Fractional COO for EV charging businesses
Fractional COO and Operating Partner support for commercial and destination EV charging installers. For owners whose surveys, connections and cash all still route through them.
What this usually looks like
Most of the critical path belongs to someone else. The client still calls you.
- Grid connection timescales are outside your control and inside your project plan.
- The gap between site survey and energisation is long enough that nothing that happens in it is tracked properly.
- Warranty and ongoing maintenance obligations accumulate without anyone pricing them.
- Funded work and commercial work run on different rhythms and the same people.
- The owner is still the one who tells a client why the date has moved.
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 engineer, every new site 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
A depot install, a single destination charger and a funded scheme install are three different businesses sharing one set of engineers. A weekly view of margin by job type, labour recovery against surveyed hours, and return visits by site turns opinion into fact — and usually shows that one category is quietly funding the others.
02Quoting that leaves the building without you
Every survey waiting on the owner’s eye adds a week to the pipeline and a decision nobody else learns to make. A documented quoting basis — supply capacity assumptions, containment and groundworks allowances, connection contingency, exclusions and sign-off thresholds — lets pricing go out without the founder reading it first, and makes a lost job something that can be reviewed rather than argued about.
03Labour planned around energisation, not remembered
Allocating engineers across concurrent sites from memory works until a connection date moves, and then it fails on every site at once. A weekly resource plan against confirmed dates, named supervision on each site, and a standing rule for where a crew goes when a date slips moves scheduling out of the owner’s head and onto a document the whole team can read.
04Variations priced, claims and retentions collected
Groundworks overruns and specification changes get agreed on site and invoiced weeks later, if at all. Grant and scheme claims go in late because submitting them is nobody’s job. A written instruction rule, a variation register, a fixed claim submission rhythm and retentions tracked as a scheduled debtor turn work already completed into cash already banked — usually the fastest improvement available.
05Certification and compliance that does not queue behind one person
Connection applications, notifications, test certification and public chargepoint data obligations stack up behind the one 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: contracted maintenance revenue rather than goodwill, a pipeline that does not rest on the owner’s relationships, commissioning records that survive sampling, and warranty obligations that have been priced and provisioned. 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
Thinking about selling?
An EV charging business is valued on what a buyer can verify. Margin evidenced by job type, commissioning and certification records that stand up to sampling, maintenance contracts that renew on their own terms, and a pipeline that does not depend on the owner’s relationships. Building that record is ordinary operational work — it simply has to start before the buyer asks.