Consultants vs. TrueMeter: The $500K Decision That Could Make or Break Your Budget
When CFOs think about cutting energy costs, the default answer often looks the same: hire a consultant. Firms like Accenture or Deloitte promise to untangle utility bills, shop rates, and identify rebates. But here’s the catch: those projects often come with six-figure invoices and deliver only a one-time snapshot. Energy markets don’t stand still. Why should your savings?
The Consulting Model: Expensive, Manual, and One-Time
Let’s walk through what a traditional consultancy does for just one store:
1. Connect
To begin optimizing, a consultant first sets up online accounts for the two or more gas and electric utilities serving that single location. Multiply this by dozens or hundreds of stores, and setup alone can take weeks.
2. Optimize
Since energy providers don’t offer standardized data, consultants parse every energy bill by hand, month after month. They compare usage to alternative energy suppliers, dig through incentive programs at the federal, state, and local level, and manually calculate cost-benefit tradeoffs. This step alone can take days or weeks per store.
3. Implement
Next, they negotiate with five or more suppliers, each with different pricing structures. To keep up, they assign a dedicated employee—or an entire team—to maintain vendor relationships, monitor rates, and track performance over time.
4. Pay
Finally, they set up bill-pay systems. Many businesses then outsource the payment process at an additional $1–2K per store per year just to process invoices and avoid late fees.
That’s a lot of work—and a lot of cost—for a solution that’s one-time only. The moment a rate changes, a rebate expires, or a new supplier enters the market, the optimization is outdated.
The TrueMeter Model: Continuous, Automated, and Aligned
TrueMeter eliminates the heavy consulting bill and the “set it and forget it” problem by automating the entire loop:
- Always Connected: We ingest utility bill data across 3,000+ energy suppliers for every location, automatically.
- Always Optimizing: Our AI constantly re-analyzes rate plans, usage trends, and incentive programs. If a better plan appears, we switch you—no meetings required.
- Always Implementing: Negotiations, supplier management, and billing are handled seamlessly in the background.
- Always Paying: Bills are consolidated into one flat monthly invoice, just like rent or payroll.
Instead of a single optimization project, TrueMeter runs the loop 24/7/365—a cycle that never stops because energy markets never stop evolving.
Think of it as having a team of energy PhDs on demand, continuously hunting for savings across your entire footprint.
The CFO’s Math
Hiring a consultancy for a chain of 100 locations can cost $500,000+ when factoring in project fees, ongoing vendor management, and outsourced bill pay. And that’s before you repeat the exercise every few years.
TrueMeter delivers the same (and often greater) optimization—guaranteed savings up to 15%—with no upfront fees, no headcount, and no expensive consultants.
Energy isn’t a one-time problem. It’s a constantly shifting line item, influenced by market volatility, regulation, and usage patterns. A one-time consulting project may look good in a board deck, but it won’t protect your budget from next quarter’s rate changes.
TrueMeter does. By automating the entire optimization cycle, we turn utilities into a predictable, fixed expense and align our economics directly to your savings.
👉 The choice is simple: pay consultants half a million for a one-time project—or put TrueMeter to work, continuously optimizing your energy bill spend with skin in the game.
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