Week ending 28 August 2026

October’s energy number, the week’s standout sector results, and the fiscal backdrop to autumn planning, with our read on what each means for a founder-led brand.

Energy price cap rises 4% from October as VAT comes off electricity

The winter cost base is now a published number rather than a forecast, and it reaches a founder twice: through the overheads line and through the customer’s wallet.

Ofgem confirmed on 26 August that the energy price cap will rise 4% for the quarter from 1 October to 31 December: £1,723 a year for a typical dual-fuel household paying by direct debit, up £60 from £1,663 today, or around £5 a month. Most of the movement is gas, up 8%. Electricity is broadly stable, because the Government’s removal of VAT from domestic electricity bills lands in this update; without it, Ofgem says, the figure would have been around £45 higher, and households that do not use gas see a rise of less than 1%. Behind the cap, wholesale prices rose 11% over the past three months, which Ofgem attributes to the conflict in the Middle East. Around 11 million households on fixed tariffs are unaffected, and the cap remains 52% below the height of the 2022 crisis, when the Government stepped in to hold a typical bill at £2,500.

The July cap rise drove the inflation reading we covered last week; this announcement writes the next quarter’s version of that line. The useful difference is timing. Most cost increases show up in your accounts after they have happened; a cap change is published five weeks before it lands, with a date and a size, so for once a forecast can absorb the movement before it arrives rather than explain it afterwards.

For a supplements or wellness brand it lands twice. On the cost side, warehousing and fulfilment run on the same energy market, cold-chain storage more so, and your co-packer’s blending, encapsulation and packaging lines do too; expect their next pricing conversation to carry this through, and reprice those lines for the final quarter now, while the number is known. On the demand side, the same £5 a month comes out of the household budgets your Christmas quarter sells into, from 1 October, just as peak season opens; a supplement subscription is exactly the kind of direct debit a tightening household reviews. Modest per household, but it moves the same way as everything else on a winter bill, and discretionary repeat purchases feel it first. The forecast worth having carries October’s published number on both lines.

Questions worth revisiting

• Is your final-quarter forecast priced on October’s published cap, or on an assumption made in the spring?
• How much of your Christmas-quarter demand plan rests on discretionary spend from households whose bills have just moved?

Phoenix can help you rebuild the winter forecast around the numbers now published, from your own cost lines to the demand they sit beside.

Source: Ofgem, Energy price cap will rise by 4% from October 2026, 26 August 2026

Applied Nutrition expects revenue up 50% to £160m and raises next year’s outlook

A UK sports-nutrition business twelve years old has just shown what the category’s growth looks like at scale, and where that growth comes from.

Applied Nutrition, the Liverpool-based sports nutrition and wellness group, said in a full-year trading update on 26 August that it expects revenue of around £160m for the year to 31 July 2026, up roughly 50% from £107m the year before and well ahead of market expectations of about £148m. Adjusted EBITDA is expected at around £43.3m, up 40% on the prior year’s £30.9m, and the group raised its outlook for the year to 31 July 2027 to roughly £205m of revenue, again ahead of consensus. The figures are unaudited, with full results to follow in mid-November. Founded in 2014 by Thomas Ryder, who remains chief executive, the company has been listed on the London Stock Exchange since October 2024, and last month launched a GLP-1-friendly supplement range exclusively with Holland & Barrett.

Since we looked at the GLP-1 shift on 17 July the demand behind it has only firmed, but the composition of this growth is the more useful read. Ryder points to significantly strengthened trade with Holland & Barrett and new listings with major retailers in the US: distribution, in other words, more than price. And the scale was not free. On the group’s own expected figures the adjusted EBITDA margin eases from about 29% of revenue in the year to July 2025 to about 27% this year, with net cash of £15.9m after an acquisition and the working capital that 50% growth demands.

That is the practical lesson for a founder riding the same tailwind at a smaller size. Category growth of this kind is won through channels, and channels ask for margin: retailer terms, promotional funding, stock built ahead of demand. The discipline is knowing in advance which costs scale with revenue and which have to be built before it, and deciding how much margin a year of growth is allowed to spend. Growth that outruns its working capital stops being a tailwind quickly.

