Four people gather in a warm, softly lit room, talking and smiling around a low table with books. Large white text across the center reads, “Powered by community,” and colorful geometric shapes appear in the top left and bottom right corners.
Hi Friends,
For solo and micro business owners across New Hampshire, managing operating costs like electricity can feel like one more thing on an already impossible list. Whether you are a home-based service provider in Londonderry NH, a three-person shop owner evaluating your Eversource bill, or a sustainable small business trying to make smarter decisions with limited time and budget, this post is for you.
If you are anything like me, a mailer with a promotion lands in the little sorter on the entry cabinet with the very best of intentions attached to it. You will sit down and evaluate it this weekend. You will figure out if it is a good deal. And then it sits there for a month while you walk past it every day thinking, I really need to look at that. Sometimes it is genuinely easier to leave it there and protect what little mental space you have left.
This post is for the business owners who want to handle it without it becoming a whole thing.
A Local Example That Got Me Thinking
I came across an article about Londonderry NH launching its first Community Choice Aggregation program, or CCA, and instead of diving into the program details, what struck me first was the mental labor involved in deciding whether to pay attention to it at all. Something like a utility program change lands on your plate with no instruction manual and no obvious first step.
A CCA is essentially the town using its collective purchasing power to negotiate a lower electricity supply rate for residents and small businesses on your behalf. Think of it like a group buying club for electricity. Your delivery, billing, and outage service stay with Eversource exactly as before. The only thing that changes is the supply rate, which is the portion of your bill that reflects where your electricity comes from and what you pay for it.
Here is the detail most business owners will miss: if you are on Eversource default service, you were likely automatically enrolled. If you are already using a third-party supplier, you were not. That distinction is the one most likely to trip up small business owners who have been most actively managing their energy costs.
A woman sits on a couch holding and reading a utility bill with a concerned expression. The room has soft warm lighting, a wall-mounted air conditioning unit above her, and colorful geometric shapes in the bottom right corner.
Why This Sends So Many of Us Into Freeze Mode
That mailer triggers a genuine stress response for a lot of business owners, especially those who already did the work. You carved out the time, did the research, made a decision, and felt good about it. And now something new has arrived suggesting you need to revisit all of that. It does not feel like a fresh decision, it feels like starting over. Starting over means pulling your attention away from the client you were serving, the invoice you were sending, the problem you were already solving.
For business owners mid-contract with a third-party supplier the mental load is even heavier. Evaluating a new program means comparing rates, factoring in early termination fees, and figuring out what the rate looks like after the promotional window closes. It is a lot like toilet paper math, except the stakes are higher and the packaging is less clear. Ok, this plan has how many sheets in a kilowatt hour, and do I divide that by square foot?!
There are several types of advisors who can help: energy brokers, accountants, SBDC or SCORE mentors, Eversource account representatives, and your town directly. The honest reality is that no single advisor holds all of this expertise, and figuring out which door to knock on first is its own task. But there is a practical workaround.
The Prep Step That Makes Any Advisor More Useful
The most expensive part of professional advice (either in $$ or time away from the business) is the time spent getting the advisor up to speed. If you arrive organized with questions, you cut that time significantly.
If you are comfortable using AI tools, Claude or ChatGPT can help you make sense of documents that feel overwhelming. Share the key details from your bill and contract and ask the tool to help you identify what you have, what is missing, and what questions to bring to a human advisor. It can translate jargon into plain language and help you feel less lost before you pick up the phone. It is not making a decision for you or interpreting your contract in a legally meaningful way. Think of it as a patient, knowledgeable friend helping you sort through a pile of papers before your actual appointment.
A privacy note worth taking seriously: when you share information with a public AI tool, it is not private the way a conversation with an advisor would be. Most platforms retain your inputs and may use them for training or share them under certain circumstances. A recent federal court ruling reinforced that users have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using public AI tools. Describe your situation in general terms rather than uploading documents directly if you have any hesitation.
If you would rather not use AI, ask your bookkeeper to do this prep step. They already have your financial information and can hand you the same organized summary without the privacy tradeoff.
If budget does not allow for either, here are a few whole-person approaches that cost nothing:
Give yourself a container not a to-do list. Put a physical folder on your desk and spend one week dropping three things into it: your most recent bill, your supplier contract if you have one, and the program mailer. No decisions yet. Just gather.
Try body doubling. Sit with a fellow business owner or get on a video call with someone doing their own admin. The social presence makes the task easier to start and finish.
Write three numbers on the back of an envelope. Your current rate per kilowatt hour, the new program rate, and your average monthly usage. That is the whole comparison. You do not need a spreadsheet.
Talk it out loud first. Call a trusted peer and describe your situation in plain language. You will often identify your own question just by saying it out loud.
Bring the folder not a summary. If you do none of the above and arrive at your advising call with the physical documents in hand, that is still a productive conversation. Arriving at all is the most important step.
Two people sit side by side at a laptop in a bright office, smiling as they work together. A glass of water sits on the table, other coworkers are blurred in the background, and colorful geometric shapes appear in the bottom right corner.
Your Best First Call
For New Hampshire small business owners the best first step is a free conversation with NH Saves. They are neutral, carry no sales agenda, and are designed specifically to help residents and small businesses reduce their energy costs. They know the NH competitive supplier landscape and can look at your full situation rather than just one piece of it.
Reach NH Saves at nhsaves.com or call 1-888-570-9917.
Londonderry business owners: the CCA program is live right now. Before you assume automatic enrollment worked in your favor or that your current bill is already optimized, NH Saves can help you sort out exactly where you stand before the enrollment window closes.
We are just getting started on Instagram and LinkedIn and we would love for you to be part of the conversation as it grows. Follow us there for more resources, local developments, and plain-language guidance for NH small business owners. We would love to hear whether this was helpful and what questions it raised for your business.
This post references Londonderry's CCA program as a timely local example. The prep workflow and NH Saves recommendation apply to any Granite State small business owner evaluating their electricity supply options.
In Partnership,
Tricia + Chandra
Collective Agency
P.S. Know a business owner or resource partner who’d love this kind of support and community?
Feel free to forward this email or invite them to sign up—we’d love to welcome them in.
