The £17,000 Bank Account He Had Forgotten About
Published October 2026
There are some stories you hear once and never forget.
This is one of them.
A number of years ago, I heard a senior Utility Warehouse Partner tell the story of how a business he'd largely stopped paying attention to ended up helping him through one of the most difficult periods of his working life.
The remarkable part wasn't simply that it produced some extra money.
It was that he'd almost forgotten the money was there.
The Business He Put Down
Years earlier, he'd built a Utility Warehouse business to Team Leader level.
But he also had what he regarded as his real business.
It was an established conventional business. It employed people. It had premises. It demanded his time and attention.
So eventually UW took a back seat.
He didn't continue actively building it.
Life moved on.
But something interesting happened in the background.
The business he'd built didn't simply disappear.
Customers continued using their services. Commissions continued being generated. And those commissions continued being paid into a bank account.
He just wasn't paying much attention to them.
Then 2020 arrived.
When Everything Suddenly Changed
COVID closed businesses across the country almost overnight.
His was one of them.
The premises had to close, income was severely disrupted and, like thousands of other business owners, he suddenly had employees to think about and bills that hadn't disappeared simply because normal trading had stopped.
When everything is going well, it's easy to overlook resources you don't particularly need.
When everything stops going well, you start looking rather more carefully.
And that was when he looked at an account he'd largely forgotten about.
There was more than £17,000 sitting in it.
It had accumulated from his Utility Warehouse business while his attention had been elsewhere.
And at precisely the point when his conventional business was struggling, that money gave him the means to help meet furlough payments for his staff.
Think about that for a moment.
The business that had once been secondary to his “real” business had quietly continued producing income in the background.
Then, when the real business was suddenly unable to operate normally, the supposedly less important one was still there.
That's What Residual Income Can Really Mean
I think residual income is sometimes explained badly.
People hear the phrase and imagine money magically appearing while somebody sits on a beach doing nothing.
That's never been my experience of it.
You have to build something first.
You have to find customers, learn skills, help people and put in work when there may initially be very little reward for doing so.
But you're doing that work to create something that can continue producing value after the original work has been done.
That's very different from simply exchanging another hour of your life for another hour's pay.
And sometimes the value of what you've built only becomes obvious when life changes unexpectedly.
Nobody built a second income in 2015 because they knew a global pandemic was coming in 2020.
That's rather the point.
You build resilience before you know why you're going to need it.
What Happened Next
For me, there's another fascinating part to this story.
He didn't discover the £17,000, solve the immediate problem and then forget about Utility Warehouse again.
He started building seriously.
By the time I began hearing him tell this story at company events, he was already progressing through the leadership levels.
Since then, he has gone on to build an extremely substantial Utility Warehouse business and help many other Partners develop theirs.
Perhaps discovering what that neglected little business had quietly done for him changed the way he valued it.
I can't know that for certain.
But something he subsequently said has always stuck with me:
“It only costs £10 to get in, but you must treat this business like you'd spent £100,000, because, done right, that is the true value of this business.”
I think there's a great deal of wisdom in that.
The price of something and its potential value are not necessarily the same thing.
Build Before You Need It
Most of us don't know what the next ten years will bring.
There will hopefully be opportunities we can't currently imagine.
There may also be redundancy, illness, economic shocks, business problems or events completely outside our control.
The lesson I took from that £17,000 bank account wasn't that everybody should expect to build a forgotten pot of money.
It was much simpler.
Create choices before you need them.
Build another source of income while the main one is still working.
Build skills before circumstances force you to acquire them.
Build relationships before you need help.
Build resilience while life is going well.
Because the interesting thing about residual income isn't only what it pays you while everything is going according to plan.
Sometimes its true value becomes apparent when everything suddenly isn't.