Questions worth revisiting

• If your revenue grew 50% next year, which costs would scale with it, and which would you have to fund ahead of it?
• How much margin is a year of growth allowed to spend, and is that a number or a feeling?

Worth a conversation if next year’s plan assumes growth your working capital has not yet been asked to fund.

Sources: Applied Nutrition plc, FY26 Trading Update, RNS, 26 August 2026; Grocery Gazette, Applied Nutrition posts strong full-year results, raises outlook, 26 August 2026

July borrowing overshoots despite record tax receipts, with the Budget set for 28 October

The autumn’s fiscal backdrop is now in view: an overshoot, a fixed date, and a speculation season it pays not to plan on.

Public sector borrowing was £1.8bn in July, up from £1.1bn a year earlier, as spending growth outpaced receipts even though self-assessed income tax brought in £17.1bn, the highest July on record, in ONS figures released on 21 August. Borrowing in the financial year to July, at £56.7bn, is £6.0bn lower than the same period last year but £2.3bn above the OBR’s forecast, and public sector net debt sits just below £3 trillion, lower as a share of the economy than a year earlier. The data lands with the destination already fixed: Chancellor John Healey confirmed on 31 July that his first Budget will be delivered on Wednesday 28 October, with a new OBR forecast published alongside it.

We covered the pause that a change at the top put into founders’ decisions on 26 June; the new development is that the waiting now has a date. An overshoot against forecast plus a fixed Budget day starts tax-speculation season, and the next two months will supply a steady stream of rumoured measures, trial balloons and confident predictions, most of which will not survive to the despatch box. None of it is legislation. What is knowable today is the fiscal position above and the date itself.

The practical discipline is to sort delayed decisions into two piles. A small number genuinely hinge on 28 October, because they turn on a specific rate or relief that could plausibly move, and for those, waiting nine weeks is a defensible plan with a defined end. Most do not; they are waiting for a general feeling of certainty that no Budget will provide, and each carries a cost of delay that compounds quietly. Plan on what is legislated, run the decisions that do not depend on the despatch box, and diarise the handful that do.

Questions worth revisiting

• Which of your paused decisions actually turn on 28 October, and which are waiting for a certainty no Budget will provide?

Sources: Office for National Statistics, Public sector finances, UK: July 2026, 21 August 2026; HM Treasury, Budget date announcement, gov.uk, 31 July 2026

The finite number of full efforts

The defending UTMB champion will not start on Friday. Her reason is worth more to a founder than most race results.

Ruth Croft of New Zealand, the defending UTMB champion, announced on 26 August that she will not start Friday’s flagship. She is the first woman to have won all three of Chamonix’s headline races: the OCC and CCC, race week’s two shorter mountain ultras, and then the 174-kilometre UTMB itself. Her fitness, by her own account, has never been better; her statement says that “today my heart and mind want to be elsewhere”, and that the decision was “very hard yet obvious to make”. Friday would have been her fifth race at the 100-mile distance, and in her announcement she quoted a line she attributes to Paul Lind: “There are only so many times you can go to the well in 100 miles. That number is finite, and I want to make all of them count.”

Last week’s edition called a start list a plan, not a result; Croft has just shown the other side of that truth, which is that a plan can be declined by the person who made it. What makes the withdrawal notable is the reason. By her own account she is neither injured nor out of form; she is an athlete at the peak of her powers counting her remaining full efforts and declining to spend one where her heart is not. In a sport built around starting, the harder discipline is sometimes not starting.

Founders run on the same finite number. The all-in efforts a business gets, a launch that takes everything, a fundraise that consumes a quarter, are countable, and each one spent half-heartedly is one fewer available for the moment that deserves it. The useful exercise is Croft’s: know what a full effort costs, know how many you realistically have in this year, and be honest about whether the next one on your calendar has both your heart and your numbers behind it. Phoenix helps founders put the numbers half of that question on one page. Declining a start you could have made can be the strongest decision on the list.

Sources: Marathon Handbook, Defending Champion Ruth Croft Pulls Out Of UTMB, 26 August 2026; Canadian Running, Defending champion Ruth Croft withdraws from UTMB, August 2026