Adam Willcox: The Truth About Building a Business People Actually Trust

Adam Willcox wrote his acceptance speech on the walk from his table to the stage. He typed it into the notes app on his phone, reached the microphone, looked down and realised it wasn't readable. "That's not even English," he remembers thinking. "I'm going to have to wing this."

A few minutes earlier his business coach had nudged him and asked whether he had a speech ready, just in case. Willcox laughed. His team had entered a customer service award against a field of entries he knew they would have to beat, and he had already made his peace with losing. As far as he was concerned, the business had got what it needed from the process. Then they won.

The story is funny, and Willcox tells it with obvious affection. It also carries an irony worth sitting with. The award was for customer service, and Willcox works in energy, a sector where, by his own account, suppliers are "about as trusted as politicians." Customers arrive expecting the service to be terrible. That expectation is set by the competition, and it is the reason his business exists at all. "The whole reason the business started in the first place was to try and turn that on its head," he says.

What his story makes the case for is simple to say and hard to do. In an industry that runs on price and suspicion, trust can become the thing a business competes on. It is built through relationships that survive contact with real problems, through speed that big competitors cannot match, and through a team that owns the standard because they want to be proud of where they work. None of that shows up on a price comparison. All of it shows up in retention.

Why Small Businesses Can Beat Big Energy Suppliers on Service

Willcox runs 55 Group, a family business with 12 staff, soon to be 14, that has grown to almost £10 million. Its competitors are large suppliers surrounded, as he puts it, by red tape. They either won't or can't change the way they serve customers, because they are too big or too set in their ways.

His definition of great service comes straight out of that gap. "Delivering what the customer expects and a little bit more," he says, and doing what other businesses "either won't or can't." The phrase sounds modest. In practice it relies on something small firms often undervalue in themselves: the ability to decide quickly. "We can make a decision on Monday and have it implemented by Tuesday afternoon," Willcox says.

Speed matters because it changes what a customer experiences when something goes wrong. In a service business, problems are inevitable. Willcox is candid about that. What customers remember is whether anyone dealt with it, and how fast.

The clearest example is a system his team built after asking customers what they wanted. Many of 55 Group's customers are business owners, and between nine and five, dealing with an energy company is not a priority. So the company started creating a WhatsApp group for each customer who wanted one. The customer can add whoever they like from their own side, the finance team or a facilities manager. From 55 Group's side, the group includes Willcox, the managing director, the CFO, someone from sales and the customer service team.

Somewhere between 30% and 40% of customers have opted in. The effect is a direct line to the people who can fix things, at the hours customers actually think about their business. "Customers can message us at 9:30 at night," Willcox says, "and they'll get a response." It might only be a thumbs up and a promise to sort it tomorrow. That is still a different experience from drafting an email and waiting for a reply within a service level agreement. The old route still exists for those who prefer it. For the customers who chose WhatsApp, Willcox says simply, "It's really worked."

Good Customer Service Is Not the Same as World-Class

The most revealing part of Willcox's story is the moment he realised his business was not as good as it thought it was.

55 Group had always delivered what he would call good, if not great, customer service. Then, at BizX in 2025, Willcox and his leadership team sat through Geoff Ramm's talk on celebrity customer service. "It just opened my eyes completely," he says. Before that session, the team had been "singing a song that we are the best." Afterwards, the verdict was harder to hear. "Actually we were good, but we weren't world-class."

Plenty of business owners leave a conference energised and are back to normal within a week. What Willcox did next is the part worth copying. The whole team sat down together, worked out where they really were and what they were delivering, and built a plan to close the gap. As part of preparing for the award, they spent a full day as an entire team pulling apart what they did well, what they didn't, and what they could do better.

Then they took the same questions to customers. What are we doing well? What could we do better? Why would you stay with us? Why would you leave? Because the relationships were already strong, Willcox says, the conversations weren't difficult. Most of the answers were polite and general. "It's fine. You're doing everything you need to do." The value sat in the occasional nugget. The biggest one was communication. 55 Group tended to get in touch only when it needed something, such as a meter reading, or when a problem had been found. Customers wanted something more proactive. The WhatsApp groups grew out of that feedback.

The team kept the momentum going with fortnightly meetings where each person brought a story of going above and beyond. Some of those stories were remarkable. Willcox describes customers in tears, and an email he was eventually copied into where a customer said a member of his team had effectively saved their business. "It makes me very proud," he says.

When the Team Owns Customer Service, the Culture Changes

Ask Willcox what he is proudest of and it isn't the trophy. "The award wasn't the pinnacle," he says. "It was the catalyst that made things happen." What moved him most was who drove the change. "It wasn't management demanding down," he says. "It was the team saying, 'We're going to do this because we want to be proud of the business that we work for.'"

That distinction has outlasted the project. Over roughly 18 months, Willcox says, the biggest change has been less about process and systems and more about culture. Staff at every level now know they can have an idea, run with it and be recognised for the result. Before entering the award, the team agreed together that if they didn't believe they had done enough, they wouldn't enter. They submitted on the very last day, because it took that long to be sure they had achieved everything they set out to do. When they walked across the stage, Willcox says, they could celebrate "with zero feeling of imposter syndrome."

