Fictional client
Thornbeck bought 4,180 enquiries last year at an average of £118. Forty-three per cent of them — 1,797 leads, £212,000 — were not contacted on the day they arrived. Thornbeck’s own figures say an enquiry answered inside five minutes books a survey 48% of the time; answered the next day, 7%. Nobody there is slow on purpose. Four in ten enquiries land in the evening, at the weekend, or while the entire team is on a roof.
Thornbeck Renewables does not exist. We cannot show live client systems, so this study is built around a fictional installer — invented firm, invented crews, invented customers, invented figures. What is not invented is the work: the enquiry economics, the certification regime, the funding mechanics and the failure modes are all real, and the screens are genuine working pages rather than pictures of pages. Every mockup on this page opens and responds to clicks.
On scope: the schemes referred to — MCS, TrustMark, competent person notification and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme — are those of England and Wales, and grant values and scheme rules change. In a real build these are configuration, not code, precisely because they move.
Thornbeck fits solar, batteries, heat pumps and insulation across Somerset and the Bristol area. Six install teams, a surveyor who is genuinely good, MCS certification and a wall of five-star reviews. It is also spending half a million pounds a year on enquiries and answering four in ten of them a day late.
Retrofit is a high-cost-of-acquisition business with a certification regime bolted to the back of it. Money leaks at both ends.
Two halves, and they are the two halves of the business. At the front, an assistant that answers every enquiry the moment it lands — on SMS, at any hour — qualifies it in the customer’s own words, and books a survey into a real gap in a real diary. It says who it is, it stops at five messages, and it never quotes.
At the back, one record per job carrying every certificate, notification, grant claim and competency the install depends on, each with the date it is due and the person who owns it. Speed wins the work. Certification is what lets you keep the money.
Seven screens follow. Each one opens as a real page — click through them.
The morning view is not a list of leads. It is a list of enquiries currently losing value, ranked by what each one cost and how fast its odds are falling. Alongside it: what a delay actually does to conversion on Thornbeck’s own data, when enquiries arrive against when anyone is at a desk, and a twelve-month line showing that knowing about the problem has not changed it.
The screen this study is built around. An enquiry that arrived at 20:14 on a Thursday, answered in ninety seconds by SMS, qualified over eight exchanges, and holding a survey slot thirteen minutes later — with nobody in the building.
The transcript is on the page in full, because that is the part people want to see. So are the eight answers it captured, each one a question the surveyor would otherwise ask on the doorstep, and the rules it works inside: quiet hours, a five-message limit, STOP honoured everywhere, and a hard stop before price, savings or grants — those need a survey and a person.
What each pound of the £493,000 lead spend actually bought, measured in installs rather than enquiries. One seller costs five times what a referral costs and produces fewer jobs.
Then the question that changes the negotiation: is it the lead or the wait? Split by response time, that seller’s leads convert at 44% when answered inside five minutes. The source was never the problem.
One installation end to end: what the survey found and how each finding changed the price, the funding stack down to what the customer actually writes a cheque for, and the eight separate certificates, notifications and registrations a single heat pump triggers.
It also carries the blockers with dates attached. This job has an install booked, three team-days held, and a network connection approval that has been outstanding for twenty-five days.
Six install teams against the week, with unsold capacity hatched because it is the most expensive thing in the business. Underneath, the honest analysis of why 147 jobs moved last year — and the observation that four of the six causes were known days in advance.
MCS, TrustMark, competent person schemes, insurance, and — the one that actually bites — individual installer competencies. A fitter whose F-Gas ticket lapsed a fortnight ago has installed two heat pumps since, and nobody knew, because the certificate is a PDF in a folder.
Lose MCS and the business stops the same day: no grant scheme, no export tariff for customers, no TrustMark. Nine jobs in flight are carrying £64,300 of grant that can only be redeemed against a valid certificate.
A second audience, so a second interface. The same job clock in plain English, including the part most installers avoid saying: what is holding things up, whose fault it is not, and what happens if it slips. Documents appear as they are issued rather than arriving as a wallet of paper weeks later.
Four phases of two weeks each — eight weeks end to end. The response engine goes live first: it is the only part where every day of delay has a measurable price, and it starts paying before the rest is finished. Each phase ends with something the team actually uses, not a demo.
Weeks 1–2.
Weeks 3–4.
Weeks 5–6.
Weeks 7–8.
Eight weeks is possible because most of it already exists. The engagement engine, the job and customer records, document handling, escalation rules and the portal are running in production across six sectors already — the conversational SMS layer in particular is a product we already sell. What actually gets built for an installer is the sector core: the qualifying questions per measure, the certification obligations each job triggers, and the funding mechanics. That is the part this study is about, and it is the part we would spend the eight weeks getting right.
This took a fictional installer and made its process visible. The same exercise works better with a real one. Tell us how your business actually runs and we will build a working mockup of it — your language, your measures, your brand — before anybody commits to a build.
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