Fractional COO for building controls businesses

New build fit-out, retrofit upgrades to legacy panels, small works and maintenance are four different businesses sharing one engineering team. A weekly view of margin by contract type, engineering hours recovered against hours tendered, and return visits after handover turns opinion into fact — and usually shows that maintenance is quietly funding project delivery, or the reverse.

Every tender waiting on the owner’s eye adds a week to the pipeline and a decision nobody else learns to make. A documented estimating basis — points schedules, integration assumptions where third-party interfaces are not yet confirmed, graphics and licence allowances, commissioning and witnessing time, exclusions and sign-off thresholds — lets pricing go out without the founder reading it first, and makes a lost tender something that can be reviewed rather than argued about.

Allocating engineers across concurrent sites from memory works until a fit-out programme moves, and then the commissioning window compresses on every job at once. A weekly resource plan against confirmed witnessing dates, a named lead engineer on each site, and a standing rule for where an engineer goes when a date slips moves scheduling out of the owner’s head and onto a document the whole team can read.

Late design changes, additional points and extra integration get agreed on site and invoiced weeks later, if at all. Applications go in against the wrong valuation date because assembling them is nobody’s job. A written instruction rule, a variation register, a fixed application rhythm and retentions tracked as a scheduled debtor with release dates diarised against practical completion turn work already completed into cash already banked — usually the fastest improvement available.

Head-end configuration, integration workarounds, panel schedules and commissioning history live in the engineer who did the job. A documented standard for as-built point schedules, software backups held centrally under version control, and O&M packs completed at handover rather than chased months afterwards mean the record holds when that person is on holiday, or leaves.

Buyers pay for what happens without the founder in the room: contracted maintenance and monitoring revenue rather than goodwill, a pipeline that does not rest on relationships with two or three M&E contractors, as-built and commissioning records that survive sampling, and software licence positions that transfer cleanly with the business. 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.