The same thinking explains how 12 people run a business of this size. Willcox credits the people first. "The benefit is recruiting people that are better than me," he says, borrowing Sara Davies's phrase about having the right people in the right seats on the bus. Problems still happen, but they are dealt with by people who care. Alongside processes and systems, he says, the people "are the reason that we don't need 40 staff."

Half the team are family, including, he notes with a smile, half his in-laws. He knows the conventional advice about mixing family and business. His answer has been ground rules and regular conversations, and the buy-in from family members has been huge.

Getting culture right has also cost him. Asked about his hardest lesson in ten years, Willcox doesn't hesitate. He had to exit his best friend and business partner because he wasn't the right fit for the culture. "That was a hard one emotionally," he says. It didn't put him off building a close-knit team. It hardened a rule. "There's no one above culture," he says. "Get culture right, everything else falls into place."

The Retention Numbers Behind a Relationship-First Business Model

Customer service is notoriously hard to measure, and Willcox admits much of the impact arrives later. One number he is certain of. Customer retention has risen from 84% to 92% since 2024.

On paper that might not look dramatic. In energy, it changes the economics of the whole business. The sector has high churn, and margins are tight. "It's expensive to onboard a customer," Willcox says. Signing someone to a 12-month contract, losing them, then finding a replacement for another 12 months is a model that "doesn't actually work very well." Retention is far cheaper than acquisition, which is why 55 Group isn't "looking for a five-minute win." Some customers have now been with the business for ten years.

Every customer who leaves now gets an exit interview, introduced by the operations director. The usual reason is price, but each interview also asks what the business could have done better. Nothing about a departure is left to guesswork.

The commitment to relationships goes further than most businesses would consider. 55 Group will not take on a customer it hasn't met face to face. Willcox calls it "a hard and fast rule" and one of the company's biggest selling points. His reasoning is blunt: "You can't have a lasting relationship with someone over email."

Last Christmas the team recorded a personalised video for every customer, almost 1,000 of them. No AI, just an iPhone in the boardroom, with a director and a member of staff rotating through so the business kept running. It took six days. Willcox admits much of the team is as camera shy as he is, so it pushed everyone. It also solved a quiet problem. Account managers know their customers well, but those customers rarely meet the rest of the office. A video that opens with "Hi, I'm Taylor" puts a face to a name. "It landed very well," he says.

When asked for the key to relationships that last a decade, Willcox's answer is one word: authenticity. "We'd never try and pretend that we're something that we're not," he says. "We don't try and pretend that we're bigger than we are."

What Happens When Customers Trust You More Than the Price

The clearest proof that trust has become the product shows up at renewal. Energy is, in Willcox's words, "very heavily price-driven. It is numbers, numbers, numbers." Even so, a growing number of customers now tell 55 Group at renewal time to just sign them up and tell them what they're paying.

Willcox refuses. "We don't do that," he says. The company wants transparency, a signed contract and a conversation that talks the customer through their options. The request still tells him something important. "We've built good enough relationships," he says, that customers will say, "I trust you. Look after me."

That trust has opened the door to work beyond price. Willcox argues there is much more to energy than negotiating a better rate. Ten years ago, understanding where energy was used and wasted was something only the biggest spenders bothered with. Now energy is a considerable overhead for most businesses, and 55 Group has adapted. Its managing director, Chris, joined around nine months ago with a background in energy auditing, and has helped move the business beyond what Willcox calls "a pricing desk." Customers increasingly want data on how they use energy and how to be more efficient. Solar and LED lighting, which Willcox's other business supplies, now pay back much faster than they used to.

Building a Business That Grows Without Its Founder

Hiring Chris was also a personal milestone. Working with his ActionCOACH, Gary Crosby, Willcox had been building towards a business that didn't depend on him. Today his involvement in 55 Group comes down to four meetings a month. Chris runs the business, and runs it well. "Having the option to exit the business and allow it to continue to grow without me has been one hell of a milestone," Willcox says.

At 35, he has moved on to a project with business partner Ashley, building an industrial estate off the A1 near Stamford. It is far bigger than anything he thought he could take on. He can do it because he knows the team in his first business are supported and will look after its best interests "whether someone's looking or not looking."

That phrase may be the truest description of what trust looks like inside a business. Customers who ask to be signed up without checking the price, and a team that holds the standard when the founder isn't in the room, are two sides of the same thing. Both took years of relationships that couldn't be faked.

Which brings Willcox back to the walk to the stage. His advice for listeners is to find something you want to be known for, put a plan in place and enter an award for it. The trophy now sits in the office and appears on email signatures. The part he remembers is crossing the stage with the whole team behind him, knowing they had earned it. In a sector trusted about as much as politicians, they built something worth trusting, one customer and one conversation at a time.

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