About EMG
EMG was founded in 1993 on the premise that errors and overcharges occur on the bills that we pay. Now, errors probably occur on all types of bills, but we at EMG focus on utility bills - namely electric, natural gas, water, sewer, and trash bills. Over the years, we've worked with businesses in wide range of industries. That said, we specialize in working with golf courses and resorts, school districts, and food manufacturers.
Why is this type of service of interest to a business? Well, to increase revenue, you can either cut costs or increase sales. Clearly, EMG looks at the "cutting costs" side of that equation. Usually, if a business wants to cut costs, they're relegated to trying such things as sacrificing quality by saving money on ingredients (if you're a food manufacturer, for instance) or cutting wages, or reducing expenses in that way. But you can save on overhead without doing ANYTHING differently when you incorporate utility bill auditing.
And this money goes right to the bottom line. What do we mean by that? Well, let's look at an example.
We had a restaurant client years ago, and you have to keep in mind that restaurants typically run on tight profit margins. After completing our utility audit for this client, we were able to reduce their total utility expenses by a total of $5,000 per year. Now that doesn't sound like a great deal of money, but for this particular business, they were operating with a 5% profit margin. So this savings of $5,000 per year equated into $100,000 of additional food sales. At this restaurant, customers used to spend about $15 per meal. With that in mind, the savings we generated equated into over 6,667 additional meals ordered in the calendar year. Breaking it down even further, that's 128 additional customers per week, 18 additional customers each day. And the beauty of that is that a utility audit takes very little time, costs nothing, and will usually not have to be repeated. So the saving on overhead expenses accomplishes the same thing as increasing sales, and it's much easier.
Our Service
How It Works
We review your utility bills for errors and overcharges, and work to correct them.
You focus on your core business.
Our auditing experience shows that most companies—about 70% of those we audit—have refunds or savings coming of which they are unaware.
EMG performs the audit without taking valuable time from you or your staff. Whenever possible, we receive billing data directly from the utility providers. Then we work in the background to analyze your electric, gas, water, sewer and trash bills to identify errors and overcharges. We then move swiftly to secure the refunds and/or lock in lowered rates.
A Risk-Free Service
EMG performs its utility auditing service on a 100% contingency basis. This “no risk” structure provides that if we discover any refunds or overcharges for your company or organization, we simply get a percentage of the newly found savings. If we don’t find savings, our service is free. And with many satisfied customers over the years, you can rest assured that you’re working with one of the industry’s most recognized leaders in service and results.
The Process
At the completion of our audit, we deliver a report. And the report says one of two things: either we found absolutely no errors or overcharges, everything looks great, don’t change a thing … or …. We found some potential for saving money, and here’s what it is. We give you an approximation of how much you can save on an annual basis; how much in the summer, how much in the winter months, and what’s involved in putting that savings in place. And we then ask for your approval, because we never do anything without your knowledge or consent. Once we have your approval, we will go ahead and take care of getting the changes made and implemented in a timely way. And then we’ll track savings and report and a spreadsheet that shows you how much you’ve saved based on what you’ve actually used and what you’ve actually been billed. And it’s very intuitive. All we do is look at the rates you were paying before we came on the scene (all the work we do is tied to the rates), and then we’ll compare it to the rates you are currently paying. We multiply those rates by whatever consumption you actually had during that billing period, whether it’s therms of gas, kilowatt hours of electricity, etc. and then we subtract one from the other to come up with the savings.