Renew Energies: an embedded engineering retainer for a UK solar installer

The bottleneck

Renew Energies installs solar, batteries, and renewable heating across the North West of England. Volume is high — the company's published track record sits at 2,000+ completed installations — but the operational stack had grown into a familiar mess: a generic CRM that didn't understand the sales motion, a separate survey-booking tool, a third tool for site photos, a fourth for social media, and spreadsheets gluing the gaps.

The cost was leaking everywhere: leads waited because the CRM didn't know which were grant-eligible; surveyors got back to the office before their photos did; social posts didn't go up because nobody had time to draft them; the website was a static brochure that turned visitors away rather than capture them.

Off-the-shelf solar-installer CRM products exist, but each fixes one slice of this and forces the operation to bend around the vendor's shape — and none combines a public website, speed-to-lead, mobile survey, image sync, AI website qualification, and social posting in one product.

What I built

One bespoke ecosystem, shaped around how Renew Energies actually operates — built and operated under an ongoing engineering retainer.

• The public website. renewenergiesltd.co.uk built end-to-end. Not a separate marketing site bolted on — the same codebase serves the public face, the AI conversational agent, and the CRM intake. Visitors flow into structured leads in one motion.
• The CRM. Pipeline stages that match the real installer sales motion (enquiry → qualified → surveyed → quoted → signed → installed → signed off → reviewed). Fields that capture what the field team actually cares about — postcode, roof orientation, grant eligibility, current heating, MCS-relevant constraints — not the vendor's defaults.
• Speed-to-lead engine. Inbound enquiries get auto-qualified against EPC band, grant eligibility, and property type the moment they land. Personalised response fires within seconds. Qualified leads route directly to the right surveyor.
• Mobile survey app. A bespoke field-team app built around the survey workflow. Photos sync from the van to the CRM in real time, indexed against the customer record. The office side of the build has the full image set before the surveyor is back at the office.
• AI website agent. A conversational agent on the public site that qualifies visitors via real questions (property type, current heating, postcode, what they're considering) and writes them into the CRM as structured leads — not a chat widget that just collects an email.
• Social-posting agent. Signed-off jobs (with photos and customer consent) auto-draft social posts in the company's brand voice. The operator reviews / edits / publishes in minutes. Volume that used to consume a half-day per week becomes a few minutes of approval.
• EPC integration. Auto-check at the moment of enquiry, surfacing grant eligibility in the same response that gets sent to the buyer. No more "we'll get back to you about the £7,500 grant".
• SMS survey booking with proximity routing. When a lead clears pre-qualification, a cron job finds the optimal survey slot using the Haversine distance formula — clustering the new appointment within 15km of the surveyor's existing jobs on the same day to minimise travel. An SMS fires automatically: the customer receives a suggested date and time with a one-click confirm link and a reschedule option. If they request a different time, the system calculates alternatives based on proximity to other that-day bookings. Surveyor Matt's end-of-day constraint (Blackpool home base, 60km radius) is respected automatically. No human dispatches the booking.

The retainer is the commercial shape. Renewable energy is a moving target — grant schemes change, regulations shift, new installer methodologies appear. The build keeps moving with the business rather than freezing on the day of delivery.

What changed

• Five tools collapsed into one bespoke ecosystem the team actually uses.
• Public website + CRM + mobile app + AI agents — one codebase, one source of truth.
• Speed-to-lead reduced to seconds on qualified enquiries — auto-qualification + personalised SMS/email in one motion.
• Survey images sync in real time from the van to the CRM, indexed against the matter — quoting starts before the surveyor is back at the office.
• Social posts auto-drafted per signed-off job, with operator approval — volume that used to be a half-day per week becomes a few minutes.
• AI website agent qualifies visitors into structured CRM leads instead of generic form submissions.
• SMS survey booking dispatch. Qualified leads receive an automated SMS with a proximity-optimised survey slot — calculated using the Haversine formula to cluster near existing jobs and minimise surveyor travel. Customer confirms in one click. No human dispatcher needed.
• Continuous improvement. Under the retainer, the system evolves as Renew Energies evolves. New grant schemes get integrated; new sales motions get reflected in the pipeline; the social agent learns new conventions as the brand voice develops.