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.
What changes
- Surveys and quotes go out without the owner reading them first.
- Commissioning quality is a standard, not a person.
- New installers reach productivity on a defined path, not by absorption.
- Margin is known per job type before the work is taken.
The market this sits in
The UK passed 250,000 cumulative MCS-certified heat pump installations in February 2026 [MCS]. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is confirmed to 2029/30 with £2.7bn of funding, with the grant at £7,500 and £9,000 for eligible off-gas homes from 21 July 2026 to 31 March 2027 [Warm Homes Plan, GOV.UK, January 2026]. From April 2026 the requirement to hold insulation recommendations on an EPC before accessing the grant was removed, widening the eligible market [GOV.UK].
The Future Homes Standard was published on 24 March 2026 and comes into force on 24 March 2027, with a twelve-month transition to March 2028. It requires new homes in England to produce at least 75% lower carbon emissions than a home built to the 2013 standard, a level no fossil fuel heating system meets in practice [Approved Document L, March 2026].
Against that, government has stepped back from the proposed 2035 phase-out of gas boilers in existing homes, which was dropped when the Warm Homes Plan was published in January 2026 [DESNZ]. The pull is now funding and price, not prohibition. And the run rate remains far below the 600,000 annual installations targeted for 2028 [MCS]. The constraint is installer capacity, which is an operational problem before it is a market one.
Proof
Ecotech Yorkshire, Sheffield. [Case study to be written — frame as gas-to-electric transition, not as a heat pump pure-play.]
Thinking about selling
Buyers in this market pay for what happens without the founder in the room: repeatable commissioning, documented compliance, retained engineers and margin that holds under scrutiny. Most of what raises a valuation is built in the two years before a sale, not during it.
Next step
The 30-Day Disappearance Test. Ten minutes, no call required. Secondary: arrange a conversation.