industry, out of operators' margins, in twelve months, through one company. And because that figure is profit after everything, the gross sum that flowed in from operators buying leads is several times larger again.

That is our margin

Plainly, that is the margin. That is the money this industry says it does not have.

A trade running at razor-thin margins, forever told there is no room to invest, no room to pay people properly, no room to modernise - and a meaningful slice of what little margin there is flows straight out to companies whose entire business is selling us our own customers, several times over.

I am not writing this to tell you to do anything in particular. I am writing it because I think we have stopped seeing it. When a cost becomes universal, it becomes invisible, and when it becomes invisible, nobody asks why.

We have spent years accepting lead-buying as a fixed law of the industry, the same way you would accept fuel prices or business rates. But fuel and rates are genuinely outside your control. This is not. This is a model we participate in, pay for, and could question any time we chose to.

It has its place for car insurance, tickets and phone contracts - commodities, bought once, on price. Is that what we are?

Do the arithmetic the industry never does

So question it. Next time an invoice for leads comes in, work through the numbers nobody in this trade puts on paper.

• How many of those leads did you actually win?
• How many did you pay for and lose?
• What did the losses cost you across the whole year, not the month?
• Where, in the end, did that money go - and what did it buy you, other than an opportunity you may have had to share with several of your competitors?
• And are those competitors even comparable to you? Do they carry your costs, your crews, your insurance, your compliance burden?

That last one matters more than it looks. If the enquiry you paid for is quoted alongside five other firms, and some of them carry none of your overhead, you did not buy a fair contest. You bought a ticket to one.

A bridge worth looking at again

I don't think the people who built this model set out to harm anyone. It is not deliberately commoditising us. It is a clever business, and it solved a real problem when it started: operators genuinely did not know how to reach customers online, and someone built the bridge.

But a bridge you pay a toll on several times for one crossing is worth looking at again. The problem it solved is not the problem we have now. And a practice that made sense once can quietly become a tax on a whole industry that has forgotten it ever agreed to pay it.

The first step is to look at it honestly, as if for the first time, and ask the question we stopped asking a long time ago. Why does it work like this? And who is it actually working for?

Because it is not working for the firm that cannot crack the top few per cent of this industry, while a single lead company quietly keeps more than most of us will ever turn over.