Two Per Cent, Ninety Days: What Ten Owners Actually Learned About Buying Local

Ten firms. One quarter. Two per cent of routine business-to-business spend moved to suppliers within roughly twenty miles. That was the entire brief — no grant, no dashboard, no logo. Just a promise made in a meeting room above a café and a shared spreadsheet that everyone could see.

The quarter ran from July to the end of September, which means the results are in and the excuses have had time to cool. This is the unvarnished version, written for anyone thinking of pinning the same pledge to their own office wall.

The rules they agreed on — and the two they argued about

Before anybody spent a penny, the group wrote down what counted. Routine spend only: cleaning, print, waste, IT support, signwriting, courier runs, small building jobs, that sort of thing. Excluded were anything on a national framework, anything under an existing three-year contract, and anything where switching would cost more in exit fees than it saved in goodwill.

Then came the arguments. The first was over what 'local' means. A twenty-mile radius sounds tidy until you realise that for a firm on the edge of a county boundary it excludes half its natural trading area and includes a lot of fields. The group settled on a fudge: within twenty-five miles of the registered office, or owned and run by someone you could get to in an hour.

The second argument was about charity. Two members wanted to count donations, sponsorship and free work. They were voted down, politely. The pledge was commercial or it was nothing — you buy from a local firm because they're good and they're close, not because you feel sorry for them. That distinction turned out to matter more than anyone expected.

What genuinely worked

Three things stood out.

Speed. Small suppliers answered the phone. A broken shutter on a Saturday in August was fixed by Tuesday by a firm eight miles away, after a national contractor had quoted three weeks and a call-out fee. Two owners said the same thing in different words: the local option was not cheaper, it was faster, and speed had a price they'd never put on a spreadsheet.

Better invoices. Not smaller ones. Cleaner ones. When you can ring the person who sent the invoice and ask what line four means, disputes evaporate. One member cut its aged creditor queries from a dozen a month to two.

Introductions. This was the surprise. Buying locally generated selling locally. A joiner who did a fit-out for one member passed two referrals back within six weeks. Nobody planned that. It happened because the supplier knew who else was in the room.

Where it turned into a paperwork headache

Onboarding. Every single time, onboarding.

A national supplier arrives pre-approved: public liability certificate, health and safety policy, modern slavery statement, the lot, all in a supplier portal. A two-person local firm arrives with a PDF of an insurance certificate photographed at an angle and a bank details letter that has to be checked twice because nobody wants to be the firm that got done by invoice fraud.

There was construction industry scheme paperwork for the building jobs. There was a waste carrier licence to verify. There was one glorious afternoon spent establishing that a 'local' print broker was a franchise brand owned out of Manchester, which meant three weeks of the quarter's effort counted for nothing.

Two other friction points worth flagging. Minimum order values caught people out — a local stationery supplier simply couldn't match a national account on a £40 order, so the 'saving' vanished in delivery charges. And credit terms: several small suppliers wanted payment on 14 days, not 30, which is entirely fair and does hit cash flow if you're used to stretching things.

The awkward bit nobody warned them about

Mates' rates. When you buy from someone you drink with, the conversation about a poor job gets strange. One member accepted a snagging list that a national contractor would have been made to fix. He knew it, the supplier knew it, and neither said so for a fortnight.

The lesson the group landed on: separate the relationship from the purchase order. Agree scope, price and payment terms in writing before the first site visit, exactly as you would with a stranger. Being local buys you a conversation; it shouldn't buy you a discount on standards.

The honest scoreboard

Combined routine B2B spend across the ten firms in the quarter came to roughly £431,000. Two per cent of that is about £8,600. They moved around £7,300 — a shade under 1.7%.

Three firms beat the target comfortably, one reaching nearly 4% purely because a waste contract and a cleaning contract both came up for renewal in the same month. Four landed between 1% and 2%. Three missed badly: two because their largest spend sat inside a national contract they couldn't split, and one because it simply forgot until the second week of September and then panic-bought printer toner.

So: a qualified success. Nothing transformed. Nobody saved a fortune. But nine of the ten said they'd do it again, and eight said they'd keep the habit going without the pledge attached.

How to run it without it becoming a box-tick

If you fancy the experiment, the group's advice boils down to this:

• Cap it at a quarter. Long enough to hit a renewal cycle, short enough that nobody loses interest.
• Measure three invoices, not thirty. Pick the spend categories you can actually see. A full procurement review is how these things die.
• Do the onboarding admin once. Build your own mini-pack — insurance, bank details, a one-page agreement — and hand it to every new local supplier. It saves a fortnight.
• Write the rule down. No free work, no mates' rates, no sponsorship dressed up as purchasing.
• Publish the total internally. Not for bragging. Because the moment people can see the number, the number moves.

What they'd change next time

Start in April, not July — the summer holiday season kills momentum and half the decision-makers you need are on a beach. And do the onboarding pack in week one, before anyone signs anything.

Otherwise, the finding is almost boringly simple. Buying local doesn't save you much money. It saves you time, arguments and, occasionally, a fortnight. For most owner-managed firms, that's a better return than a percentage point on a price list.