Fractional COO for Heat Pump Businesses
Fractional COO and Operating Partner support for air source and ground source heat pump installers. For owners whose quotes, commissioning and cash all still route through them.
What this usually looks like
Demand is not the problem. The problem is what happens behind it.
- Every MCS submission and BUS voucher waits on one person to check it before it goes.
- Commissioning quality varies by engineer, and the callback rate tells you which ones.
- New installers take months to become productive, and training depends on whoever is least busy that week.
- Nobody can say reliably which job types make money and which ones do not.
- The owner is still surveying, still quoting, still on site when something goes wrong.
Why it happens
None of this is a competence problem. It is a sequencing one. A business that grew on the owner’s technical judgement keeps routing decisions back through that judgement, long after volume has made it impossible. Every new installer, every new job type and every scheme change adds another line to the queue. The business does not slow down because anyone is doing a bad job. It slows down because there is only one place decisions can be made.
How the work changes
01Visibility — margin by job type, not by feel
Most heat pump businesses know their turnover and guess at everything below it. A weekly view of margin by job type, callback rate by engineer, and time from survey to commissioning turns opinion into fact — and usually shows that one or two job types are carrying the rest.
02Surveys and quotes that go out without you
Every quote waiting on the owner’s eye is a day added to the pipeline and a decision nobody else learns to make. A documented survey standard and pricing basis — heat loss assumptions, emitter rules, exclusions, sign-off thresholds — lets quotes leave the building without the founder reading them first.
03Commissioning as a standard, not a person
When quality varies by engineer, the callback rate is the only place it shows up, and by then the customer already knows. A defined commissioning standard with a checked handover makes system performance repeatable, and turns callbacks from an accepted cost into a number that can be driven down.
04A defined path to installer productivity
New installers absorb the job from whoever has time that week, which makes recruitment slow and unpredictable. A structured route to productivity — what they do in week one, what they sign off unsupervised by week twelve — turns hiring into a capacity decision rather than a gamble.
05Compliance that does not queue behind one person
MCS submissions and BUS vouchers stack up behind the person trusted to check them. Defined responsibility, a submission rhythm and a documented standard mean the paperwork moves at the pace of the work, and the records hold when that person is on holiday, or leaves.
06Value built 12–18 months before the sale
Buyers pay for what happens without the founder in the room: repeatable commissioning, documented compliance, retained engineers and margin that holds under scrutiny. Each of those is improvable, and each takes longer than a sale process allows — which is why the work that raises the multiple happens well before the business goes to market.
The market this sits in
The UK passed 250,000 cumulative MCS-certified heat pump installations in February 2026. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme runs to 2029/30 with £2.7bn of funding, at £7,500, or £9,000 off-gas, to 31 March 2027. The EPC insulation requirement was dropped in April 2026, widening the market.
The Future Homes Standard comes into force in March 2027. New homes in England must produce at least 75% lower carbon emissions than the 2013 standard, a level no fossil fuel system meets in practice.
Against that, the proposed 2035 phase-out of gas boilers in existing homes was dropped in January 2026. The pull is now funding and price, not prohibition. The run rate remains far below the 600,000 annual installations targeted for 2028. The constraint is installer capacity — an operational problem before it is a market one.
Thinking about selling?
Buyers pay for repeatable commissioning, documented compliance and margin that survives scrutiny. Each is improvable, and each takes longer than a sale process allows.