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
SOLAR AND BATTERY INSTALLERSThe demand arrived faster than the business was built to carry it.
- Connection applications sit with one person, and the install diary is built on optimism about when approval lands.
- Scaffold, subcontractors and stock arrive in the wrong order often enough that nobody trusts the schedule.
- The gap between accepted quote and energised system keeps stretching, and nobody owns it.
- Deposits are taken early and spent early, so cash looks healthier than it is.
- Battery jobs are priced on last year’s assumptions, and nobody is certain which ones make money.
- The owner still prices the difficult jobs, because nobody else is trusted to.
Why it happens
How the work changes
DELIVERY
01Visibility — margin by job type, not by feel
Most installers know their turnover and guess at everything below it. A weekly view of margin by job type — solar only, solar with storage, battery retrofit, commercial rooftop — alongside scaffold cost per job and days from deposit to energisation turns opinion into fact. It usually shows that one or two job types are carrying the rest.
- 02
Surveys and quotes that go out without you
Every quote waiting on the owner’s eye adds a day to the pipeline and removes a decision somebody else could have learned to make. A documented survey and design standard — shading and generation assumptions, roof and fixing rules, inverter and battery sizing, stated exclusions, where discount authority stops — lets quotes leave the building without the founder reading them first.
- 03
Grid applications that run to a rhythm
Connection paperwork decides the install date, so it should not live in one person’s inbox. Systems notified under G98 and larger systems applied for under G99 need named ownership, a weekly submission and chase routine, and a tracked approval status. The diary is then built on what has been approved rather than what is hoped for.
04Deposits, scaffold and stock in the right order
Cash arrives early on a solar job and is often spent early, which flatters the bank balance and hides the real position. Staging payments against defined milestones, sequencing scaffold and materials to a confirmed install date, and holding a visible work-in-progress figure means the number in the account and the number in the business are the same one.
- 05
Commissioning, handover and the paperwork behind it
Quality that varies by installer shows up first in callbacks and second in reviews. A defined commissioning and handover standard — inverter and battery settings, monitoring set up and demonstrated, certification and export registration issued without the customer chasing — makes system performance repeatable, and turns callbacks from an accepted cost into a number that can be driven down.
- 06
Value built 12–18 months before the sale
Buyers pay for what happens without the founder in the room: quotes that price consistently, connections that clear on schedule, commissioning that holds up under sampling, and margin that survives 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
From 24 March 2027 the Future Homes Standard makes on-site generation a requirement under Part L in England, which in practice means rooftop solar on almost every new home. New build already accounts for roughly a third of certified rooftop installations, and that share is rising.
Against that, the 0% VAT rate on domestic solar and battery installation runs to 31 March 2027, then reverts to 5%. Expect demand to pull forward into the months before it and soften after. The businesses that hold margin through that will be the ones that can price, connect, install and commission at volume without the owner in every decision — an operational problem before it is a market one.