Fractional COO for solar and battery storage businesses
Fractional COO and Operating Partner support for rooftop solar and battery installers. For owners whose quotes, grid applications and cash all still route through them.
What this usually looks like
- G99 applications sit with one person, and the install diary is built on optimism about when approval lands.
- Scaffolding, subcontractors and stock arrive in the wrong order often enough that nobody trusts the schedule.
- The gap between quote accepted and system energised keeps stretching, and nobody owns it.
- Deposits are taken early and spent early, so cash looks healthier than it is.
- The owner still prices the difficult jobs, because nobody else is trusted to.
Why it happens
Solar businesses grew fast on demand nobody had to create. Speed rewarded a founder who could make every call quickly. The same speed becomes the constraint once volume passes the point where one person can hold the whole pipeline in their head. The business is not badly run. It is run in a way that worked at a third of the size.
What changes
- Grid applications move on a tracked process, not a memory.
- Scheduling holds because it accounts for the constraint rather than ignoring it.
- Quote-to-energisation is measured, so it can be shortened.
- Cash position is known forward, not reconstructed backwards.
The market this sits in
2025 was the strongest year the UK solar market has recorded: 257,397 MCS-certified installations, up 32% on 2024 and ahead of the 2011 Feed-in Tariff peak. Cumulative installations passed two million by March 2026 [MCS, DESNZ]. Battery storage is growing faster still, with roughly 36,000 MCS-certified battery installations in the first half of 2026, close to double the same period the year before [MCS].
Grid connection remains the drag. A G99 application gives the DNO 45 working days to respond, but commercial installations commonly run to 8–16 weeks and considerably longer where network reinforcement is needed [Energy Networks Association; DNO published timescales].
The sector is also carrying real counterparty risk. GivEnergy entered administration in April 2026 with 74 redundancies, and the administrator confirmed hardware warranties would not be honoured by the company, leaving the installer as the customer’s first point of call [Insolvency filings, April 2026]. A business whose warranty exposure is undocumented finds out how large it is at the worst possible moment.
Proof
GEC Electrical, Oxfordshire. Electrical, solar, battery and EV. [Case study to be written.]
Thinking about selling
Solar businesses are bought for their forward book, their retained engineers and their warranty position. All three are documentation problems as much as commercial ones.
Next step
The 30-Day Disappearance Test. Secondary: arrange a conversation.